Pythian Group

Database Servers are humming along, and the people who manage them, interact with them or are just in awe of them are busy in blogging about them. This inspires our next Log Buffer, Log Buffer #214.

Oracle:

Chet Justice, the Oracle Nerd breathes a sigh of relief as he gets to release some much needed space from his hard drive.

Jonathan Lewis reminds about a subtle difference between a predicate and the constraint.

Randolf Geist, another Oakie posts a meaty blog about Concurrent Index Creation.

Martin posts a useful blog about using wget and proxy to download patches from My Oracle Support (MOS).

Charles Hooper points us towards an OTN post which mentions Metalink (MOS) Doc ID 1203353.1 – “How to find Oracle Database Documentation on OTN Web Site” and lists four easy steps for finding information in the Oracle documentation library.

SQL Server:

Dynamic Management Views are views that can be queried using SQL in SSAS and which contain all kinds of useful admin data. Chris Webb posts a popular post about querying PowerPivot DMVs from Excel.

Social networks around the web are buzzing with the SQLRally. Kendal Van Dyke offers his help to go to SQLRally.

Wes Brown carries on his celebrated series about Fundamentals of Storage Systems, IO Latency and SQL Server and this time talks about latency.

Stuart talks about the ideas culled from different people of direction that PASS should take over the last year at Summit, SQL Saturdays, email, etc here.

Ok the question is: For a clustered index on an identity column, is it okay to set the fill factor to 100? And the answer is here.

My SQL:

Kris Buytaert does a terse post about Converting KVM to VirtualBox here.

MySQL Expert Ronald Bradford shares valuable input about Optimizing UPDATE and DELETE statements in MySQL.

Xaprb gives a heads up that the call for papers for the MySQL conference’s Ignite sessions is open. He also tells that there is lot of fun: 5 minutes, 20 slides, period.

Danil blogs about the podcasts by Sheeri Cabral and Sarah Novotny that explains what MySQL’ers would get out of attending COLLABORATE 11 (besides getting to go to the Harry Potter theme park for free, but that’s included, too.)

Imagine PECL/mysqlnd_ms could keep certain reads on certain slaves in a MySQL master slave setup. You would have a good chance to profit from hot database caches. Ulf Wendel writes more about it here.

DB2:

Kim May, Vice President of Business Development for The Fillmore Group, has been named an IBM Information Champion for 2011. Congrats to him from Pythian.

Alpha 4 of the next version of DB2 quietly slips out in to the wild. You don’t have to be a genius to guess that IBM is hard at work on the next version of its DB2 database product. Read more here.

Richie Escarez points to a new support page that highlights the features and capabilities between the stand-alone and IDE packages of IBM Data Studio.

Want to learn more about some of the improvements to DB2 LUW since the release of 9.7? Read this post.

Conor O’Mahony posts a hillarious video about IBM DB2 and Oracle Database. A must see.

PostgreSQL:

What phpMyAdmin is to the MySQL database, phpPgAdmin has been considered to be for PostgreSQL, but perhaps not any more, because new adminer, a nifty tool has also come to fore to support PostgreSQL, as blogged by Joe Abbate.

Sivakumar Krishnamurthy expounds that increasing work_mem is a quick and worthy trick, when it comes to that.

Valentine Gogichashvili blogs about the usage of PostgreSQL array aggregate to merge several arrays together in one one-dimensional array.

This is not my notes about the MySQL conference that just occurred. These are my thoughts about MySQL conferences in general. Baron wrote in The History of OpenSQL Camp:

After O’Reilly/MySQL co-hosted MySQL Conference and Expo (a large commercial event) that year, there was a bit of dissatisfaction amongst a few people about the increasingly commercial and marketing-oriented nature of that conference. Some people refused to call the conference by its new name (Conference and Expo) and wanted to put pressure on MySQL to keep it a MySQL User’s Conference.

During this year’s conference, I heard a lot of concern about whether or not O’Reilly would have a MySQL conference, and whether or not Oracle would decide to sponsor. I heard all of the following (in no particular order):
Read the rest of this entry . . .

I guess I have only one and a half posts about COLLABORATE 08 this year. It’s a bit unfortunate that I couldn’t make the whole conference, but only last day-and-a-half. In addition, I’ve been speaking at the two lasts slots of the conference so it’s been quite busy for me.

As I mentioned already, the scheduling for my presentation got a bit screwed-up due to the last minute call to participate in the speaker panel — “To RAC or Not To RAC: What’s Best for HA”. Thanks to Dan Norris, my session was finally moved to 11:00, which is right after the panel. On the other hand, 11:00 slot is the last IOUG session of the conference. This fact, coupled with last minutes re-scheduling, brought the number of participants down. Even though there were about 30 people and the hall (Korbel 1C) was small enough not to seem empty.

Back to the RAC speaker panel, I enjoyed the discussion and especially the fact that speaker’s opinions on how wide RAC adoption should be were a little different. I took the liberty of starting the discussion with a quite provocative quote — “complexity is the enemy of availability”. Interesting that the other panel speakers seemed to disagree to it to some extent by countering it — use knowledge to fight complexity. Not that I don’t agree with it (on the contrary) but my point was rather, “why make it complex when you can keep it simple?” Some of the reasons for over-complicating systems can be found here.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

I’m at Collaborate 08 in Denver these days. I arrived yesterday evening so I haven’t had a chance to see any sessions yet but I did have a nice dinner with a bunch of OakTable folks. The steak wasn’t great but the best part was that I could enjoy my time with people I don’t get to see very often.

Today started with some confusion. My presentation, Oracle 11g New Features Out of the Box, was originally scheduled on Thursday at 9:45 AM but due to participation in the speaker panel ,”To RAC or Not To RAC: What’s Best for HA?”, it was rescheduled to today, Wednesday, at 4:30 PM. However, this change didn’t make it to the printouts with latest changes so the options right now are either re-schedule my session to a later time tomorrow or keep it at the original schedule and pull me off the panel. I’d really enjoy that panel as it goes right along my alley but I need to make my session as well so we’ll see how it works out.

I’m off to the Carol Dacko’s presentation about DBMS_XPLAN now and looking forward to show up at the RAC SIG Birds of a Feather later today. Stay tuned – more to come…

Just a quick note to wish good luck to Pythian DBAs Christo Kutrosky and Babette Turner-Underwood who are presenting at Collaborate ’06 today and tomorrow.

These are two outstanding presenters with deep technical knowledge reinforced with day-to-day use of the technology and I would encourage anyone to attend. If you attended the presentation, by all means post any feedback here!

Here are their schedules if you would like to attend: