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Log Buffer #104: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
Andrew Clarke has published to 104th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, on Radio Free Tooting, marking LB’s second year. Happy Birthday, LB!
Log Buffer always needs editors, so if you you’d like to present your view of the week that was in DB blogs, contact me, the Log Buffer coordinator. You’ll be joining some of the best bloggers around, and making yourself and your blog a little better known to readers around the world.
And now, here’s Andrew Clarke’s Log Buffer #104.
P.S.: To our readers in the U.S. — Happy 4th of July!
dbWatch News
Seems I have turned into a bit of a news source. dbWatch Software sent me a news release on their dbWatch monitoring platform, which looks like it might be an interesting product for those who work in a heterogeneous database environment. Here’s the release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Rob Shuster, VP US Sales
dbWatch USA
6122B S. Eagle Pass Rd.
Gold Canyon, AZ
85218Phone: 800-270-9892
http://www.dbwatchusa.com
info@dbwatchusa.com
dbWatch Software Announces US based Sales & Support Oslo, Norway — June 23, 2008 ? dbWatch Software has launched a US sales and support organization. The flagship product, dbWatch? (v8.1), is a heterogeneous database monitoring/reporting tool currently supports Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL.
Marek Jablonski, CEO states ?As a DBA you are often stuck with multiple platforms (both OS and database systems) and multiple unmanageable tools from database providers. dbWatch? is a single tool allowing the DBA to monitor all databases and generate professional custom reports.?
Clear Channel Norway IT Director, Jan Erik Rasmussen, reports ?dbWatch provides an effective overview of our databases, and allows me to sleep well at night.?
Three dbWatch? editions are available: Standard ($195), Professional ($1,995 to $9,995), and Enterprise ($14,995). A free 30-day evaluation is available for download.
For information: http://www.dbwatchusa.com or
Contact: info@dbwatchusa.com
Phone: 800-270-9892
It was a timely contact, coinciding with Sheeri’s review of MONyog. It sounds like dbWatch is the kind of tool that would be valuable here at Pythian, where we work with all of the DBMSs it supports. But — I haven’t tried it yet, so I put it to you: have any of you used dbaWatch? If so, what are you opinions?
Log Buffer #103: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
Welcome to the 103rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Starting with Oracle stuff, Chen Shapira (just a simple DBA on a complex production system) is looking for great PL/SQL. Why? To become a better PL/SQL programmer. “But,” she writes, “for PL/SQL , I?m a bit stuck. I can still read my own code for bad examples, but where can I find examples for great code? . . . Somehow, there is simply no open-source code written in PL/SQL that I can read to get a good idea of how PL/SQL should be written.” Niall Litchfield recommends the contents of $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin. Any other ideas to help Chen?
There was no shortage of people offering their help, as always. Beginning here on the Pythian blog, Grégory Guillou posted the fifth of his ten-part series on Oracle silent mode, this part covering adding a node to a 10.2 RAC. Says Grégory, “Even if you don?t leverage RAC?s ability to add or remove nodes to gain in agility, it?s still very likely you?ll come to these techniques when you want to upgrade some of your Servers or Operating Systems.” The post includes links to the earlier articles in the series.
On his Core IT for geeks and pros, Tanel Poder expounds another use case for WaitProf. He begins, “I recently diagnosed a performance issue where the ‘events in waitclass Other’ occasionally took significant part of the session?s response time. . . . So, what to do when this ‘events in waitclass Other’ wait becomes significant in the response time profile?” This is where waitprof, his custom tool, comes into play.
Jeff Hunter of the So What Co-operative posts Something to be aware of, Part II, in which he and Oracle Support tussle over NUMA in Linux, and where he is heard to say, “My next step is talking to a Duty manager. I really don’t want to do that.” And Part III, which Jeff begins, “I escalated my issue to a duty manager . . .”
On Oracle Applications DBA, Aviad Elbaz knows how to do tricks with a pipe, as he shows in his article on how to execute TKPROF on trace files larger than 2GB. Aviad, I think Bilbo and Gandalf would be proud.
Are you like me, shamefully ignorant about the whole Business Intelligence thing? Do you, too, secretly believe it might be an oxymoron? Mark Rittman is here to help, with an introduction to the Oracle BI Applications.
Vivek Sharma of Database/SQL Experiences informs us that he will be contributing a seminar on “Real Time Performance Tuning” to the very first event mounted by the IOUG (All India Oracle User Group). This is their TechNight, taking place in Hyderabad on Friday, July 18th.
Log Buffer #102: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
Welcome to the 102nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Since it was DB2’s 25th birthday this week, as Anant Jhingran reports, let’s start with it.
