Pythian Group

For those of you attending UKOUG today, there is a healthy dose of Pythian presentations on tap this afternoon. Actually, you can do it wall to wall 2:30pm to 6:30pm if you like.

To note:
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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.

OpenSQLCamp 2009 is happening “in parallel to the Free and Open Source Conference 2009 (FrOSCon) on Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd August in St. Augustin, Germany …. close to Bonn and Cologne.”

I plan on being at FrOSCon and OpenSQLCamp. Where I go before and after that is up to *you*. Yes, that is right, perhaps I will visit a user group, such as France’s MySQL User Group. Or perhaps your company needs the type of services Pythian can offer — we can do the “traditional consulting” model where we look over your systems for performance tuning and security gains, or fix problems in an emergency. Even more of a win, we specialize in recurring engineering — we can supplement your existing IT staff with database expertise, and do all the database work your current staff does not have time to do.

We do it all, whether it’s large project work that would ordinarily be farmed out to consultants such as new schema development, ETL and reporting scripts and data warehouse creation; or the ordinary but important stuff that keeps the business running like ensuring backups work, constructing a no-downtime architecture, making the development environment realistic, testing failover, and capacity planning.

If you have a mixed environment, that’s OK too — we cover the major database vendors (open and closed source) and have a team of system administrators if you need help in that arena.

Keep in mind — I’m not a sales person, I’m a tech person. Day-to-day I not only lead a team of MySQL DBA’s, I am one myself, and have my hands in the tech stuff all the time. Most of the reasons I like working at Pythian are the same reasons our clients love us — 24×7 coverage to me means “my pager only goes off past 5 pm if it’s the one weekend a month I’m oncall”, to a client it means “whoever is paged is already awake most of the time.”

So if you would like to sit down with me and have a drink, just say “hi”, speak at an upcoming User Group, or talk about what Pythian can do for you, comment here, or e-mail me at “cabral at pythian dot com” and we will work something out. I can come to your European location, meet you at FrOSCon or OpenSQLCamp, or we can arrange a meeting at our Prague office sometime around the end of August.

If so, you should check out OpenSQLCamp 2009, European Edition. November last year, the home of OpenSQL Camp was Charlottesville, VA, but now it is time to have something a bit more local. OpenSQL Camp will take place Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd of August, in St. Augustin, Germany, so it could do for a nice August getaway to Germany.

It’s not really the biggest of cities, but then again, that is part of the charm, going to some small city and learning more about databases.
In case you do happen to be curious, feel free to check out the list of proposed sessions, although it is not complete, it does give a overview of what to expect.

I for one am looking forward to a European event, as it seems like most things is based in the US, and that means travel time will be less and no timezone difference, which I think will be great. In addition, the opportunity to meet with friends, share knowledge and listen to some very interesting talks makes for a very promising weekend.

I hope to see you all there!

When we founded Pythian Europe a year ago, we had, as former Oracle employees, a rather black-and-white view of the database world. There was the Oracle database; and then “The Others.”

Here at Pythian, though, we learned that the database world is more colorful than that, and very dynamic. Of course there are passionate debates between our Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server teams over whose DBMS is better. These discussions, however, are friendly and respectful, and when it comes to a concrete situation, the winner is always the customer—his or her business needs and circumstances decide.

We learned a lot about the fascinating history of MySQL and more details about its features from Nicklas Westerlund and Danil Zburivsky, MySQL experts and members of Pythian Europe. Nicklas helped with the migration of a 1 TB Oracle RDB database on OpenVMS to MySQL on Linux. And there’s our Australian colleagues—see Alex’s blog about the Australian Webinar.

Paul Vallée, Pythian’s founder and Executive Chairman really opened our eyes. Paul talks about Oracle’s 11G features with the same enthusiasm he has for MySQL’s federated architecture, or for SQL Server’s peer-to-peer replication technology. You could hardly find anybody who presents his visionary views of the new technology trends like cloud computing, virtualization, or server consolidation with such a deep understanding of the topics.

Here is your opportunity—especially those of you in Europe,the Middle East, or Africa—to confer with Paul Vallée on Thursday, June 4, 2009 12:00 PM–1:00 PM CEST (11AM–12:00 PM GMT) in a free webinar, Database Platform Migration. Read the rest of this entry . . .

If you ever thought it was easy to kill an oracle job, let me show you something that gave me a headache today.

We’re testing an application that uses custom code to de-queue and propagate AQ messages between databases. There are nine processes in total, and all of them are submitted as jobs using DBMS_JOB. They are supposed to run all the time, waiting for messages to de-queue. Once in a while, I need to kill them in order to recompile the objects they are executing.

The steps are simple enough: remove/break all jobs in question, kill the jobs that are running, recompile the packages with new the version, and submit/un-break the jobs again. This time, however, things were not going as smoothly as I expected. Let’s have a look.

First I remove all the currently running jobs:
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Tonight I returned from my first UKOUG conference. I’ve been to smaller conferences like Microsoft Technet and big ones like European Oracle Open World before, but this was without a doubt best one so far (measured by the value of content and amount of fun).

I couldn’t attend all the sessions that aroused my interest, there were simply too many of them. From those I attended, there are few I’d like to mention as highlights of the conference.

Tom Kyte and his “Best way…” was one of the most entertaining sessions and at the same time, one of the most educational. James Morle and his view of the current state of storage devices was also one of the very strong ones in both perspectives.

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The Malta MySQL User Group (MMUG) met for the second time this Thursday, and compared to last time, we had a much better venue: Ixaris Systems let us use their board room, so we had all the tools we needed to have a good meeting.

We managed to get a group picture before everyone has arrived, so I guess we can call the people in this picture “early birds”.

Once we all arrived, however, Sandro Gauci from EnableSecurity gave us a very interesting talk on SQL Injection security, and general security flaws from a developer point a view. You can find the slides here: sql-injection.pdf.

Here’s a picture of Mr. Gauci while presenting. (Sorry for the obvious problem with the over-white picture — seems like I forgot to turn down the flash, and this was the only non-blurry shot I got.)

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So, we’re coming up on that time again. When I moved back to Malta in order to work for Pythian one of the things that I wanted to do was to involve myself more in the community. Currently, I’m doing this by trying to keep an active blog with tips and tricks, good standard knowledge, and just overall trying to enlighten people. I’m also doing this by organizing a MySQL User Group here in Malta.

We’re set to have our 2^nd meeting this coming Thursday, the 28^thof August, in Ta’ Xbiex where we have graciously been donated a board room and projector (and parking space, luckily) for use. I’m trying to get one of our members to give a session about security (not only on MySQL, but also on the OS level to secure the process), and I know there is work being done on a presentation on MySQL Cluster, which I personally find very interesting and can’t wait to see.

In this second meeting, we’ll again focus on general best practices and free discussions, in order to share our knowledge as much as we can. The last meeting was in Mellieha and it was a success — we had a good turnout and some very interesting discussions. Darren, one of our members, blogged about our meeting here and so did I in one of my previous posts.

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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.