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The 118^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published on Ward Pond’s SQL Server blog.

Log Buffer is the only platform-neutral, distributed, human-edited article on database blogs. It receives several thousand views each week, and publishing an edition on your own blog brings those views to you. Hosting an edition of LB also introduces you and your blog to your colleagues in the DB blogosphere. Write me an email and I’ll get you started.

Now, here’s Ward Pond’s Log Buffer #118.

In many parts of the world times are uncertain. I live in the United States and we are in the middle of a financial meltdown that many fear may be as bad as the Great Depression. Because the world’s economies are so linked it is causing severe distress in many other countries as well. I just read that two trillion dollars have been lost from nest eggs in the last 15 months here in the States.

I am not going to turn this into a rant about who is right, who is wrong, or  what should be done about it to resolve the problem. This isn’t the place. I probably don’t even have the right answer. I have a different angle.

If you are involved with MySQL as a database administrator, or if you work directly with MySQL in some other aspect, you can probably breathe a little easier. Why is this? MySQL Server has grown in market penetration for a long time. It is now a significant section of the RDBMS pie.  I predict that this market penetration will only continue to grow. As this economic downturn/recession/whatever continues, companies will look harder for ways to save money. What better way to do so than replace your proprietary RDBMS that can cost you significant amounts of money, with MySQL Server? For all intents, the same functionality is there, the speed and flexibility is certainly there, and there is a giant company behind MySQL now, providing “enterprise-ready” support.

The market is crying right now for MySQL database administrators. We don’t cost any more than Oracle or Microsoft DBAs, you know. Just a couple of years ago, very few companies hired MySQL DBAs. They hired developers who also did database administration, or a system administrators who also managed the MySQL server. Now, as the number of database servers increases and the amount of data grows they want real, honest-to-goodness database administrators. If you have production experience with MySQL server in any significant amount you will not have any problems finding a job. I don’t think this is going to change anytime soon. So, even if your company succumbs to the times, there are others out there who need your experience. Don’t be dismayed! (more…)

Martin Brown’s blog shows a pretty good way of navigating the MySQL Reference Manual. It’s worth noting, however, that finding the different topics has been a lot easier since mysql.com started using a Google appliance for its search.

I use the documentation all the time and have been doing so for years (I won’t claim that I can remember +2000 pages worth of ever-changing content). A few years back, I stopped using the search box on dev.mysql.com because the result sets were enormous, with lots of unrelated references. My technique was to do a Google site search:

For replication use the expression: replication site:http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/index.html

The result set was smaller and I would find what I was looking for relatively easily, usually within the first page.

Since the documentation team implemented the Alphabetical Index, it has succeeded the Google search as my favorite way to get the information I needed. Things are easy to find and never more than a couple of URLs away.

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Welcome to the 117^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Nicklas Westerlund, and I’m a MySQL DBA with The Pythian Group. This is my first time writing Log Buffer, and I hope I’ll do it right.

Let’s start off with SQL Server, where Simon Sabin asks if you know what concurrency is and how to improve it. And on SatisticsIO, Jason Massie focuses on the SQL Server 2008 experience instead, which should provide more inside knowledge of the technology used.

Continuing on with SQL Server 2008, the engineering team is sending loads of engineers to the SQL PASS Conference, as the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team tells us in their post on what, in their opinion, just may be the best PASS Conference yet. And if you’re into meeting engineers, then perhaps you’d also like to know how that patching is done in SQL Server 2008, which PSS SQL informs us about.

The folks over at sqlserver-qa.net also give us an overview of the SQL Server Web Edition.

Let’s move over to Oracle, where there’s still a lot of buzz about Exadata, and let’s start with with the second part of the Exadata FAQ by Kevin Closson. In that post he also mentions his interview on the Exadata with Paul and Christo here at Pythian.

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Welcome to the 116^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

This was the week of Oracle Open World (OOW), Oracle’s gigantic annual get-together in San Francisco — always the heaviest week in Oracle blogs, so let’s start there.

For day-by-day coverage of OOW on the ground, I recommend Doug’s Oracle Blog: OOW Day 1, OOW Day 1.5, OOW Day 2, OOW Day 3.

Tom Kyte shared a podcast from OOW 2008, and interview with Oracle Magazine editor Tom Haunert, in which Tom, “ . . . stirs things up in this conversation about Oracle OpenWorld happenings, a new approach to publishing, and the trouble with triggers.”

Oracle teased everyone right at the beginning with word that CEO Larry Ellison’s keynote, carrying the title “Extreme Performance,” would introduce something big and new. And there was much speculation in the blogging world, some of it quite perspicacious. “Big and new” was soon going by the tantalizing nom-de-hype “X”. And before Larry’s keynote was even over (before he mothballed the black mock-turtleneck for another year), X was no longer unknown.

