Pythian Group

This is the 182nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Make sure to read the whole edition so you do not miss where to submit your SQL limerick!

This week started out with me posting about International Women’s Day, and has me personally attending Confoo (Montreal) which is an excellent conference I hope to return to next year. I learned a lot from confoo, especially the blending nosql and sql session I attended.

This week was also the Hotsos Symposium. Doug’s Oracle Blog has a series of posts about Hotsos. If all this talk about conferences has gotten you excited, Joshua Drake notes that 14 days and the hotel is almost full for postgresql conference east which is March 25th-28th in Philadelphia. And the Oracle database insider notes that the Oracle OpenWorld call for papers is now open.

According to Susan Visser this week (ending tomorrow) is also read an e-book week. So if you have not already done so, read an e-book! She links a coupon for an e-book in the post.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Oracle has just released their January installment of their critical patch update (CPU). Vulnerability CVE-2010-0071 is particularly critical, with a CVSS score of 10, the highest possible. It’s a remotely-exploitable listener vulnerability that’s particularly severe on Windows platforms.

Full details are on Oracle’s security site.

In the first part of this blog I tried to shed some light on EBS patch terminology and naming conventions. In this post, I’ll show you how to check your patchset levels and query applied patches.

The very first question is, how do I find out if patch “1234567″ for example, was applied?

Of course you can use OAM, as the current release has made a huge step in enhancing OAM to show all necessary information about applied patches. If, however, you don’t like to rely on the GUI, you have a number of other options, which I’ll show you here.

Essentially there are two tables one can use to check for applied patches: AD_BUGS and AD_APPLIED_PATCHES.

It is important to understand the difference between these two. AD_BUGS contains all bug numbers fixed on your system, while AD_APPLIED_PATCHES contains all patch numbers which were applied to your system only.

For example: if you apply 11.5.10 CU2, it will add a row with patch_name=3480000 to AD_APPLIED_PATCHES and it will insert thousands of entries in AD_BUGS (including 3480000).

Caveat: if you use merged patches, always check AD_BUGS.

So how do you query the above two tables? Read the rest of this entry . . .

A while ago, MySQL developed a Community Contribution Agreement for community contributions to the MySQL source code. While browsing the MySQL Forge Wiki I came across:

http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Community_Contributions

This page shows that the Community Contribution Agreement has changed — it is no longer the document MySQL AB created. It is now Sun Microsystem’s standard Sun Contributor Agreement, which CEO MÃ¥rten Mickos recently explained to me was “more accepted than the agreement MySQL had come up with.”

I am happy to see some of the great Sun practices trickle down to replace some issues that MySQL did not handle smoothly. All in all, I agree with MÃ¥rten Mickos and think the Sun Contributor Agreement is much better….

….but what do you think?