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Hello, and welcome to the 171^st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Let’s get it going this week with . . . 

Oracle

Uwe Hesse, the Oracle Instructor look at result cache, another brilliant 11g new feature. He says, “There are many amazing New Features in the 11g version, one of them is the possibility to cache the result sets of statements, that access large tables but return relatively few rows. Think of it like automagically created materialized views inside the SGA.” Commenters contribute some thoughts on problems with result cache and latch contention.

Christian Antognini is, as always, Striving for Optimal Performance. He has a worthwhile post on instance caging, “ . . . nother small but useful feature of Oracle Database 11g Release 2. Thanks to it the database resource manager is able, for the first time, to limit the number of CPUs that can be used by a given instance.”

Meanwhile on The Dutch Prutser’s Blog, Harald van Breederode has a book review: Oracle Data Guard 11g Handbook. “I rate this book with 6 out of 5 stars.”

Martin Widlake examines the business of dealing with bind issues, having been shown at UKOUG the fourth solution to the problem of mixing bind variables and histograms.

And here is his Tuesday report on UKOUG so far (as of Tuesday).

Jason Arneil was also there in Birmingham, England. Here is his review of UKOUG 2009 – Wednesday.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

It is with heavy heart (and snuffy nose and throbbing head) that I regret to inform you: there will be no Log Buffer today. Your LB coordinator has some of that flu that’s so popular these days, and he can’t blow away blog congestion when he’s so busy with his own.

We’ll get through this together, LB readers! Log Buffer will return next Friday. Till then!

This is the 170^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome. Let’s kick off this week with a double-helping of . . . 

SQL Server

There are lots of good technical posts this week. The SSIS Junkie has some observations and a straw poll on sort transform arbitration. He writes, “This post was prompted by a thread on the MSDN SSIS forum today where the poster was asking how he could replicate the behaviour of SSIS’s Sort transform using T-SQL, specifically he wanted to know how the Sort transform chooses what data to pass through when the ‘Remove Duplicates’ option is checked.”

Another poll, courtesy of Tibor Karaszi: do you perform log backup for the model database?

Eric Johnson has a lesson in looping through rows in a table in SSIS 2008, which begins, “When writing code against a SQL Server, as we usually are doing in SSIS Packages, you often need to iterate over all the rows in a table. This can be done using an SSIS Foreach Loop Container, but the how is not obvious.”

Simple-Talk’s Tony Davis wonders, Do Scalar UDFs give SQL Server a Bad Name? “Many developers seem to regard SQL Server as if it were a science-fiction alien planet where unsuspecting crew-members in blue jumpers occasionally die horribly; everything is suddenly unsafe, and potentially malicious: nothing really works properly and so any serious code should be kept well away from it. Is this developer ignorance, or is their fear justified?”

From Merrill Aldrich comes a trick question — part quattro. Spoiler: TPH is an evil trap. As a commenter says: “Very interesting, I’ve never heard this vehement an argument against TPH before.”

Read the rest of this entry . . .

The 169^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published on Pakistan’s First Oracle Blog by Fahd Mirza.

This is the first Log Buffer published outside Pythian in quite a while, and we’d love to have more. Log Buffer has a regular readership, and so makes a great way to present yourself and your blog to the DBA community at large. To get started, just send an email to the Log Buffer coordinator.

And now, here is Log Buffer #169.

This is the 168^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Let’s give the wheel a spin and see who comes first . . . 

MySQL

Brian “Krow” Aker has something to say about Drizzle, InfiniDB, and column-oriented storage: “I have been asked a number of times ‘do you think there is a need for a column oriented database in the open source world?’ The answer has been yes!  . . .  I was very happy to see Calpont do their release of Infinidb last week.”

Vadim of the MySQL Performance Blog said, “As Calpont announced availability of InfiniDB I surely couldn’t miss a chance to compare it with previously tested databases in the same environment.” And he didn’t, as shows his post Air traffic queries in InfiniDB: early alpha. Bob Dempsey and Jim Tommaney of InfiniDB are in on the discussion.

Back to Drizzle for a moment, and Jay Pipes’ item, The Great Escape. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Welcome to the 167^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Since all that OOW news forced Gerry to give them short shrift last week, let’s begin with blogs on . . . 

