For those of you who have been under a rock for the last several years, there is a buzz-phrase floating around—cloud computing. If you haven’t been paying attention, it is time to wake up.

While I could spend an entire blog post—if not several—on a definition of cloud computing, I will be talking only about cloud computing in the sense of companies moving servers from their building or network operations center to running virtual servers in this computing cloud.

While there are a number of companies providing virtual servers, the most visible is Amazon, with their Amazon Web Services (AWS). I will be talking about AWS in this post as it is the service with which I am most familiar. It seems like every month, AWS rolls out new options and services. Just recently Amazon announced that you can now run on AWS the Windows operating system along with SQL Server.

Amazon also announced a service level agreement (SLA) of 99.5%. The SLA is important. It is a guarantee of service uptime. If Amazon don’t meet the SLA, then you get money back. As any of you will know, you have to be able to count on your data center. 99.5% is a pretty good level of coverage.

Beyond that, one of the new features Amazon will be implementing during the next year is the use of regions and availability zones. Regions are distinctly different areas of a country (or completely separate countries); availability zones are designed to be insulated from failures in other availability zones and provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other availability zones in the same region. What does this mean? It will soon be very easy to deploy a set of servers in different areas and/or regions so that your data and servers are spread out and not vulnerable to a single point of failure.

I am not going to go into any detail about how virtual servers work. That’s not the point of this post. I am going to concentrate on what you can do with virtual servers.

(more…)

This week gives me a chance to get back into something I love to do—write. For those who don’t know, my name is Keith Murphy and I am a MySQL DBA at the Pythian Group. In addition, I have the privilege of being the editor of the MySQL Magazine, a quarterly  magazine for those who use MySQL on a daily basis, either as a DBA or a developer. The sixth issue was just released last week and is available for download now. But enough about me! Let’s see what you all had to say this week.

Beginning with the world of MySQL.

Monty Taylor kicks things off, bringing us news of the ability to use the innodb plugin with Drizzle. I just think its great how the Drizzle development is moving along so rapidly. My thanks to everyone involved.  Monty also puts out a call to help defray the cost of the purchase of the drizzle.org domain name.

There have been several posts this week on virtualization of MySQL Server. I point you to a colleague at Pythian, Sheeri Cabral, who wrote about some of the benefits our customers have already experienced while using virtualized servers. While virtualized servers are not a panacea, they definitely have a place in the DBA’s environment. If you don’t work with any currently, you will be doing so down the road.

The OpenSQL “unconference” is coming! The date is Nov 14 -16 in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. Details and registration information are available here. Speaking of conferences, the MySQL Users Conference, which is in April in Santa Clara, CA, USA has extended its deadline for topic proposals.

Baron has a great post on naming conventions for your schema.

In the how-to department, Falko Timme has a good tutorial on how to set up GreenSQL to protect your databases from SQL Injection attacks. Finally, Johan Andersson has a good introductory blog post on optimizing queries for a NDB cluster, and a post on how you can get the Cluster Sandbox tool for testing the MySQL Cluster.

The Oracle world had sad news this week. Carl Backstrom, who was an Oracle employee and APEX developer, was killed early Sunday morning in a car accident in Nevada. (more…)

OpenSQL Camp is a free unconference happening Friday, Nov. 14th through Sunday, Nov. 16th in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. More details can be found at http://www.opensqlcamp.org.

Whether or not you have already registered for OpenSQL Camp by putting your name here:

http://www.opensqlcamp.org/index.php?title=Events/2008/AttendeeList

you should be aware of very important information.
(more…)

Previously on Log Buffer: Log Buffer #119.

And now.

Welcome to Log Buffer #120. My name is Warner, and I’m a SQL Server DBA at The Pythian Group. This is my first time on Log Buffer duties ever, so here’s hoping I can give everyone a fair and unbiased look at this week in the database blogging world (and related).

I admit I had no idea of the community or state of the PostgreSQL RDBMS, and so I definitely learned some new stuff this week. First off, over on “The Scale-out Blog” Robert Hodges invites us all to get our shoephone and get smart about the new world of PostgreSQL replication.

Moving over to “ad’s corner”, Andreas Scherbaum gives us a glimpse of the glitz and glam of PGDay opening. Then he entices us with the title, “Party in the evening” just to horrify us by revealing that—you’d better sit down—by the end of the event half of the beer was still untouched. Next time Andreas, who you gonna call?

“Everything is a DNS problem,” is my new voicemail message, and also the title for Kris Buytaert’s blog, where we go deep into uncovering once again the 10 month-old enigma of why did Sun buy MySQL.

