Pythian Group

For one of our customers, I’ve recently reviewed the strategy of migration from single-byte encoding to variable length multi-byte UTF8 (AL32UTF8 encoding in Oracle naming standards). These type of projects are coming up again and again so I think it must be common for many of you. Thus, this bit might be useful. I’m also interested in your experience – perhaps you can run this simple simulation on your platforms and provide the results in the comments?

Back to the project… One area was estimation of the string manipulation overhead. Based on Pythian experience as well as the feedback from my network, I could conclude that nobody has observed any measurable performance degradation or significant CPU usage growth clearly attributed to UTF8 migration.

Thus, I decided to simulate at least some operations and measure them. One of the concerns was sub-string extraction — fixed length encoding sub-string is super easy to implement as the offset and length in bytes are known. Variable length character set would require scanning the whole string from the very beginning because byte offset and byte length are not known until the string is traversed from the beginning character by character.

This is the PL/SQL block I came up with: Read the rest of this entry . . .

The Oracle gateway for ODBC provides an almost seamless data integration between Oracle and other RDBMS. I won’t argue about its performance, limits, or relevance. It serves a few purposes; set it up and you’ll be able, for example, to create database links between Oracle and MySQL. After all, wouldn’t it be nice if you could run some of the following SQL statements?

• select o.col1, m.col1 from oracle_tab
o, mysql_tab@mysql m where o.col1=m.col1;
• insert into oracle_tab (select * from mysql_tab@mysql);

This post is intended to share, the same way Karun did it for SQL Server last year, some tips related to the setup of the Oracle Gateway for ODBC with MySQL Connector ODBC on Linux.

Prerequisites

I’ve installed all the configuration on my laptop to test it. It’s running Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 32bits, but I won’t dig into the challenge of installing the MySQL Connector ODBC 5.1 on it. All I’ll tell you is that, if I understand correctly, the version of iodbc that comes with Intrepid doesn’t support MySQL Connector ODBC 5.1 too well, and the messages that it returns are not quite explicit. To be frank, what I did is put that monkey on Augusto’s back. He sorted out everything in a few minutes. I guess I have to thank Augusto twice, just for this post! I’ve also followed his “Installing Oracle 11gR1 on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex” post to install the Oracle part.

But let’s talk about the prerequisites! You need to have installed and configured the following components:

Read the rest of this entry . . .