This week for the open source world brings OSCON in Portland Oregon. There are plenty of MySQL people present and there have been more posting this week from these realms than normal. Also, Lewis Cunningham, among others, posted news that EnterpriseDB released the results of their open source survey at OSCON. The 451 CAOS Theory published their thoughts on the survey.

Of interest to all DBAs is John Duncan’s post about what is called the “five minute rule”. This was introduced in 1987 by Jim Grey. And finally, before we dive into the specific server news, here is a post on Facebook’s project to build a distributed database similar to Google’s BigTable.

MySQL News:

Friday saw the release of the summer issue of MySQL Magazine. The highlights of the issue include the first annual MySQL Usage Survey. The magazine is available here. Peter, over at Percona, shows some initial benchmarks for the latest version (0.9.8) of Sphinx. If you aren’t familier with Sphinx, it is a full text search engine that easily integrates with MySQL.

Probably the biggest news this week was the announcement by Brian Aker of “Drizzle”. It is what amounts to a slimmed down version of MySQL server. These comments are from his initial post “Stored Procedures, Views, Triggers, Query Cache, and Prepared Statements are gone for now.” Interesting. My co-worker, Sheeri K. Cabral, posted a video of Brian Aker talking about the Drizzle project at this week’s OSCON. Monty Widenius writes a good summary how Drizzle can/might integrate with the MySQL “ecosphere” at large. It was very good to hear Monty say that Sun management is encouraging this project. There has been some other interesting posts about this as well including Arjen’s thoughts, and Paul McCullagh’s. Brian Moon gives a very thoughtful view on how Drizzle could potentially fit in at dealnews. While I could probably fill up the entire Log Buffer with links to post about Drizzle, I better leave it at that.

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I’d like to start by sharing the story of MySQL engineer Andrii Nikitin’s young son, Ivan. The short story is that Ivan is in need of a bone marrow transplant and that would also require travelling outside of their native Ukraine for the procedure. The family is asking for donations to cover the cost of the operation and trip, so please consider donating via the previous link.

Now, moving on to the database topics, we begin with my own area of (relative) expertise, Oracle. The big news this week is the July 2008 CPU, or Critical Patch Update, which Oracle releases quarterly. The Integrity blog has a nice summary of what’s included in this latest patchset. I’m sure plenty of you will be heading to Oracle OpenWorld 2008 as well, and OTN’s Justin Kestelyn announced a community preview page with some sneak peeks of what to expect (spoiler: beer!).

In a quick round-up of Oracle 11g topics, Amit Bansal at AskDBA.org has a nice guide for installing Oracle 11g on Solaris 10. Meanwhile, Oracle performance guru (and fellow Wisconsin native) Greg Rahn makes a great case for using incremental global statistics on partitioned tables. I see that Tim Hall has taken a break from reviewing summer blockbusters to write up a nice article on AWR baseline enhancements in Oracle 11gR1, and Alex Nuijten at AMIS has a nice presentation on using Oracle 11g’s virtual columns to clean up your data model.
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Fulfilling the stereotype of Microsoft software being unsecure, Microsoft released a very important SQL Server update that Aaron Bertrand notes patches “four elevation of privilege vulnerabilities.” That’s right, not one, not two, but four!!! At least there is a patch now……go forth and patch! Usually it is MySQL that throws ambiguous warnings or errors which are not an accurate representation of the actual error, but Bertrand also notes that there is A Little Management Studio Oops.

Contrary to stereotype, Microsoft is giving away content with NO DRM! Kalen Delaney asks, Did You Know the History of SQL Server? and shares a link to a chapter from a book on SQL Server 2000 in the Inside SQL Server series.

The PSS SQL Escalation Services team has fought many times about SQL Server I/O Bottleneck, I don’t have one, YES YOU DO! The team gives some reminders about how to interpet averages properly.

Allen White asks about Tools for the Reluctant DBA — that is, a programmer or administrator so good at databases that they were promoted to DBA, but may not actually want the job. Check out the comments and add your own.

Tibor Karaszi shares his stored procedure to find physical index details. Now you can use one stored procedure does what a stored procedure plus 3-4 tables ordinarily does.

But wait! There are some more updates!

