Pythian Group

By now you know that there is a MySQL Track during next week’s ODTUG Kaleidoscope in Washington, DC. Ronald Bradford and I organized the schedule at the last minute (Ronald did a lot of the work!). It was difficult to fill a schedule with 19 sessions that are either 1 hour or 1.5 hours long, and to do it I ended up with three presentations.

At each presentation I will be giving away a copy of The MySQL Administrator’s Bible, so be sure to show up! All MySQL track sessions are in Maryland C, and all times are Eastern.

On Monday, June 28th from 4 pm – 5:30 pm I will be presenting “What do you mean, SQL Syntax Error?”, a presentation about how MySQL’s SQL syntax extends and deviates from the ANSI/ISO SQL:2003 standard. There is an 80-page PDF accompaniment that will be given out for free during this session.

On Tuesday, June 29th from 11 am to 12 noon I will be presenting Importing and Exporting Data with MySQL, about the many tools to load and bulk load data, and how to export data for regular and bulk loads. I will also be going over which storage engines are particularly well-suited for bulk loading, and the caveats to watch out for. This session is useful for those who know MySQL as well as those asking the question, “What’s the equivalent of Oracle’s SQL Loader for MySQL?”

On Wednesday, June 30th from 8:30 am to 9:30 am I will be presenting Navigating MySQL Stored Procedures & Functions, Views and Triggers, which covers all the ways stored procedures, stored functions, views and triggers can be used, including a highlight of Oracle differences.

I hope to see you there!

While perusing the Oracle 11g Data Pump documents recently, I noticed a new parameter that was introduced in Oracle 10g, but I had missed it there. The parameter is TABLE_EXISTS_ACTION, and it applies only to the Data Pump Import.

Basically, this feature allows you to decide how to handle importing data if a table already exists. The options are SKIP (defaut), APPEND, TRUNCATE, and REPLACE. Do these parameters look familiar? Possibly reminiscent of the SQL*Loader parameters (INTO TABLE x INSERT/REPLACE/TRUNCATE/APPEND)? They are very similar and they work the same way, with the exception of SKIP.

Here’s an explanation of each option.

• SKIP: The default value for TABLE_EXISTS_ACTION. If the table exists, then SKIP will cause the table (and any related data) to not be loaded. The table will be skipped.
• TRUNCATE: This will truncate the data in the table and load the data. If the table already exists, no metadata will be applied.
• APPEND: This will append the data to the end of the table. Again, if the table already exists, no metadata will be applied.
• REPLACE: This will drop the existing object, recreate the object with the information from the dumpfile, and then load the data.

Let’s create a simple test case to demonstrate. Read the rest of this entry . . .