Welcome, readers, to the 92^nd Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Brian “Krow” Aker started an interesting blog-thread with his post, The Death of Read Replication, the crux of which is that object caches, such as memcached, make the DBMS itself a little less central, particularly in “Web 2.0″ scenarios. “What does this mean? Less database servers. Bringing down your load means you push off the load to another tier. . . . Why do I need to go through MySQL at all… unless I just want it as a backup or for ad-hoc reporting?”

Ronald Bradford responds with an overview of the MySQL-plus-replication scene. Farhan Mashraqi concurred with Brian’s post, while Arjen also agrees, adding, “I’m not sure the new memory based MySQL storage engines coming out are so relevant, they might be fixing the wrong thing in the wrong place.”

Ronald (who, by the way, is on-deck for a his third Log Buffer on the 25^th) also surveys both the storage-engine stuff to be had at the MySQL Conference, and the prevalence lately of talk about Kickfire in MySQL blogs, something also mentioned by Peter Zaitsev on the MySQL Performance Blog.

Peter has another question on his mind: should you have your swap file enabled while running MySQL? He wants to hear your approach to this matter, having himself experienced variable results. Lots of responses already.

Here on the Pythian Group Blog, Paul Moen posted about a situation in which SHOW SLAVE STATUS lies.

Moving into Oracle stuff, our Alex Gorbachev also pointed out something that doesn’t quite work: the ASMCMD cp command in ASM 11g. He sure gives it a try, but finally concludes: “I couldn’t make the cp command work even a single time.” Except maybe on datafiles.

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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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Welcome to the 90^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

First, SSQA.net’s SQL Master offers his walk-through of best practices for installing SQL Server 2005, with clustering as the destination.

If you read SQL Server blogs, you already know Adam Machanic. I’m very pleased to mention his first post for the Pythian Group blog, covering the basics of minimal logging and its enhancements in SQL Server 2008.

Also looking at Katmai was Bob Beauchemin, with his tip on accessing multiple servers with the SQL Server 2008 PowerShell provider, something right out in the open that nonetheless you might have missed.

Bob also figures out a little more about 2008’s new sparse columns and column_sets.

Joe Webb’s site mentions his appearance on Buck Woody’s Real World DBA podcast, where they tackle the question, does JOIN order matter?

On OraStory appears a very-commented post by Dominic Brooks, tantalizingly called, The dea(r)th of Oracle RDBMS and contracting?. From the piece: “I feel like the war has been lost and there are only a few pockets of resistance left now, resistance that will sooner or later be squashed. The database is under attack. . . . A newly created hierarchy have decreed that databases are indeed bad. . . . And I was speaking to a friend today at a previous employer, a major media / entertainment company. They are planning to abandon their pragmatic approach to Oracle and switch wholely [sic] to open source databases, ORM tools, and the like.”

And speaking of “Oracle versus X” (why doesn’t HTML have a <segue> tag?) — in last week’s LB#89, Shakir Sadikali criticized a post by Sean McCown’s Database Underground that compared Oracle and SQL Server to the latter’s advantage. Sean follows up the original piece, with this second item on Oracle’s community. He writes, “. . . one area I think Oracle has it over Microsoft is in its downloads. When I go to Oracle to download anything, all the downloads are clearly marked on a single page. Microsoft just isn’t like that. Sometimes even finding a service pack for SQL is like finding help for Oracle. . . . to those of you who said Oracle is easier to admin that SQL, you’re just crazy.”

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Welcome to the 89^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Welcome, welcome everyone.

In writing this week’s Log Buffer, I’ve had a chance to sit down and read some excellent posts on all sorts of platforms. The depth and breadth of what’s available to house and retrieve data is astonishing.

Many of you who have read my posts will know that I’m a fan of vegetables. They are something most of us don’t eat enough of. Come on DBAs! I think we need to make a collective effort to get healthy. We need you to keep all these systems alive. I say this because I have a new found appreciation for the work we do day in and day out.

Six months ago my wife and I said hello to our baby girl for the first time. I don’t say this to elicit any type of congratulations, but to illustrate something entirely different. If you have ever been to a hospital for any reason — to celebrate, to hope, or to say goodbye — you know the sheer complexity of the vast numbers of systems that need to interact. Daily, these systems save lives and help bring new ones to this world. I saw first-hand how the work I do on a everyday keeps the wheels turning.

Some of our customers run systems used by hospitals and I saw them in action. In a simple world, treating people can be done without technology, but this is an issue of scale, and our involvement directly affects the sheer masses of people whose lives are better because of our behind-the-scenes support. It’s true here, and it’s true for the most serious, most mission-critical systems, to the least critical and most trivial systems. The work done by DBAs from all platforms should be recognized for what it is.

I’m proud of what I do for a living and happy that I get to work in an industry filled with so many savvy folks. Oracle, Microsoft, MySQL, Postgres, IBM, and countless other organizations, and the people involved in them have together created an industry filled with opportunities and challenges, and above all, they have together elevated our ability to communicate and share. It’s in this spirit that Log Buffer was created, so let us proceed!

Since I’m an Oracle guy, we’ll let Oracle go first this time.

