Log Buffer #42: A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Welcome to the 42nd edition of Log Buffer, a weekly survey of database blogs.

MySQL

As noted last week, conference season seems to be in full swing. The MySQL Conference and Expo has been rolling in Santa Clara this week (sunshine! I'm so jealous) and judging by the comments it's been well worth the trip. Some conference pictures are available on Stewart Smith's Ramblings. [Advance apologies to MySQL bloggers -- there were TONS of terrific conference reviews out there; more than I could possibly include in one buffer. I picked out some representative posts to bring forward here.]

Sheeri Kritzer attended and posted summaries of several presentations including The Nitty Gritty of Indexes and SQL Antipatterns. She also posted slides from her security presentation.

Scalability and BLOBs is always an challenge. In Len Grimmer's Blog Lenz points to the Scalable BLOB Streaming Architecture for MySQL project and notes Paul McCullagh planned to host a BOF on the topic at this week's conference.

Storage obviously ties into this, which is a segue to Charles Colin's mention of MySQL, Amazon, and S3 in the Colin Charles Web Log. Fahran Mashraqi picks up the same topic in MySQL DBA.

Another heavily-blogged conference topic was High Availability (HA). On the Solid site Anton Wolski gives a quick overview of HA options (as well as a nice discussion of optomistic/pessimistic concurrency control in solidDB)

Scalability and availability came together in the Flickr presentation. Mike Krukenberg reviews the presentation in his blog.

Perhaps the popularity of this conference is related to job demand for MySQL DBAs. In Robins Blog, Robin notes a demand for the expertise and asks MySQL DBAs to complete a survey about where their time is spent. Sounds like a worthy idea.

Did I mention Google released patches for MySQL (with GPL licensing)? The top-level announcement is in Google Code Blog, with links to the gritty details.

Raj and Paul published several conference day reviews (as well as the slides from their tuning presentation) at Pythian. There's also some pointers to relevent portions of the Google MySQL patch announcement.

On a less pleasant note, Beat Vontobel posts a warning in fuþark that MySQL 5.1 has a feature which might enable worms to crawl between MySQL servers. See the comments thread by Brian Akers and others on Brian Aker's Idle Thoughts for the follow-up conversations.

Oracle

In the Oracle world, congratulations to Mogens Norgaard who, as Doug Burns points out in Dougs Oracle Blog, was named as an Oracle ACE.

Keeping with ACEs, Oracle ACE Lewis Cunningham published the SQL Developer presentation from last week's IOUG in his ITToolbox blog.

Moving back to the performance topic, Greg Rahn published a detailed demonstraton of cursor management and its implications for performance. He closes with a call for Java developers to close statements and resultsets. I'm forwarding this one to a couple friends.

Disk performance was a topic of conversation as well. In Kevin Closson's blog he notes that storage is leaning toward large, sequential I/Os. This leaves challenges for OLTP applications.

You know it's a good week when Tom Kyte learns something new, because he always shares with the rest of us. This week he posts two new things he learned. Thanks Tom!

In Oracle Scratchpad, Jonathan Lewis published a pointer to some good research on Histograms and Joins that was done by Alberto Dell'Era.

Continuing with sharing of tips, Andrew Fraser shares code to determine what SQL and sessions are running.

Peter Scott is back and posting in Random Musings again, this time with a discussion of query tuning as it relates to how statistics are gathered.

In Oracle Data Mining and Analytics, Marcos Campos is doing linear algebra in Oracle. Looks like he'll be posting more on this subject.

Part 3 of a discussion on emulating tables with PL/SQL was posted by Rene on his ADP blog. He gives some pretty detailed code examples.

Don Seiler points us in Die Seilerwerks to an article from Steven Feuerstein about exception handling in 10g PL/SQL.

Moving to the buzz about 11g... On OracleBrains, one of the team members posted key features supporting 11g's "change assurance" theme.

DB2

Not to be outdone, DB2 has a conference this week in Bonn, Germany. Craig Mullins is there and is impressed with the material.

SQL Server

Tara Krizer had some challenges with database mirroring last week. She publishes her experience in Ramblings of a DBA and would be interested in any feedback from readers.

General

CrazyDBA takes on the ever-frustrating topic of the interaction (or lack thereof) between application developers and DBAs. He rightfully points out that developers are rarely trained in database design, gives some quick points that could be incorporated into classes, and would love to see trainers occasionally mention the benefits of consulting with a DBA.

For the design folks among us (which in my mind includes all DBAs), over at Rittman Mead Consulting Jon Mead posts an essay on dimensional modeling. Good reading.

Have a great weekend everyone!