The big news — SQL Server 2008 is released, as reported by SqlServer-qa.net, in seven different versions. Aaron Bertrand introduces a new kid on the block: SQL Server 2008 Web Edition — “. . . designed for highly available Internet facing web serving environments for the next generation Windows Server,” according to MS. (I’ve heard it rains quite a lot in Seattle. I guess it also Drizzles, too.) Says Aaron, “Basically, it has higher scalability than Express or Workgroup Editions : it supports up to 4 CPUs, no artificial limit on RAM, and unlimited database size.”

(Before you crack open your server case, Tara Kizer on Ramblings of a DBA has some advice on how to get physical CPU count on a server.)

The SQL Server Express Express blog helpfully offers a table outlining the differences in the features of the differences between SQL Server 2008 Express editions.

A couple little issues with the release have already emerged. Here’s Euan Garden on SQL Server 2008 Installation Confusion, VS 2008 Sp1 and NetFx 3.5 Sp1: “SQL Server 2008 has dependencies on (and includes) VS 2008 SP1 and its components (BIDS is just VS 2008, SSMS uses components), plus NetFx 3.5sp1. SQL includes the RTM versions of both of these, HOWEVER they are not broadly released yet. There is a check in SQL Server Setup that if you have an old version (Beta, RC, whatever) it will bounce the install and ask you to upgrade to the RTM bits…which of course are not yet available independent of SQL.” Click through for the KB and some other help. Denis Gobo and his readers have some more to say about this.

In all this change, you may lose sight of an important fact or two, and you may ask yourself, how did I get here . . . what version of SQL Server am I running? A couple resources are shared by Kevin Kline.

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Well, one simple solution is to use the sed tool to modify the file. Sed actually stands for “stream editor”. The vi editor would be considered a static editor in that it loads all of the file into memory at once. If you run out of memory, you are out of luck. With sed there is a very limited amount of data in memory at any time because it streams the data “through”, manipulating it as it goes. So sed can work with files that are huge, and only use a minimal amount of memory for processing.

The format of the search and replace also is similar to vi's search and replace. For example:

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I’m pleased to announce that there will be the formal launch of Pythian Europe at the premises of the Canadian Embassy in Prague on Wednesday the 6th of August from 17:00 to 18:30. This historic event will be announced by Mrs. Sameena Qureshi, Trade Counsellor, Embassy of Canada; and Paul Vallée, President and Founder, The Pythian Group. Present will be various members from the press (IT and Business), as well as representatives from Oracle and Sun Microsystems, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Prague, and many more. We will prepare some unusual and very tasty snacks and refreshments.

We would love for readers of this blog to join us, so please consider this your special, personal invitation from me. Please come if you’re in Prague on Wednesday. If you plan to attend, please contact Dan at elbl@pythian.com.

I’m especially interested in meeting:

• DBAs, Applications Administrators and Systems Administrators,
• Potential customers (IT Directors, DBA Managers, Supply Managers for IT), and
• Potential partners (IT product of service companies that could partner with Pythian to delight our mutual customers)

Here is my itinerary:

• Sunday, August: Frankfurt,
• Monday, August 4: Stuttgart,
• Tuesday, August 5: Munich, and
• Wednesday, August 6 through Saturday, August 9: Prague, Czech Republic.

Please reach out to me using vallee@pythian.com if you would like to meet!

With almost no ado at all, let’s begin with the bad news–from StatisticsIO and Jason Massie: The Death of the DBA. And who is the perpetrator of this crime? The Cloud! It sounds like something from a John Carpenter movie, doesn’t it?

Let’s see what Jason is thinking. “I’d like to retire a SQL Server DBA with 40 years experience but I don’t think that will happen. The cloud is coming and it is bad news administrators, database or otherwise.  . . . Let’s make some assumptions. The features get there. The availability gets there. The platform basically matures . . . Now put yourself in the IT decision maker’s shoes. No upfront capital expenses, no managing backups, and no patch management.  . . . If they can remove their focus from managing and deploying IT, they sell and service more widgets.”

Scary stuff, right? Well, the commenters don’t entirely agree. I think it will be at least a factor, but I wonder how many managers will look at “The Cloud” and feel uncomfortable about privacy, data retention, and the like. (For myself, I couldn’t even endorse the idea of putting this blog’s comments into “The Cloud”.) What do you think?

Elsewhere on StatisticsIO, Jason has a note about MSDN’s SQL Heroes contest, whose aim is to, “. . . create a community project in CodePlex based on SQL Server 2008.” Jason also links to a list of CodePlex’s active SQL Server projects.

Turning to matters technical, Jeff’s SQL Server Blog offers a lesson on converting input explicitly at your client: don’t rely on the database to “figure it out”. Jeff takes the example of formatting dates, and show both the right and the wrong way, writing, “I’ve said it over and over and I’ll say it again: The concept of formatting dates should never be something that your database code should ever worry about.”

On the Less Than Dot blog, SQLDenis observes that converting columns to date from datetime does not result in a scan in SQL Server 2008. What you get instead is a seek, as he demonstrates.

Indexing Foreign Keys - should SQL Server do that automatically? So asks Greg Low on the The Bit Bucket. “By adding indexes on the foreign keys on three tables,” he writes, “we saw a reduction of 87% in total I/O load.  . . . it really struck me that having SQL Server do this by default would avoid a lot of apparent performance problems.  . . .  Should SQL Server simply do this by default when you declare a foreign key reference?”

Kent Tegels of Enjoy Another Sandwich — riddle me this, riddle me that! “When is a bug not a bug?” I give up, Kent. When is a bug not a bug? (more…)

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!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:

Rob Shuster, VP US Sales
dbWatch USA
6122B S. Eagle Pass Rd.
Gold Canyon, AZ
85218

Phone: 800-270-9892

http://www.dbwatchusa.com

info@dbwatchusa.com

dbWatch Software Announces US based Sales & Support Oslo, Norway — June 23, 2008 – dbWatch Software has launched a US sales and support organization. The flagship product, dbWatch™ (v8.1), is a heterogeneous database monitoring/reporting tool currently supports Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL.

Marek Jablonski, CEO states “As a DBA you are often stuck with multiple platforms (both OS and database systems) and multiple unmanageable tools from database providers. dbWatch™ is a single tool allowing the DBA to monitor all databases and generate professional custom reports.”

Clear Channel Norway IT Director, Jan Erik Rasmussen, reports “dbWatch provides an effective overview of our databases, and allows me to sleep well at night.”

Three dbWatch™ editions are available: Standard ($195), Professional ($1,995 to $9,995), and Enterprise ($14,995). A free 30-day evaluation is available for download.

For information: http://www.dbwatchusa.com or

Contact: info@dbwatchusa.com

Phone: 800-270-9892

It was a timely contact, coinciding with Sheeri’s review of MONyog. It sounds like dbWatch is the kind of tool that would be valuable here at Pythian, where we work with all of the DBMSs it supports. But — I haven’t tried it yet, so I put it to you: have any of you used dbaWatch? If so, what are you opinions?