From ZDNet this week came a story that IBM was considering the open-sourcing of DB2 — big news, naturally, whether true or not. Matthew Aslett of 451 CAOS Theory says, Open source DB2? I don?t think so, suggesting that it was merely theorizing on the part of one IBM executive, and hype on the part of ZDNet. “Then of course,” Matthew continues, “there is the issue of why IBM would open source DB2. Where is the business driver? Despite solid competition from Oracle and Microsoft, the company is doing pretty well with DB2 as it stands, thanks very much, and open source databases have had minimal impact on the established vendors.”
Matt Asay of The Open Road likewise comes down on the uh-uh side of this. “It was . . . no surprise to see IBM quickly follow up ZDNet’s article with a blunt statement: ‘IBM has no plans to open source DB2.’ Of course it doesn’t. . . . The day that it needs DB2 to undermine Oracle’s database, however, we may see IBM making a similarly bald statement…in the other direction.”
On An Expert’s Guide to DB2 Technology, Chris Eaton offers some news on DB2 videos, including ChannelDB2’s video tutorials, IDUG’s video competition, and a funny video from IBM on the making of a “viral” industrial video. Such as itself.
On to MySQL now. Keith Murphy made his debut on the Pythian blog this week, with a link to some video tutelage of his own — his presentation to the Boston MySQL Users Group on backups. Jay Pipes also offers the slides for his address on Join-Fu: The Art of SQL (I and II). (I rarely cover presentation materials when I do Log Buffer, but these ones of Jay’s looks fantastic.)
Mark Schoonover reports that Keith’s and his 2008 MySQL Magazine survey is officially closed, adding, “Now the fun begins compiling all the data and pretty charts made. We’ve had 432 responses!”
Baron Schwartz of xaprb describes how to write a lazy UNION in MySQL. No, it doesn’t deal with posting a complaint about undefended job benefits. Baron explains: “Something occurred to me a couple of weeks ago: why not write a UNION that stops executing as soon as one part of it finds a row? Then you can UNION to your heart?s content and not incur the overhead of that second lookup unless you need it. For lack of a better term, I?m calling this a lazy UNION.”
Query Processing at Light Speed
Query Processing at Light Speed
Log Buffer #100: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, is 100 editions (and almost two-years) old today! Lewis Cunningham has returned to LB to publish The Big 100th edition of LB on An Expert?s Guide to Oracle Technology.
No speech, but I would like to thank Log Buffer’s readers and especially all of Log Buffer’s editors for making LB a worthwhile and fun stop in the database “blogosphere”. It’s very easy to see why LB editors are successful in what they do — they are consistently enthusiastic, diligent, and adaptable. And I enjoy working with them.
Okay, okay — I can hear the orchestra starting to play me off, so let’s get to it. Here’s Lewis’s Log Buffer #100.
OpenLink Universal Integration Middleware - Virtuoso Product Family
Log Buffer #99: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
Welcome the the 99th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Since PGCon recently happened right here in Ottawa, let’s start with some posts about it, and about PostgreSQL. Josh Berkus came to the conference with his Database Soup. It sounds like he enjoyed himself: “So, that’s pgCon. It was exciting and fun. All of you PG geeks who missed it should be kicking yourselves about now, and putting in budget requests for next year.” He has day one highlights; day two highlights, and also some photos from the conference.
On Tending the Garden, Selena Deckelmann (who knows a thing or two about Postgres conferences) has her PGCon review, with links to conference webpages.
Robert Treat of zillablog also has his take-aways. “The biggest thing to come out of this past week to me was recognition of the continued growth of the postgresql community. With a number of regional conferences springing up over the past year, I wondered if PGCon would be able to match the experience from last time, and was happy to see that it far exceeded it. . . . One thing I noted was that we have a very large presence of Postgres in Ottawa, I think larger than what we had at PGEast for the Baltimore/Washington Area.”
On Greg’s Postgres stuff, Greg Sabino Mullane has an item on verifying master-slave replication with check_postgres.pl, a montoring script for Nagios and other systems.
Hubert Lubaciewski of select * from depesz; looks at different approaches to counting the number of distinct elements, such as distinct sessions per day.
On An Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology, Lewis Cunningham examines the recent news of the worlds largest database running on Postgres. How large? 2 Petabytes! “Let’s put that in perspective,” writes Lewis. “1 petabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Yahoo has two of those. . . . [They use] this database to analyze the browsing habits of its half a billion monthly visitors. How would you like to tune those queries?” Lewis also notes that this is not the plain-vanilla PostgreSQL that you or I would download and run on our website box.
