Pythian Group

Well the last busy day here in The Big Apple again a number of very good technical talks. It is not often that the developer of a key piece of a technology gives an intro talk so I grasped it when it came up. Robert Haas gave a very informative talk on the theory behind WAL (Write Ahead Logging) and how it is implemented on PostgreSQL as compared to other DBs. His talk never ventured into the neither world of techno-babel but gave just enough of the technical side to get the understanding out. In the second part of his talk Robert focused on a introduction of the ‘Buzz’ words of WAL that one might have to deal with. This was both very entertaining and armed one with a real understanding of WAL.

I next sat in on ‘Little Jim’ Mlodgenski’s ‘Scaling with GridSQL’ talk. Another great technical talk that did not get bogged down in little details. Jim illustrated how GridSQL leverages the Power of Nodes to create a scalable parallel query data ware-house by creating a controller that will split off most of a large query to the different nodes in a cluster take the results from these nodes and then applies the final touches. Jim clearly demonstrated that with simple aggregation queries one seen a linear gains in performance for each node added to the cluster. With more complex queries there was an exponential gain for the first few nodes but one sees a fall of after only 8. Jim was very open about the pitfalls of this form of scaling (eg backup can be problematic) but it a very good solution for quick scalable data-ware housing.

The final talk of the conference was Jake Luciani’s talk comparing Apache’s Casandra to PostgreSQL was a very good introduction to this rather novel No-SQL DB. Think of a ring of peer to peer hash tables that work together to scale, provide no single point of failure, automate replication and implement tunable consistency. Its basic concept is the opposite or the RDBMS ‘Store Many! Read Once’ which makes some sense when used in such situations as large blogs, photo libraries or even diverse catalogs. Jake also introduced us to something he called CQL a query language for thew No-SQL DB

The conference ended with one of the better open forums I have attended I am sure next year will be much better.

Hopefully I will be able to make it next year as well

I guess I brought the snow with me to Ne York as I awoke to a nice 10cm dump. Anyway today would best be described as a day of ‘Disruptive Tech’

I first attended Kevin Kempters intro into PorstgreSQL High Availability. A very well balanced presentation that gave a very good overview of what is available out of the box for both Warm Standbys and Hot Standbys how they can be very easily implemented. He also gave a quick overview of other tools that can be used including Slony for detailed fail-overs and PgPool for load balancing and relication. Not very disruptive but it does show that Pg is on par with most of the heavy hitters such as MySQL and Oracle.

The keynote this year was by Ed Boyajian the CEO or EnerpriseDB and he gave an big picture of the DB in terms of market which is a whopping 26$ Billion a year in the US alone of which the the two five players have 90% of the market one having more than half.

He made the comparison between his time at Red Hat when there was a huge untapped market much the same situation exists today for PostgreSQL as it represents a ‘Disruptive player’ in the game is it is the last open source DB out there. In other words we can only grow in the future.

To continue on with my Disruptive theme I also attended B. W. McAdams and Justin Dearing’ s two talks on Mongo. Mongo is true disruptive technology as it is a NON-SQL Database. For an old timer relational chap I was a little skeptical. It is hard to thing of a DB without SQL, Schema, Joints or triggers but they made a good case for it. It is all a question of building the correct tool for the Job. Traditional relational DB where never intended to be used to create Blog web sites and as many of us have found out they might not be the ‘right’ tool. Mongo with its ‘Document’ orientation solves many of the ‘Blog’ problems very elegantly. Mongo is just not for Blogs both speakers gave a number of examples of its application for example in a quickie app that displays the nearest Subway station to you and one that acts as the cache for a large PostgreSQL DB

I also has to pleasure to hear a first time speaker Vanessa Hurst who presented on the topic of ORMs (Object Relational Mappers) and the problems they cause for DBs. It was good to hear some of these issues and she made the very good point that it is always a compromise between speed to market and long term goals. You might get an ORM db out in two months but in one year form now your DB may not work anymore because of single object files, lack of planning for scalability or just poor design that was forced upon the team from the ORM.

Well off to enjoy the ‘Le Comte Ory’ at the Met for me tonight

Cheers

Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly round up of news and happenings in the database world.

