Log Buffer #282, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Blogging is the way to express an idea in an informal way by a person, who has either worked with it, or planning to work with it, or has seen it at work. In databases, ideas are the foundations of everything, and these Log Buffer Edition is presenting ideas from bloggers in Log Buffer #282.

Oracle:

Pythian will be at Oracle Open World as usual, and our marketing guru Marryanne has uploaded the schedule.

Frits Hoogland‘s post really is about using LVM (Logical Volume Manager; an abstraction layer for disk devices) snapshots.

If you are looking to kick start your community contributions or looking to volunteer more than what you already do, Alex Gorbachev has an awesome suggestion for you.

Randolf Geist is doing parallel execution analysis using ASH.

What are the things I need to know, what do I have to do to become expert, where is the list of key things I need to do with regards to Oracle. Tom Kyte answers.

SQL Server:

DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS and CHECKPOINT are very useful and Jugal Shah expounds on their usefulness.

Bob Beauchemin is not sure how many full-text search over filetable demos he has seen, so he blogs.

Bill Graziano is discussing yet another update to the SQL Server configuration Scripting Utility.

Your presence matters at the PASS Summit, Allen White assures.

Allessandro Alpi blogs about deprecated database engine features in SQL Server 2012.

MySQL:

It’s always interesting when somebody asks why they got an error message, and especially sweet when you’re working on something related that lets you answer the question. Michael McLaughlin has more.

Calculating the standard deviation in MySQL is a no-brainer by using the build-in aggregate function STDDEV(), says Robert Eisele.

Chris Calender is very pleased to see that the SSL-related MySQL Bug #62743 was just fixed.

Regression tests for some bugs are not published in new MySQL releases, and it matters to Mark Callaghan.

Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and the technology it uses (Galera) is an exciting alternative to traditional MySQL replication. Jay Janssen gives more details.