Log Buffer #265, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Weathers are changing, clocks are being adjusted too, and the changes at the technological fronts are as usual rapid, frequent and over-whelming. Keeping up with such rapid-fire changes is a project in itself. In database triangle of Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server; patches, updates, features, tricks, and tips are booming and so is this Log Buffer Edition, which is Log Buffer #265.

Oracle:

Just a quick heads up to the ODA customers from Alex Gorbachev — there is a critical patch 2.1.0.3.1 out that is applied on top of ODA patch bundle 2.1.0.3.0.

How often are you backing up your cloud services? Tim Hall asks.

Toon Koppelaars blogs about the fourth use-case for the triggers.

Which PLAN_HASH_VALUE Appears in V$SQLAREA? Charles Hooper answers.

Randolf Geist notes down that Oracle 11.2 introduced a set of new Query Transformations, among others the ability to coalesce subqueries which means that multiple correlated subqueries can be merged into a number of less subqueries.

SQL Server:

Jonathan Gardner discovers his strengths and weaknesses on technical side after certification.

Bob Horkay guides us about using Rank function to get newest (or oldest) record from related records.

You can easily import data from an Excel file to SQL Server using SQL Server Import and Export Wizard. Vishal has more.

Marlon Ribunal is looking forward to learning and sharing about SQL Server and data in general in the new blog.

Melissa Coates encountered the dreaded File system error “A FileStore error from WriteFile occurred.”

MySQL:

Adam Douglas enables us to resolve MySQL Error Incorrect Key File for Table.

Henrik Ingo has introduced the newly committed HTTP JSON key-value interface in Drizzle.

Agile software delivery and schema changes – how do you do it? Trent Hornibrook asks.

Ted Wennmark points out an opportunity to better understand how to achieve high availability with MySQL.

Kristian Köhntopp an internal project that is generating a materialized view of some pretty important data, using 96 application server cores against a 12 core database with 192g of memory and a buttload of SSD, good for about 250 MB/sec peak write rate in synthetic file creation.