There are conferences on the horizon of the Oracle world too. Dan Norris reminds us that ODTUG is just around the corner. That’s the Oracle Developer Tools User Group’s Kaleidoscope 2008 event, taking place in mid-June in New Orleans.
Gareth Roberts of In Depth Apps announces the call-for-papers of the New Zealand Oracle Users Group’s (NZOUG) 2008 conference, coming in October.
In other Oracle matters — Chen Shapira, just a simple DBA on a complex production system, has some thoughts on cumulative distribution. “How do we calculate Cumulative Normal Distribution? This means calculating the probability that a random variable from a normal distribution, will end up equal to or less than X.”
Log Buffer #98: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
The 98th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published on Jeff’s SQL Server Blog.
Log Buffer is a shared project of the DBA blogging community, so you’re welcome to edit and publish an edition yourself. LB’s 100th anniversary edition is still up-for-grabs (and there’s plenty of room besides that), so read the Log Buffer homepage and the guidelines, and then email me.
Here’s Jeff Smith’s Log Buffer #98.
[from rugi] [Forum] Invoking URL in Trigger in MS SQL SERVER
Technical Podcasts I Listen To
There are a few podcasts I tend to listen to as I have time. Since I work with a wide range of technologies, I've tried to group them together into a semblance of order. There are a few others I am evaluating, but since I haven't listened to a large enough body of work, I'll refrain from listing them at this time. If there's one you think is particularly valuable or interesting that I don't have listed, please leave it in the comments.
.NET
.NET Rocks - http://www.dotnetrocks.com/
This is one of the best done podcasts out there and they cover anything and everything related to Microsoft .NET. That's a broad brush of most anything that interacts with Microsoft technologies. This one runs twice a week and is about an hour each podcast, but if you can spare the time, it's worth the listen.
Plumbers @ Work - http://plumbersatwork.com/
These guys from Canada talk about a lot of different things, but most of it relates to .NET. They were quite for a while but then popped up two episodes in February and March. Another one I'm hoping gets more active again soon.
Architecture
ARCast - http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/ARCast.TV
ARCast used to be hosted by Ron Jacobs and covers architecture. While the focus is mostly on application architecture, there were some times when infrastructure architecture was covered. Unfortunately, this podcast has been on hiatus since the end of the year when Ron Jacobs moved on to another opportunity in Microsoft.
General Technology (Microsoft)
Behind the Code - http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Behind_The_Code
Behind the Code talks to the people behind the technologies, and it's extremely interesting to hear the folks who have developed the things we use every day explain their challenges and ideas in their own words.
Going Deep - http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going_Deep
As the name implies, Going Deep is where folks do a deep dive on the technologies they are/were involved in. If you are interested in the Why? question, this is a great podcast.
RunAs Radio - http://www.runasradio.com/
As .NET Rocks is for the developer, RunAs Radio is for the infrastructure folks. It was spun off from .NET Rocks and is a weekly, half-hour show. Same quality as .NET Rocks and it shares some of the same people. If you work in IT infrastructure (in Microsoft or related technologies), this podcast should be right up your alley.
TechNet Radio - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb510143.aspx
Not sure why the folks at Microsoft don't have a more friendly link, but "it is what it is." This weekly podcast covers some aspect of Microsoft technology, usually whatever is "new" and "fresh."
MySQL
OurSQL - http://www.technocation.org/category/areas/podcasts
A podcast which focuses on MySQL. This one has also been quiet for a few months, but hopefully it'll pick back up again soon.
SQL Server
SQL Down Under - http://www.sqldownunder.com/
As the name implies, a podcast for SQL Server out of Australia. It's hosted by Regional Director and MVP Greg Low and the episodes typically have an extensive interview with a luminary in the SQL Server or general database category. It's not all technology stuff, either. For instance, the podcast with Kevin Kline talked a bit about family and the balance between life and work.
The Voice of the DBA - http://sqlservercentral.mevio.com/
This one is done by SQL Server MVP Steve Jones and it comes out every weekday. These generally tend to be short, they're not always on SQL Server, but as is standard Steve Jones' style, they make you think. This one is an easy one to stay up to date with and it's well worth the few minutes every day spent watching.
Log Buffer #97: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
The 97th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published on Brian “Krow” Aker’s Idle Thoughts.
We have Jeff Smith and Ward Pond standing by for two upcoming editions. And if you’d like to contribute, make yourself known in the DBA community-at-large (and have some fun in the process), you too can do Log Buffer! Read the homepage and send me, the Log Buffer coordinator, an email.
And now, Brian Aker’s Log Buffer #97.
Log Buffer #96: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
This is the 96th edition of the weekly review of database blogs, Log Buffer.