We’re planning our publishing calendar for 2011. Happy to announce that we’ll have a few guest hosts in the New Year. Don’t forget if you’d like to host or edit a future edition of Log Buffer on your own blog, send a note to the Log Buffer coordinator.

We’ve had several contributions of favorite reads from the team this week. Enjoy this issue, Log Buffer #208.

Gwen Shapira’s picks:

Iggy Fernandez uses GraphViz to visualize his explain plans – he thinks it makes them easier to read, but Gwen’s not sure she agrees. In the comments, Tim Hall and Charles Hooper give a lot of information on how to read explain plans correctly and are worth reading.

Jonathan Lewis, on Oracle Scratchpad, blogs about optimizer issues with collection types and suggests a work-around.

Asif Momen updates that Oracle released a nifty little tool for looking up DBA views and background processes.

Jared Stills ran into interesting date format issues while working on his latest book.

Pythian’s Alex, Christo and Dan were blogging live from UKOUG 2010. It looked like they were having so much fun, I’m not sure why they call it work! Welcome home, Paul and team – you made it, despite the snow.

Vadim Tkachenko blogs about a very scary InnoDB bug that can corrupt your data and crash your database. It can even allow your users to do it to you! Read and take steps to protect yourself.

In DB2 news, Fahd Mirza suggests:

Henrik Loeser expounding as how to build a full text index on PDF documents in DB2.

Raul F. Chong gives the chance to experience the next version of DB2 today!

Willie Favero appreciates the security offered by the DB2 10.

Edwin Sarmiento writes his second post in a series on HADR, further building on his point that a good HADR strategy is more than just the underlying technology.

Guiseppe Maxia, the Data Charmer, starts a lively discussion on MySQL forks, and points out 5 arguments in favor of them.

Hard to believe it’s December already.

Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly roundup of happenings in the database world.

Lots to cover this week, so let’s get on with Log Buffer #204. Enjoy!

Oracle:

Pythian’s Gwen Shapira dabbles with MySQL and explores MySQL troubleshooting for the Oracle DBA.

Venkat Janakiraman explores how connectivity works for BI EE 11g on Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2008.

Iggy Fernandez explores SQL 101: Which Query is better, in part II to a post he covered in summer of this year.

Chet Justice, on Oraclenerd reviews how to use forgotten function OBIEE: Evaluate

Tanel Poder announces last chance for early-bird rates to sign up for the virtual conference on Systemic Oracle SQL Optimization featuring himself, Cary Millsap, Jonathan Lewis & Kerry Osbourne.

DB2:

Lots going on at the IOD 2010 conference over the past week. Craig Mullins covers the event with news, a video of attendees, and the final keynote.

MySQL:

Sheeri Cabral shares how she determines MySQL fragmentation.

Baron Schwartz posts the third in a series of posts on MySQL limitations – one thread per connection. In case you missed them, part 1 covered single-threaded replication, part 2, the binary log, and part 3, subqueries.

SQL Server:

On In Recovery, Paul S. Randal invites readers to participate in a survey to determine wait times on systems. Chime in with your feedback by commenting on his blog post or sending him an email after reading the instructions. Paul is also calling for participants for T-SQL Tuesday #12 – Why are DBA skills necessary.

And lastly in Postgres news, PG West 2010 is happening next week. There are a number of posts on the need for replication in PostgreSQL 9.0. Joshua Drake stirred the pot, responded and created a Replication poll to find out what you really think. Cast your vote!

Happy Haunting weekend.

Welcome to Log Buffer. The weekly roundup of posts, and news of what’s happening in the database world.

At Pythian, we’re pretty much recovered from a hectic Oracle OpenWorld 2010, and I’m no longer an OOW virgin. What an experience! I had the pleasure of meeting many of you Log Buffer readers and contributors at the Annual Blogger’s Meetup at Jillian’s. Great to put faces to names. And I now officially feel like “Vanessa from Log Buffer”, as many of your t-shirts will show.

Many thanks to Marc Fielding for providing the hot items for this week’s post, in Log Buffer #203. Enjoy.
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Hello, and welcome to Log Buffer, a weekly blog about happenings in the database industry. Today is a celebration of the 200th edition of Log Buffer, and we’d like to give a special shout out to all of our guests hosts over the past 4 plus years. Their contributions have been invaluable in helping to grow Log Buffer into the community source of favorite database-related blog posts that it is today.