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Welcome to the 88^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

SQL Server

To begin, Simon Sabin, on SimonS Blog, offers the proposition: SQL Server tools suck, do you agree? He elaborates, “When I moved from Oracle 7 to SQL Server 6.5 I was amazed at the tools you got with SQL Server. They made the product so much easier to manage and pickup. Things like enterprise manager, profiler and query plans where amazing. That was almost 10 years ago, and whats changed. Well very little.” There is some improvement with Katmai, he writes, but, for for most DBAs to benefit from it, it needs to be decoupled from the engine. There’s a poll.

Not one to merely complain, Simon also posts on what’s new in SQL Server 2008 tools.

Staying with things Katmai, in the Database Underground, Sean McCown has a critical look at Katmai’s backup compression. Here’s an excerpt: “[What] does Katmai’s backup compression offer? Well, it offers you the ability to compress your backups. Period. That’s it. . . . [What] about the implementation? . . . Well, simply, it’s too limited. Even if you could put up with the missing features, backup compression in Katmai is limited to the enterprise edition. Personally, that’s unacceptable as a backup solution because I don’t want to have several backup processes to manage.”

Systems Engineering and RDBMS has what a lot of SQL Server DBAs want, a basic overview of DTS vs SSIS, the data-transformation tools associated with SQL Server 2000 and 2005, respectively.

High Availability (SSQA.net) tell their story of setting up database mirroring using a local account with 2005. Three problems encountered and solved.

Kimberly L. Tripp issues the call for abstracts the fall 2008 SQL Connections conference, taking place in Las Vegas in November. Kimberly writes: “The conference will take place shortly after the SQL Server 2008 launch (when it actually RTMs, not the ‘launch’ that happened February 27th), and will focus heavily on SQL Server 2008. Abstracts are still welcome on best practices for SQL Server 2005 and how to upgrade and migrate applications from SQL Server 200x to SQL Server 2008. However, we will consider all topics . . .” And hey, it’s a paid gig, too.

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Welcome the the 87^th of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

First up, a couple of items responding to news about H-Store, the new database technology. Nigel Thomas of Preferisco wonders if H-Store is a new architectural era, or just a toy?

Too much information, in turn, asks, Is H-Store the future of database management systems?

MySQL

Also aware of how technological change affects day-to-day DBA business, Dave Stokes of Dave’s Stuff has a tip for MySQL certification candidates: “[They] need to know about a little known but important function . . .” — PROCEDURE ANALYSE(). He writes, “It is mainly used to suggest optimal column sizes. Forty years ago you needed to worry how to properly encode data so that it would fit on an eighty column punch card. Thirty years ago when hard disks were the size of stove or dishwasher, there was a need to conserve as much space as possible. Today people carry gigs of data in their pocket and a terabyte of disk is available at local stores next to other consumer products. So you can be less than optimal in your storage of data for the most part. There are exceptions.”

Dave also asks that, as MySQL joins Sun and introduces their data into Sun’s systems, MySQL certification candidates update their email address info.

Matt Asay of the Open Road covers IBM’s announcement that is has ended development for MySQL storage engine, SolidDB. “Some among us (myself included) once worried that IBM was joining with Oracle to besiege MySQL when it acquired SolidDB, one of MySQL’s primary storage engines. It turns out, however, that IBM didn’t have such nefarious plans.”

Guiseppe Maxia, The Data Charmer, illustrates how the easy use of DISTINCT is lazy.

On Diamond Notes, a tip on speeding up imports by sorting, coming from a 60-hour, 106 million row MyISAM import.

CrazyToon offers answers to the question, how do you set up master-master replication in MySQL?, laying out the basics of this arrangement.

Baron Schwartz was mining the same vein this week. He has a piece on Xaprb on how to sync tables in master-master MySQL replication.

so many trails … so little time has an item showing how to sync two tables in MySQL.
“Usually replication is the suggested answer, but it might be a little overkill… In this case the right tool might be a mix of the new MySQL features, federated tables, extended insert synthax, stored procedures, events, triggers … quite a fest.”

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http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pllolcode/

Do I really need to say more?

Hello everyone,

I think this will be a great log buffer.

Dave has been sick these past two days and as a result, we do not have a comprehensive log buffer ready the way we or a volunteer usually do. This was bound to happen to log buffer at some point and today it has happened.

So I had two choices - cancel this week’s log buffer, or try to make it great despite this adversity. Never one to accept defeat easily, I’ll go for the second option. At least if this is the lamest log buffer ever it won’t be because I didn’t try something new that had a shot at a good result.

So this week’s log buffer is as follows: If you came here to read interesting content from the database community, you probably spend some time each day learning and reading about things we would all find interesting. We are counting on each and every one of you, our faithful readers, to propose the one article you read in the last week (and preferably was written in the last week but I can’t exactly be choosy at this point can I?), and include a short paragraph as to why this article was interesting to you and why it should interest us. Do this in the comments to this post; the akismet spamfilter will tend to eat comments with URLs so please include the magic word “contribution” somewhere in your comment so I can go dig them out for approval.

Feel free to link to your own blog posts if you are proud of them. It is a carnival of the vanities, after all.

A typical log buffer gets over a thousand reads over the week it is active. I am going to call this experiment a success if there are at least 25 interesting links written by the community posted below! And if there are not, well it was worth a try and much better than saying it was canceled.

And so this will be the first log buffer truly written by the readership - join us to make it a good one!

Thanks

Paul
P.S.

Get well soon, Dave