Writes Lucas Jellema on the AMIS Technology blog — The secret is out: Oracle launches “The Database Machine” - becoming a hardware vendor! “The big announcement that had loomed over the conference has been made. Oracle - in joint partnership with HP - introduces the world’s fastest hardware for running databases and especially data warehouses: the Exadata Storage Server.” Click through for Lucas’s précis of what it’s all about.

On blogs.oracle.com, Jack Flynn has some video excerpted from the keynote.

Lucas’s story has a picture of the thing itself, albeit a somewhat blurry one. Here’s a better image of one of the two new machines, the Exadata. Oooh, just look at it! Cor!

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If you track the database world outside of MySQL, you know that Oracle is having a conference this week. It’s called Oracle Open World. Drips with irony doesn’t it? But this post isn’t about Oracle being open or otherwise.

This post is about the announcement being made Wednesday. It seems Oracle has a surprise. A pretty well kept surprise. It’s such a big deal that Larry Ellison himself is making the announcement.

Some people, including some of my colleagues at Pythian, are speculating that this is going to be an announcement about a share-nothing clustering solution.

In the first quarter of 2007, I interviewed with a company in Atlanta, seeking my first full-time job as a MySQL database administrator. They were an online company building a social-networking website with a virtual world interface (kind of like Second Life, from what I understood). They were using an (at the time) fairly unstable version of MySQL 5.1 only because it offered clustering with the ability to store data on disk while keeping the indexes in memory. Previously, in version 5.0, everything had to be stored in-memory. Much has improved with MySQL clustering since that time.

While I don’t know for certain that Larry is going to announce in-memory clustering, I kind of hope that is what it’s all about, because it would demonstrate this: Oracle is walking a trail blazed by MySQL.

Gavin Newsome, mayor of San Francisco, and Ed Begley, Jr. talk about being green, and commend Oracle and Oracle OpenWorld for being green.

Watch the video online or download the 19 Mb flash video file

Watch the video online or download the 18 Mb flash video file

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Larry Ellison is announcing a major new feature this Wednesday at Open World. For the first time in a while, his keynote is dedicated to the “database” as opposed to the usual high level ERP/Apps/Fusion. Even the title of his keynote is catchy — “Extreme Performance”.

Oracle has been keeping the new feature a secret. Even the 11gR2 beta program had very few participants to prevent information leaking out. It’s, “Something’s coming, but I am not telling what.”

Okay, it worked on me, I’m excited about it. Let’s think what it could be. What single database feature is so major, that Larry himself will announce it during OpenWorld?

What do we know so far?

• Starting with the obvious, Larry’s keynote is “Extreme Performance”, so it’s related to performance.
• We know Kevin Closson has worked on it - he had a blog entry saying “I am working on something big” that got pulled off the web. (Here’s Google’s cache.)

Given these two point, let’s further think about it. What do we know about Kevin?

• He worked for PolyServe — a company whose main product is a cluster file system.
• He worked for Sequent on NUMA systems, which in today’s world is pretty close to cluster software with a very fast, low latency interconnect.
• He is an expert in storage systems and disk performance.
• He joined Oracle recently, possibly to work on this secret project.
• He must be really excited about it, to post anything on his blog under radio silence.

I think it’s something related to storage, something new and revolutionary about storage. But what?

We already know, from leaks on certain websites, that ASM will become a cluster filesystem which will allow storing OCR files, as well as user files, on the ASM disks.

But is this big enough? It’s definitely significant. Now you get a “free” reliable, cluster file system with Oracle. I don’t think it’s big enough though. Oracle already had OCFS and OCFS2. So it’s not something new to release a filesystem. And even if ASM becomes a true filesystem, that would not provide such a significant performance boost to warrant a keynote called “Extreme Performance”. An ASM filesystem would be a major manageability feature, not so much a performance feature.

That being ruled out, what could it be?

Recently, when setting up a new 11g database on a server with 128gb of RAM, I was setting up hugepages as usual, and thinking about how big my cache would be. It struck me that the cache will be bigger than the database for quite a while. Why do we even need the SAN/Datafiles?!

Then it hit me.

(more…)

To start off the conference, the first keynote at Oracle OpenWorld took a break from technology and veered into the world of politics. The official conference description says:

Washington’s best-loved political couple Mary Matalin and James Carville entertain the crowd with a bitingly humorous look at the world of politics.

Indeed, there was humor, and politics. For a light-hearted yet factual look at US politics, watch the video by streaming directly in your browser or download the 176 Mb Flash video file.

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