We’ve come a long way since our inaugural issue, Log Buffer #1, published July 14, 2006. This week enjoy mix of contributed links and the latest posts from past contributors.

Mart Rittman (Log Buffer #11) reminds everyone that OBIEE 11gR1 is available for download. His colleague, Venkatakrishnan J follows up with posts on a few new and important features including reporting on CLOBs – Lookups, map views – integration with Mapviewer, handling double columns – ID/description interoperability, lookup tables – sparse and dense lookups and vertical clustering.

Adam Machanic, of SQLblog.com and host of Log Buffer #21 is reflecting on 6 plus years of blogging in the database world, and wants to know who his readers are.

Lewis Cunningham (Log Buffer #32) notes that the call for abstracts is open for ODTUG/Kaleidoscope 2011. Submission deadline is October 26, 2010. He also talks about a problem with success and offers good advice to make sure you’re not getting “crusty”.

Coskan Gundgobar (Log Buffer #49) responds to a slow system waiting on library cache lock and credits Tanel Poder’s scripts as the solution.

Jeremy Schneider (Log Buffer #55) points out that DBCA is missing from the 11gR2 ASM/grid installation.

Hubert Depesz Lubaczewski (Log Buffer #57) writes about OMNIPITR – hot-backups on slave – they really work.

Edie Awad (Log Buffer #73) references 5 interesting posts in his Monday, August 16th roundup including working with long columns, and database performance for developers.

Robert Treat (Log Buffer #127) shares on his personal opinion on what people should do following the announcement that OpenSolaris is cancelled and is to be replaced with Solaris 11 Express.

Gary Myers (Log Buffer #181) has a little fun with passwords on Sydney Oracle Lab.

Kent Milligan suggests to process your DB2 for i indexes in parallel and thus improve the overall performance of your database server.

Steve Karam, the Oracle Alchemist reports strange behaviour with MEMORY_TARGET.

Chris Presley shares Paul White’s post on viewing another session’s temporary table.

While a few have fallen off the map, it’s nice to see many members of our database blogging community still going strong.

Welcome to Log Buffer. The weekly review of DBA industry news. Enjoy Log Buffer #199.

Remember if you find a link or interesting blog post that you think Log Buffer should mention, send a note to the editor at Log Buffer and be sure to include the link, and a short note outlining why you think that particular post would be of value to other DBAs, or what you learned from reading it.

And, for inquiries about hosting or editing a future edition of Log Buffer on your own blog, send your query to the Log Buffer coordinator. (Please include the words “Log Buffer” in the subject.)

Kicking off this week are posts recommended by Gwen Shapira who also took a few minutes to share her production advice for developers.
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Welcome to Log Buffer, a weekly review of the database industry. This week’s issue Log Buffer #198 is generously published by Sam DeFilippis, who manages Oracle Notes blogs, with latest postings on Oracle GoldenGate.

As always, if you’d like to host your own issue of Log Buffer, simply reach out to the Log Buffer coordinator.
Please enjoy Sam’s issue of Log Buffer #198.

Log Buffer #197 marks the middle of summer, and the fact that we’re a mere two weeks away from our 200th edition.

To begin this week’s reading, I’d like to highlight two Oracle blogs maintained by Sam J. DeFilippis: Oracle Notes, where he’s recently posted about troubleshooting GoldenGate and positioning a read of Extract/Replicat Trail file or Oracle redo log. Sam volunteered to host a future edition of Log Buffer (thanks, Sam!). You can too, by sending an email to the Log Buffer coordinator, we’re always looking for volunteer publishers.

Brad Hudson a points that PostgreSQL test servers have moved from Oracle to EnterpriseDB.
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Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly roundup of database industry news.

For your reading pleasure this week we have Log Buffer #196:

Charles Hooper blogs about an in-depth investigation on what can cause Oracle to ignore a hint.

Doug Burns reminds his readers that there are only two weeks left to submit papers for UKOUG. The deadline is Aug. 2.
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