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Log Buffer #94: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
April 25th, 2008 - by Ronald Bradford - COO PrimeBase Technologies
Welcome to the 94th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of the database blogsphere. Adding to the list of usual database suspects, I have some more alternative considerations for our readers this week.
We start with Conferences
Still some discussion from last weeks’ 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo.
Baron “xarpb” Schwartz calls it correct in Like it or not, it is the MySQL Conference and Expo. Matt Assay of c|net gives us some of his opinions in three posts Two great posts on MySQL, Back to the future for MySQL and Between two consenting corporations… in followup to last week’s active slashdot discussion. Many others have also commented if you have not been following the news released before opening keynotes.
If you didn’t get a hard copy, Sheeri Kritzer Cabral has published the Pythian EXPLAIN Cheatsheet many attendees received.
Also last week was Collaborate 08 - Technology and Applications IOUG forum for the Oracle Community.
This week we also see the Web 2.0 San Francisco in action, and excitement is also brewing for the PGCon - PostgreSQL Conference for Users and Developers happening in under a month as Robert Treat has Plane tickets booked for PGCon. Postgres was also visible at the MySQL Conference & Expo if you were looking with a prominent consulting team downing the blue elephant during the event. Wish I’d taken a photo now!
Still more news from Adam Machanic of the Pythian group with SQLTeach Toronto: Almost Here.
Common threads
The 2008 Google Summer of Code announced this week showcases the Open Source databases MySQL (14 projects) and PostgreSQL (6 projects). Kaj Arnö talks more in Fourteen Summer of Code projects accepted 2008. My company PrimeBase Technologies also features strongly with two projects for the Blob Streaming storage engine for MySQL as I detail in Media Blob Streaming getting a Google boost.
MySQL
DTrace Integration with MySQL 5.0 - Chime demo in MySQL Users Conference 2008 by Jenny Chen is an example of Sun’s Open Source contribution to MySQL which I saw as a physical demo last week. Unfortunately, due to the imbalance in actually getting new functionality into Community contributions (actually non existence in current or next mysql version :-(), this functionality is only really for show. Dtrace with MySQL 6.0.5 - on a Mac describes some of this work actually making it into the next, next version. It seems this next Falcon Preview is available but not announced by MySQL generally as I note in Continued confusion in MySQL/Sun release policy.
MySQL Gurus Mark Callaghan and Brian Aker comment respectively here and here on MySQL Heap (Memory) Engine - Dynamic Row Format Support. Work submitted by Igor Chernyshev of eBay Kernel Team (whom I’ve met previously and was most impressed with his ability to submit MySQL patch work, with little previous MySQL kernel knowledge, but extensive C++ knowledge). This work also contributed to eBay Wins Application of the Year at MySQL Conference & Expo.
Mark also mentions in his post “How do users get it? There is no community branch into which people can submit changes with a GPL license.“. A topic your’s truly has also mentioned regarding the Community contributions, development and release. Perhaps a sign of more benefit to the community soon as Monty mentions.
Baron Schwartz comments on Keith “a.k.a Kevin” Murphy’s work in Spring 2008 issue of MySQL Magazine. With a quick plug also for his upcoming book “High Performance MySQL - Version 2″ (me giving it a plug also now), Baron also has the best published anti-spam sniffer email I’ve seen, and recently updated to his new employer. Check his blog and let me know.
Postgres
Joshus Drake of Command Prompt Inc. The Postgres Company gets excited in Is that performance I smell? Ext2 vs Ext3 on 50 spindles, testing for PostgreSQL and gives us some insight into different settings of two popular file system types. It would be great to see a follow up with a few more different filesystems types.
Pabloj “so many trails … so little time” extends his MySQL example to Postgres in Loading data from files. And on Postgres Online Journal, we get An Almost Idiot’s Guide to PostgreSQL YUM giving you a step by step guide of PostgreSQL setup, including the all important “Backing up Old Version”.
Oracle
We get a detailed book chapter from Keith Lake of Oracle OLAP The most powerful, open Analytic Engine in his extensive post on Tuning Guidance for OLAP 10g. David Litchfield brings attention in A New Class of Vulnerability in Oracle: Lateral SQL Injection. The title is sufficient for all Oracle DBA’s to review.
Don Seiler gives his experience in Bind Variables and Parallel Queries Do Not Mix when an Oracle Bug is discovered the database to 64-bit H/W..
Matching LOB Indexes and Segments by Michael McLaughlin gives us a good CASE/REGEX SQL example exam question, and simple output to monitor the growth of LOBs in your Oracle database.
Additional readings for Oracle folks can be found with Kenneth Downs writing Advanced Table Design: Resolutions and Dan Norris’ Collaborate 08 thoughts gives a concise review of a largely attended Oracle event.
SQL Server
B Esakkiappan’s SQL Thoughts gives us a throughout lesson on SQL Server 2005 Database Transaction logs with Know the Transaction LOG - Part - 1, Part - 2, Part - 3 and Part -4 Restoring Data.
Paul S. Randal of SQL Skills adds Conference Questions Pot-Pourri: How to create Agent alerts to his writings following many requests after a recent workshop.
In Scalability features I would like to have in SQL Server Michael Zilberstein lists 3 key features including “Active-Active cluster”, “Indexes per partition” and “Bitmap indexes and function based indexes”.
Ingres, Times Ten, Google App Engine and more
Some movement in the Ingres world with Deb Woods of Ingres Technology Blog discussing in Inside the Community - Ingres style?. the Ingres Engineering Summit occurring this week. Attendees included newbies to a 24 year Ingres veteran. That beats my experience in Ingres which now extends 19 years.
