Pythian Group

Well day two here at PgEast has drawn to a close and it was another
very informative day.

Today I concentrated on the more common tasks of a Pg DBA so I attended three
talks (four if you count mine) that where rather heavy on the technical side of being a Pg DBA

Keven Kempter drew me back again with his excellent talk on Backup and recovery methods
this time giving some very good advice on how to use and abuse of pg_Dump_all and
PG_restore. He also touched on three different recipes PITR on ProstgreSQL and gave some handy
advice on when and why to use it.

I also caught another Mongo talk this time by Steve Francia it was on the application of Mongo
in a real world web retail store. He presented a very convincing argument for the NoSQL side of things in
the retail realm namely that RDBMS works great when you have but a few similar products
such as books, CDs and movies but what if you are a retailer who sells Jeans, Watches, Fresh fruit as well.

Mongo allows for a completely flexible schema and his fits the diverse retail model well.
Another good point he made is in the archiving pf transactions. Taking a product return
as an example one has to keep a recoded of all the details of the sale and you have to have some sort of mechanism to reconcile data points such as the price which might be stale they the time of the return. In
the Mongo world one just keeps the original sales record. A rather elegant solution.

I rounded out the day with two technical Pg talks the first by Magnus Hagander gave a very informative talk on the differing approaches to the ‘caching problem of web applications’ with PostgreSQL. By leveraging PostgreSQL notification system one can easily build a very robust and scalable cache with another open commercial product called Varnish.

I rounded out the day with an talk on Migrating from MySQL to PostgreQSL given by Paul Gross. This was an interesting case study of his experience where he was constrained by a 0 down time requirement. His solution was to use the ORM he was familiar with ‘ActiveRecord’ and use that to solve the many problems with data conversion he was encountering using just Ruby on its own. He used an iterative approach where he ran a script over and at each pass gathering up any changes in the originating MySQL into the PostgreSQL until they where exactly the same. This was successful with only a 30 second blackout time during the switchover to the new DB.

Well that is about it for day.

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 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.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

We’re well into summer and almost at our 200th edition of Log Buffer, a blog of blogs about the database world.

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.

Now on to our weekly reading in Log Buffer #194:
Read the rest of this entry . . .

It’s Friday, and summer’s here. While it seems the industry is slowing down to a lazy pace, there is still some action so let’s splash right in to this week’s edition of Log Buffer DBA industry news in Log Buffer #192.

Alex Gorbachev had a few minutes to suggest the following interesting tidbits to me before running off to attend Oracle ACE Director activities at ODTUG/Kaleidoscope this weekend. One of these days we’ll have to see if he can share some of what goes on behind closed doors at those hush hush sessions.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ perl -MFile::Find::Rule \
    -e'INIT{@ARGV=File::Find::Rule->file->name("*.news")->in("blogs")}'

Remember me mentioning David Wheeler‘s CPAN-like project for PostgreSQL? Well, by now it has an official name — PGXN — and the ball has now been set into motion. This is going to be good.

bingos decided to take the Dist::Zilla leap this week. A few plugins have already been churned out as the result.

Danger Will Robinson! If you are using File::chdir, David Golden warns that Perl 5.13.1 broke it by fixing a tied variable-related bug. Things are expected to be back to normal with Perl 5.13.2.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly roundup of database blogs.

Kicking off this week in Log Buffer #191 are posts from Alisher Yuldashev:

Randolf Geist blogs on an Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting Session – PGA/UGA memory fragmentation for when a batch process takes significantly longer than expected.

James Morle talks about an example of a misleading average in Log File Sync and AWR – Not Good Bedfellows.

And a few faves from Bradd Piontek:

Marco Gralike, on Blog.Gralike.Com, revisits Enabling and Disabling Database Options, a small item that is easily overlooked. Marco also notes a cool tool: VirtualBox Appliance which makes a great start-up test environment. Word of caution however, it’s for testing purposes only.

On Askdba.org, Amit advises on downloading Oracle software directly to server in a post based on Pythian’s downloading from OTN directly to your database server. Watch for future posts from Brad on how he does it via Firefox, and edelivery.oracle.com.

Alex Gorbachev is spreading the word about The Ultimate SQL Tune-off with Jonathan Lewis and Kyle Hailey, two of his most respected Oracle performance experts, believing the session should be interesting to all DBAs, not just Oracle.

Robert Catteral continues to recap session highlights from the International DB2 Users Group Conference last month in Nuggets from DB2 by the Bay, Part 3, following Parts 1 & 2.

Chen Shapira contributed Cloning Oracle Home from RAC to Stand-Alone.

On In Recovery, Paul Randal wrote the whitepaper Proven SQL Server Architectures for High Availability and Disaster Recovery he wrote for the Spring SQL Server release has been published.

Moving to MySQL world, Vadim Tkachenko continues storage benchmarking of MySQL FlashCache (very much like Oracle FlashCache but for MySQL InnoDB engine). This time he is using FusionIO cards for FlashCache.

And, to round things off, Ronald Bradford writes about When SET GLOBAL affects SESSION scope.

Have a great weekend everyone.

[yanick@enkidu shuck]$  perl -MWWW::Robot
my $robot = WWW::Robot->new(
    NAME => 'shuck', VERSION => 0.1, EMAIL => 'blogger@pythian.com' );
$robot->addHook( 'follow-url-test' => sub { 1 } );
$robot->addHook( 'invoke-on-contents' => sub { print $_[5] if rand() > 0.5 } );
$robot->run( 'http://blogs.perl.com' );
^D

First, Inigo Tejedor reminds us that we have until Thursday June 3rd (yes, tomorrow) to fill out the Perl programming survey. If you haven’t done so already, what are you waiting for? Stop reading this blog entry right now and go do your duty. No, seriously, go!

And no peeking back until you’re done!

… so, survey’s filled out? Good. Now we can continue.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly roundup of database blogs. We’re back this week with a short Log Buffer #190. Only ten more issues, and we’ll be celebrating our 200th edition post.

Chen Shapira was eager to share news early this week, sending along her favorite picks on Tuesday.

Prof. Neil Gunther doesn’t like the way commercial load testing software distributes think times.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Welcome to Log Buffer, a weekly review of the database industry. This week’s issue Log Buffer #189 is generously published by Iggy Fernandez, editor of the quarterly journal of the Northern California Oracle User Group (NoCOUG).

As always, if you’d like to host your own issue of Log Buffer, simply reach out to the Log Buffer coordinator.

Please enjoy Iggy’s issue of Log Buffer #189.