Log Buffer #268, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Log Buffer Editions are marching along, and this Log Buffer #268 is once again all about Oracle, MySQL, and SQLServer plus some peeks at some of other glittering database technologies like PostgreSQL and DB2. Sit back and enjoy.

Oracle:

Martin has produced another scenario based blog post about Shrinking Tables to Aid Full Scans.

What do you think of the interview question of Oracle DBAs? Charles has a great post.

If you are trying to find out how Exadata architecture really works, Kevin is offering this video presentation to offer some critical thinking on the matter.

Karen just read an article from the Harvard Business Review entitled “The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time” and thought it was excellent.

Cary is playing with the puzzles.

SQLServer:

You may or may not already have heard about it, but the next version of our favorite database, SQL Server 2012, ships with a client tool called SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT). Valentino Vranken has more.

Chad Miller is answering a question in one of forums on backing up i.e. scripting out a database object.

Michelle Ufford is currently working on the logic migration of data marts from SQL Server to Teradata.

Mark Broadbent is wondering as who’s active on SQL 2000.

John Sterrett is taking collaboration to another level and has got a confession to make.

MySQL:

Pythian’s MySQL expert Ben Mildren has done YACR! (Yet another conference review!).

The Percona MySQL 2012 conference, has seen the MySQL community, interact as it was doing many years ago,
re-creating the dynamic and creative environment that allow MySQL to become the most adopted open source database.

Rob Young has put up a blog about New Replication, Optimizer and High Availability features in MySQL 5.6.5!

Nowadays MySQL can, and does, use subquery materialization for query; thanks to it, the execution time can have 25% improvement.

While working with RDS and Google Cloud SQL Ronald Bradford has come to realize that excluding the mysql schema from a mysqldump is important.

MySQL team increases scalability by >50% for Sysbench OLTP RO in MySQL 5.6 labs release april 2012.

NoSQL and MySQL – free webinar, replay now available announced by Andrew Morgan.

Jorgen Loland writes a blog about copying unused bytes is bad. (duh!)

Things are going to be busy over the next few months for Keith Larson.

Setting up replication in MySQL is something we need to do quite often. Slaves die, replication fails, or tables and data get out of sync. Sean Hull has a nice post about it.

Misc:

Postgres has three backup methods: logical, file system, and continuous archiving. Bruce Momjian has more.

Joshua Drake has given information about some of PostgreSQL conferences and shares a video.

David Wheeler has a recommendation for sane time zone management in PostgreSQL; Always Use TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE.

Holly Ann shares the promised update on InfoSphere Optim Performance Manager (OPM) 5.1.1 that will be available April 30th.

IBM finally announced the new DB2 10 for Linux, UNIX and Windows (LUW).