We get another very detailed installation description, this time for Times Ten in Install Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database 7.0.4 on Linux.
Just a few weeks ago, a new database offering hit the market with the Google App Engine. News this week includes
Google App Engine Hack-a-thons! being announced with events in New York on May 7th and San Francisco on May 16th. As a developer with an account and an excuse to use it more, I can’t win, being in the right towns on the wrong dates.
OakLeaf Systems this week writes Comparing Google App Engine, Amazon SimpleDB and Microsoft SQL Server Data Services. Another good read just for comparison.
Not in a blog, but in discussion in at the recent MySQL, was msql. It was interesting to find out that PHP was originally developed for msql first, and only used MySQL as the preferred database after some functionality requirement. Interesting what could have been?
In Conclusion
Thanks Dave for the opportunity to contribute to the week in review. Until my chance to charm the readers next time.
I leave you with a photo, and challenge our readers to find another person who would be capable of wearing a t-shirt that states “My free software runs your company”. Michael Widenius- Founder and original developer of MySQL can, and my thanks to you for MySQL, and the Vodka shots at the Conference last week.
The Ingres Vultures Descend
In a despicable business practice, I received a message from a PR Firm representing Ingres. Now, I even wrote about the controversy that seems to have swept the open source community; but even my writings were not completely factually correct — I wrote that even if online backups were closed it was not necessarily the worst thing in the world. The actual parts of the online backup that are not open source and free are compression and encryption — that is all.
So really, we are talking about a very small part of backup. The last I saw most people used their own compressing (ie, | gzip -c) and encryption for backups. And honestly, I would rather use tried and true compression and encryption than something new that MySQL comes up with, so I do not even see most people wanting compression nor encryption.
But that’s besides the point. If Ingres thinks they can win customers over by swooping in when a controversy is happening, they are way more evil than I would ever have guessed. It’s not good business practice to do this kind of thing — it is cold, calculated, uncalled for, and just plain wrong.
As for my comments — firstly, MySQL did not make any particular “announcement”, and secondly, MySQL is already losing “feedback and contributions on its products from a large group of users in the community” because it does not have an easy way to get community patches committed to the source tree.
There is so much else that bothered me about the e-mail I received, so I will just copy it here for full context for readers:
Subject: Ingres' Thoughts on Today's MySQL Announcement and What it Means for the Open Source Community From: Lindsey Pappas Date: Apr 15, 2008 5:33 PM Hi Sheeri, Did you see MySQL ’s announcement on new features in MySQL Enterprise version of its product? This is interesting news for the open source community, as it appears that MySQL is moving away from true open source towards a proprietary model by not providing the same features in its community version. Ingres is a a leading provider of open source database management software and support services and views the news as the loss of a true competitor in the open source space. By doing this, MySQL will lose feedback and contributions on its products from a large group of users in the community. Costs will go up and quality will go down. Ingres is a believer in the true open source of its products. I can put you in touch with an executive at Ingres to hear thoughts on the news and what MySQL’s announcement means for the future of the open source community, including comment on: · The benefits of open source solutions that are identical between community and enterprise, functionality should not differ between products, cost or version. · The importance of an online backup component for mission critical applications. · In a community where everyone benefits from the valuable contributions and feedback on new developments and innovations from other players, MySQL?s move away from open source is a loss for the open source community. Please let me know if you?d like to connect in the next day or so to discuss MySQL?s announcement and where the open source community is headed. Thanks, Lindsey Lindsey Pappas Atomic Public Relations 8 California Street San Francisco, CA 94111 (415) 402-0230 lindsey@atomicpr.com
Open Source Database Alternative - Ingres
On several occasions this year I’ve been prompted to mention in conversation Ingres as an alternative Open Source Database. Jonathan Levin in A list of Open-Source Alternatives to Business Applications was the latest example where Ingres was not mentioned and perhaps it should have been.
Want features like online backup, online alter, multi-master replication, parallel queries and partitioning. These are all long existing features in a more mature product then MySQL presently. Is this a sleeping giant that nobody remembers about? Ingres has been around a long time, in fact my experience extends back to 1988 (that’s 20 years).
From a product perspective they have created a number of pre-packaged product stacks, for example The Ingres Icebreaker BI Appliance Powered by JasperSoft, something MySQL has failed to capitalize on. Another stack appliance for example is with Alfresco.
However since the CA announcement to open source Ingres back in 2004 I’ve not seen a great deal of press, at least not in the Open Source or MySQL circles. Time permitting myself it’s time again to look at Ingres. It’s worth another look and hopefully I can provide some translation for MySQL DBA’s and Developers. Also part of Ingres is ABF Application By Forms, an entire development environment. My use was back in the terminal days so I can only assume they have fully embraced the Web now.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is a Object-Relational DBMS supporting almost all SQL constructs, including subselects, transactions, and user-defined types and more. The name comes from the fact that many of the original developers also worked on Ingres, and so this is the “post-ingres” database. Design for the system began in 1986, with an explicit goal of providing a database that completely supported types with the minimum number of features necessary. By the early 1990s, the database had reached a significant number of users. Around this time, its status as a University of California, Berkeley project ended, but due to the open source license, development continued, as it does to this day.
PostgreSQL is seen as the most popular open source database after MySQL, although it has in many ways more advanced and more mature implementations of key features, particularly those required by heavy-duty OLTP applications.
Useful links:
An overview of features.
postgresql
Database
License:BSD
ingres
DBI
ODBC
JDBC
SQL
DBMS
object-relational