Welcome to the 91^st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

For a change, let’s begin with some PostgreSQL stuff. On Tending the Garden, Selena Deckelmann gives her retrospective thanks to those who attended and presented the PostgreSQL Conference East.

On Esoteric Curio, Theo Schlossnagle gives his thoughts on the keynote address by Joshua Drake, touching on the perennial versus, Postgres vs. MySQL.

Hey, there was a MySQL ambassador there, too — Baron Schwartz of xaprb. Here’s Baron’s recap of his experiences at the conference.

When pet projects bite back! reasserts that SQL is in fact a programming language. Sometimes one can forget that and need a little reminder. Or a not-so-little reminder, such as a three-pages-long query. The discussion ranges into questions of design, a matter that Baron Schwartz also pursues: he asks (on behalf of his wife), what is your favorite database design book? (I want to know too — um, for . . . a friend of mine.) Lots of good responses so far.

For huge queries to huge tables. On the MySQL performance blog, Aurimas Mikalauskas walks us through using MMM to ALTER huge tables. He writes, “When it comes to changes that really require table to be rebuilt - adding/dropping columns or indexes, changing data type, converting data to different character set - MySQL master-master replication especially accompanied by MMM can be very handy to do the changes with virtually no downtime.”

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