Log Buffer #272, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

It is evident and beyond doubt now that the new media technologies like Twitter and Facebook are not going to wipe-out the blogs, rather they are complimenting each other very nicely and it seems they were made for each other. This Log Buffer Edition enhances this match, and presents you Log Buffer #272.

Oracle:

It amazes and amuses Karen Morton how many times she remembers something that she used to know but forgot due to lack of use. Hmmm sounds familiar.

Jonathan Lewis was in a discussion recently about how to estimate the size of a bitmap index before you build it, and why it’s much harder to do this for bitmap indexes than it is for B-tree indexes.

The Silly Little Benchmark is gaining popularity and Kevin Closson is happy about that.

Mark W. Farnham blogs about Farnham’s Seven Steps of Application Design.

A common question that gets asked is does Oracle access the index itself or the parent table during an index rebuild to extract the necessary data for the index? Richard Foote answers.

SQL Server:

How you could more flexibly react to locks on your application than to wait for blocks to occur and then kill the SPID at the head of the blocking chain? Kevin Kline answers.

Microsoft has just released SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide. This guide is very comprehensive and covers the subject of upgrade in very much depth. Pinal Dave describes.

Jonathan Gardner has a nice post about securing SQL Server with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE).

What Toy Story 2 Can Teach You About Testing Your Backups and Recovery Strategy? Know from Thomas LaRock.

A big headache in SSAS, especially when dealing with a large cube, is making a change that when deployed, causes a cube to become unprocessed, forcing you to do a full process so the cube is usable. James Serra has more.

MySQL:

Luca Olivari posts about unlimited possibilities of MySQL Cluster 7.2.

Oracle enhanced the bugs.mysql.com site to provide a better experience for users to submit contributions. Keith Larson tells.

Can MySQL use primary key values from a secondary index? Maciej Dobrzanski has the answer.

A hardware, software or human failure can occur at any time. Are you prepared? Ronald Bradford talks about MySQL Backup & Recovery Essentials.

Ovais Tariq has been working for a customer benchmarking insert performance on Amazon EC2, and has got some gems to share.