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Log Buffer always needs editors, so if you you’d like to present your view of the week that was in DB blogs, contact me, the Log Buffer coordinator. You’ll be joining some of the best bloggers around, and making yourself and your blog a little better known to readers around the world.

And now, here’s Andrew Clarke’s Log Buffer #104.

P.S.: To our readers in the U.S. — Happy 4^th of July!

Starting with Oracle stuff, Chen Shapira (just a simple DBA on a complex production system) is looking for great PL/SQL. Why? To become a better PL/SQL programmer. “But,” she writes, “for PL/SQL , I’m a bit stuck. I can still read my own code for bad examples, but where can I find examples for great code?  . . .  Somehow, there is simply no open-source code written in PL/SQL that I can read to get a good idea of how PL/SQL should be written.” Niall Litchfield recommends the contents of $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin. Any other ideas to help Chen?

There was no shortage of people offering their help, as always. Beginning here on the Pythian blog, Grégory Guillou posted the fifth of his ten-part series on Oracle silent mode, this part covering adding a node to a 10.2 RAC. Says Grégory, “Even if you don’t leverage RAC’s ability to add or remove nodes to gain in agility, it’s still very likely you’ll come to these techniques when you want to upgrade some of your Servers or Operating Systems.” The post includes links to the earlier articles in the series.

On his Core IT for geeks and pros, Tanel Poder expounds another use case for WaitProf. He begins, “I recently diagnosed a performance issue where the ‘events in waitclass Other’ occasionally took significant part of the session’s response time.  . . . So, what to do when this ‘events in waitclass Other’ wait becomes significant in the response time profile?” This is where waitprof, his custom tool, comes into play.

Jeff Hunter of the So What Co-operative posts Something to be aware of, Part II, in which he and Oracle Support tussle over NUMA in Linux, and where he is heard to say, “My next step is talking to a Duty manager. I really don’t want to do that.” And Part III, which Jeff begins, “I escalated my issue to a duty manager . . .”

On Oracle Applications DBA, Aviad Elbaz knows how to do tricks with a pipe, as he shows in his article on how to execute TKPROF on trace files larger than 2GB. Aviad, I think Bilbo and Gandalf would be proud.

Are you like me, shamefully ignorant about the whole Business Intelligence thing? Do you, too, secretly believe it might be an oxymoron? Mark Rittman is here to help, with an introduction to the Oracle BI Applications.

Vivek Sharma of Database/SQL Experiences informs us that he will be contributing a seminar on “Real Time Performance Tuning” to the very first event mounted by the IOUG (All India Oracle User Group). This is their TechNight, taking place in Hyderabad on Friday, July 18th.

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Since it was DB2’s 25^th birthday this week, as Anant Jhingran reports, let’s start with it.

From ZDNet this week came a story that IBM was considering the open-sourcing of DB2 — big news, naturally, whether true or not. Matthew Aslett of 451 CAOS Theory says, Open source DB2? I don’t think so, suggesting that it was merely theorizing on the part of one IBM executive, and hype on the part of ZDNet. “Then of course,” Matthew continues, “there is the issue of why IBM would open source DB2. Where is the business driver? Despite solid competition from Oracle and Microsoft, the company is doing pretty well with DB2 as it stands, thanks very much, and open source databases have had minimal impact on the established vendors.”

Matt Asay of The Open Road likewise comes down on the uh-uh side of this. “It was . . . no surprise to see IBM quickly follow up ZDNet’s article with a blunt statement: ‘IBM has no plans to open source DB2.’ Of course it doesn’t.  . . . The day that it needs DB2 to undermine Oracle’s database, however, we may see IBM making a similarly bald statement…in the other direction.”

On An Expert’s Guide to DB2 Technology, Chris Eaton offers some news on DB2 videos, including ChannelDB2’s video tutorials, IDUG’s video competition, and a funny video from IBM on the making of a “viral” industrial video. Such as itself.

On to MySQL now. Keith Murphy made his debut on the Pythian blog this week, with a link to some video tutelage of his own — his presentation to the Boston MySQL Users Group on backups. Jay Pipes also offers the slides for his address on Join-Fu: The Art of SQL (I and II). (I rarely cover presentation materials when I do Log Buffer, but these ones of Jay’s looks fantastic.)