SQL Server

Jeremiah Peschka gets our week going with his refresher introduction to SQL Server system databases.

Likewise, Pinal Dave reviews the difference between candidate keys and primary key.

Mladen Prajdic says, “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the STP is back to rock your world!” Why? Because SSMS Tools Pack 1.7 is out with a new feature: SQL Snippets.

Michael Swart, The Database Whisperer followed up, and reports SQL Snippets is my new favourite thing.

Martin Bell was also gettin’ good and GUI. He shares his tips on how to display long text in SSMS.

Home of the Scary DBA also exposes some snags with Profiler GUI.

In general, when you hit snags, the question that arises, says The Rambling DBA, Jonathan Kehayias, is Have you got air in your spare tire? (Have you checked your DR/HA plans?).

Read the rest of this entry . . .

I regret to say, there is no Log Buffer this week, as we’ve all been busy preparing for the Big New Thing coming in a few days. The good news is, we have a Big New Thing coming in a few days. Stay tuned for that, you won’t want to miss it.

LB will be back in a week, with Gerry Narvaja at the helm. In the meantime, I invite you to leave a comment with your favourite DB blogs from this week — MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Postgres, Ingres, or other relational/NoSQL databases.

Welcome to the 165^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Since they haven’t had any Log Buffer love for a couple weeks, let’s start this one with . . . 

PostgreSQL

Selena Marie Deckelmann was tending the garden and found a Snow Leopard amongst the Macintoshes. The result, her post Snow Leopard and PostgreSQL: installation help links.

Josh Berkus posts a poll on encrypted backup. he writes, “ . . . I realized it would be relatively simple to add a simple encryption option to pg_dump and pg_restore.  . . .  So that’s what I’m asking here: would an -e option actually be useful and make you more likely to encrypt your backups? If not, is there some other encrypted backup feature which would?”

The other Postgres Josh, Joshua Drake, reminds us, Everybody loves parties! (Pg Conference West in Seattle next week).

Tom Copeland, junior developer, shares his notes on upgrading PostgreSQL with pg_migrator.

Magnus Hagander loves 80 pages about PostgreSQL! “I was just told that the latest edition of GNU/Linux Magazine in France is dedicated to PostgreSQL.  . . .  A commenter says, “I wish PostgreSQL would get even a small amount of coverage in magazines, but it’s all MySQL or SQLite.”

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Welcome to the 164^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

SQL Server

We have a delicious assortment of technical posts from the SQL Server world this week.

Piotr Rodak writes, “While I always knew and imagined that ON DELETE CASCADE may be useful, I wondered, what scenarios would be suitable for ON UPDATE CASCADE. I still don’t have this answer, but I came across some interesting behavior which kept me occupied for quite a bit more time that I had intended to.”

On In Recovery…, Paul S. Randall pursued the answers to the question, how do checkpoints work and what gets logged?

Another question: will EMPTYFILE on primary ldf “doom” it somehow? This one is posed by Tibor Karaszi.

Davide Mauri wonders if he has found a SET IDENTITY_INSERT little bug. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Welcome, readers, to the 163^rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, your sieve

Oracle

First, the ghastly news—Tom Kyte said “I’m not a DBA anymore.” Say it ain’t so, Tom! “After nine years and nine months of running the database that hosts asktom, I’ve retired . . . not from answering questions, but rather from being the DBA and semi-SA for the machine that was asktom.oracle.com.” Okay, so he said it ain’t so.

Meanwhile, Tom’s Oak Table colleague, Jonathan Lewis, played no head games on us, but he has been at the hash partitions. He writes, “I made a throwaway comment in a recent posting about using powers of two for the number of partitions when using hash partitioning.  . . .  Here’s a simple demonstration of hash partitioning in action demonstrating why Oracle adopted this ‘power of 2′ rule.”

Hemant’s Oracle DBA Blog featured an item on SQLs in functions: each execution is independent. “Functions (Stored PLSQL code that return a single value at each call) are good for calculations, validation against business rules etc. But when you use them for lookups, you must watch out for underlying data being changed!”

A new blog appeared in the firmament, namely James Morle’s. For his very first post, he avers, Forget I/O Bound, You’re Latency Bound, Bub. Read the rest of this entry . . .