Next up, I will speak to you, Mr. (or Ms.) Cross-Platform DBA. You think you know all of Oracle’s exp command-line switches? All of SQL Server’s bcp formats? And all of the things you can do with . . .  whatever you use with DB2? (more…)

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.

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.

(more…)

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!

(more…)

Welcome to the 115^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

I must thank Paul for taking over at last minute for LB#114 last week, when, as he put it, “ . . . a killer combo of painkillers and the pain that the painkillers can’t kill . . . ” reduced to me a less-than Log-Buffer-capable state. Or to be more precise, to a writhing, benighted gargoyle of misery. (Too colorful?)

Anyway, the good news is that I’m better. Not all better, mind you. Between the tooth thing and my spending all my working time on a special project, there was nothing left for poor old Log Buffer. So, I face the choice: throw it open to you, LB’s loyal readers for your contributions; or adopt Paul’s approach¹ from last week, and use the nifty AideRSS.

I’m going to bet on our readers. Let’s hear from you with your picks for best database blogs of the week gone by. I promise you a real, proper Log Buffer next week, from someone. If not me, well, Nick Westerlund still wants his go, and Ward Pond is back looking for a slot.

Until then, wish me luck with my angry tooth.

1. The truth is that I was briefly worried about having my job taken away by software. My concerns were allayed, at least partially, when I saw that the original software-built list of database blogs also included an item from “manscaping.com”, which I’m fairly sure had little or nothing to do with database administration.

This is the 114^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

I am sorry to say that this log buffer was supposed to be edited by Dave Edwards, but he’s suffering from severe and long-lasting tooth pain and until his root canal is done he’s KO’d by a killer combo of painkillers and the pain that the painkillers can’t kill. I’ve been there myself, twice, and here’s a tip Dave. It hurts until the dentist takes out the needle. Then the pain goes away while he digs. The pain comes back that night. The next morning it’s worse than ever, unbelievably, writhingly bad. But later that afternoon, blisssssssssssss. :-) Good luck man.

This Log Buffer has been generated in a completely automated way with the help of the incredibly awesome AideRSS.

To give you an idea of just how awesome it is, I was able to load up Dave’s complete OPML file of all the blogs he monitors for Log Buffer. And AideRSS applied it’s magical PostRank algorithm which scores blog posts based on how many comments, del.icio.us bookmarks, blog links from other blogs, etc. that it received, along with some more secret sauce they don’t publicly tell us about (kind of like Google with their Pagerank equivalent). The number to the left of each headline represents the linked item’s AideRSS PostRank.

It did a great job of automatically selecting the best posts from the last week.

To give you an idea of AideRSS’s helpfulness, here are a couple useful feeds I suggest you subscribe to:

1. PlanetMySQL, but only with posts that rank “Best”
2. OraNA.info, again only the posts that rank “Best”. Note that there is a bug in Eddie’s feed that makes it impossible to use all possible information on the ranking.
3. SQLBlogs.com processed by AideRSS to show only the best posts.

While I have no idea how AideRSS plans to make moolah, I think we can agree that is some kind of awesome if you’re like me and can’t afford to miss a big story, but can’t afford the time you would need to read it all. Many thanks to Andrew Baldwin and although that’s the AideRSS about page there there’s a good pic of Andrew on that page. I first met Andrew at MySQLConf 2008 this spring and he’s a great guy and a great advocate for this service.

With no further ado or free advertising for AideRSS, here’s this week’s fully automated Log Buffer. We do not plan a fully automated Log Buffer to become routine but depending on the feedback we might adopt this approach whenever we have a last minute cancellation due to illness or what have you. So your feedback would definitely be appreciated, thanks.

10.0 - Random selection, with a bias ..

(more…)

This is the 113^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Sheeri Cabral gets things going this week with her coverage of this rumour: Monty Widenius Leaves Sun/MySQL. If it turns out to be true, that seems like bad–or at least sad–news for MySQL, but Sheeri’s take is mostly an optimistic one.

MySQL’s Kaj Arno responds to the rumours on Monty resigning: “First, it’s a rumour.  . . .  Second, Monty’s resignation has been a possible outcome already since years before the Sun acquisition.  . . .  I can neither confirm nor deny the rumour.”

On CNET’s The Open Road, Matt Asay says. “Monty has done the right thing with his dissent. He has taken it outside the company, as Arjen Lentz, MySQL’s twenty-fifth employee, did before him. Arjen continues to be both a promoter and critic of MySQL, but is able to do so publicly without the constraints of an employee agreement. I assume Monty will do the same, and rightly so.” That’s not all the response out there, and there will certainly be still more as this develops.

In non-Monty blogs, Brook Johnson of Database Science asks, can a timestamp be slower than a datetime? (more…)