Mark Schoonover reports that Keith’s and his 2008 MySQL Magazine survey is officially closed, adding, “Now the fun begins compiling all the data and pretty charts made. We’ve had 432 responses!”

Baron Schwartz of xaprb describes how to write a lazy UNION in MySQL. No, it doesn’t deal with posting a complaint about undefended job benefits. Baron explains: “Something occurred to me a couple of weeks ago: why not write a UNION that stops executing as soon as one part of it finds a row? Then you can UNION to your heart’s content and not incur the overhead of that second lookup unless you need it. For lack of a better term, I’m calling this a lazy UNION.”

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This edition was originally claimed by Ward Pond for his SQL Server Blog. Unfortunately, Ward is, in his own words, “dealing with the aftermath of a burst appendix,” which is a very good reason not to spend your time at the computer. Ward, heal up soon! We’ll see you on LB before too long.

In lieu of the normal Log Buffer, I throw it open to our readers. Please leave a comment mentioning your favourite database blog items from the week that was, and anything else you care to say about them.

LB will be back to normal next Friday. See you then!

No speech, but I would like to thank Log Buffer’s readers and especially all of Log Buffer’s editors for making LB a worthwhile and fun stop in the database “blogosphere”. It’s very easy to see why LB editors are successful in what they do — they are consistently enthusiastic, diligent, and adaptable. And I enjoy working with them.

Okay, okay — I can hear the orchestra starting to play me off, so let’s get to it. Here’s Lewis’s Log Buffer #100.

Since PGCon recently happened right here in Ottawa, let’s start with some posts about it, and about PostgreSQL. Josh Berkus came to the conference with his Database Soup. It sounds like he enjoyed himself: “So, that’s pgCon. It was exciting and fun. All of you PG geeks who missed it should be kicking yourselves about now, and putting in budget requests for next year.” He has day one highlights; day two highlights, and also some photos from the conference.

On Tending the Garden, Selena Deckelmann (who knows a thing or two about Postgres conferences) has her PGCon review, with links to conference webpages.

Robert Treat of zillablog also has his take-aways. “The biggest thing to come out of this past week to me was recognition of the continued growth of the postgresql community. With a number of regional conferences springing up over the past year, I wondered if PGCon would be able to match the experience from last time, and was happy to see that it far exceeded it. . . . One thing I noted was that we have a very large presence of Postgres in Ottawa, I think larger than what we had at PGEast for the Baltimore/Washington Area.”

On Greg’s Postgres stuff, Greg Sabino Mullane has an item on verifying master-slave replication with check_postgres.pl, a montoring script for Nagios and other systems.

Hubert Lubaciewski of select * from depesz; looks at different approaches to counting the number of distinct elements, such as distinct sessions per day.

On An Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology, Lewis Cunningham examines the recent news of the worlds largest database running on Postgres. How large? 2 Petabytes! “Let’s put that in perspective,” writes Lewis. “1 petabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Yahoo has two of those. . . . [They use] this database to analyze the browsing habits of its half a billion monthly visitors. How would you like to tune those queries?” Lewis also notes that this is not the plain-vanilla PostgreSQL that you or I would download and run on our website box.

There are conferences on the horizon of the Oracle world too. Dan Norris reminds us that ODTUG is just around the corner. That’s the Oracle Developer Tools User Group’s Kaleidoscope 2008 event, taking place in mid-June in New Orleans.

Gareth Roberts of In Depth Apps announces the call-for-papers of the New Zealand Oracle Users Group’s (NZOUG) 2008 conference, coming in October.

In other Oracle matters — Chen Shapira, just a simple DBA on a complex production system, has some thoughts on cumulative distribution. “How do we calculate Cumulative Normal Distribution? This means calculating the probability that a random variable from a normal distribution, will end up equal to or less than X.”

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Log Buffer is a shared project of the DBA blogging community, so you’re welcome to edit and publish an edition yourself. LB’s 100^th anniversary edition is still up-for-grabs (and there’s plenty of room besides that), so read the Log Buffer homepage and the guidelines, and then email me.

Here’s Jeff Smith’s Log Buffer #98.