Let’s start this one in SQL Server Land, with a question from Dennis Gobo — should SQL Server have the CREATE [OR REPLACE] PROCEDURE syntax? There are, he writes, advantages: “When scripting out a database you don?t have to generate if exists…..drop statements,” and disadvantages: “I can overwrite a proc without even knowing it.” Of course, the commenters have opinions of their own, and the piece becomes a straw poll for the desirability of that syntax as a feature.
Aaron Bertrand has one too: when was my database/table last accessed? Writes Aaron, “SQL Server does not track this information for you. SELECT triggers still do not exist. Third party tools are expensive and can incur unexpected overhead. And people continue to be reluctant or unable to constrain table access via stored procedures, which could otherwise perform simple logging.” He looks at 2008’s built-in auditing, and for those who can’t wait for that, illustrates a workaround for 2005.
Linchi Shea explores something else from 2008, Page Compression, focusing on how the number of processors affects the rebuilding a table with page compression.
Jamie Thomson, the SSIS Junkie writes that he has made a submission to Connect on the matter of absolute and relative paths in SSIS. “. . . I have always agreed that stipulating the use of absolute paths within SSIS was the right thing to do (and indeed I have championed it) however of late I have changed my mind. Support for relative paths would greatly simplify package deployment and package management . . . What do you think? Should SSIS support relative paths?” So far, it looks like a shoo-in.
Brian Knight also explains another little quirk, SSIS Case Sensitivity: “The case sensitivity can in some cases create behavior that is not expected and may give you bad results if you’re not careful. . . . One such example is with the Lookup Transform, where comparisons against the cache are case sensitive. If you do not expect this, you may have a miss in a match that is actually a hit.”
In the MySQL ’sphere this week, there is plenty of talk about the openness or otherwise of MySQL. (more…)
Log Buffer #95: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
The 95th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published by Mark Schoonover on his Mark’s IT Blog.
We can look forward to LB#98 Jeff Smith’s Jeff’s SQL Server Blog on May 23rd. There’s always plenty of room for more editors, so don’t waste another minute — send an email to me, the Log Buffer coordinator, and get started!
Without further ado, here is Mark Schoonover’s Log Buffer #95.
Log Buffer #94: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, welcomes back for his record-breaking record-tying (Sheeri, are you reading?) third edition Ronald Bradford of Opinions, Expertise, Passion.
Why does Ronald write Log Buffer? Perhaps it’s because he knows that LB is and established and widely read feature, and hence likely to bring his own blog some new readers and improve its ranking. Or maybe he enjoys the fun and challenge of comprehending and presenting the entire DBA blog scene, not just the part that deals with his own favoured technologies. (Or maybe he just likes me? Ronald?)
Since Log Buffer is open to anyone, I encourage you also to join in. If you’d like to edit and publish an edition yourself, take a look at LB’s homepage, read the few guidelines, and then get in touch with me, the Log Buffer coordinator.
You can also contribute by emailing your favourite blog items to the editor.
And now, here’s Ronald Bradford’s Log Buffer #94.
[from rugi] DBC de Microsoft SQL Server 2005
[from rugi] Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) - how can i load microsoft SQL Server driver in the classpath ?
Log Buffer #93: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
Welcome to the 93th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Conference season is upon us, so it’s been a busy week. There was the MySQL Conference & Expo, so let’s look at that.
Arjen Lentz posts about Sunday’s community dinner, including the arrival of an unexpected guest. Two photos: one of Pythian’s Paul Vallée getting some Sun; the second from the pre-conference dinner.
Zack Urlocker has a couple pieces with both photos and links to video of the keynote addresses from Marten Mickos, Jonathan Schwartz, and Rich Green. From Wednesday, and from Thursday.
Congratulations are due to Baron Schwartz, Diego Medina, and Sheeri Cabral. Baron reports from the conference that the three of them were awarded the 2008 MySQL Community Awards, and his piece makes for a very apt acceptance speech. Here’s Kaj Arnö’s more official post on the Community Awards.
Baron also has good summaries of the conference course: day one, and day two.
Elsewhere on the MySQL scene, much ado about the immediate roadmap for the DBMS, as introduced at the conference. Jeremy Cole got things going, writing, MySQL to launch new features only in MySQL Enterprise: “MySQL will start offering some features . . . only in MySQL Enterprise. This represents a substantive change to their development model ? previously they have been developing features in both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. However, with a shift to offering some features only in MySQL Enterprise, this means a shift to development of those features occurring . . . only in MySQL Enterprise.” This post got a lot of comments, including from MySQL boss Marten Mickos.
SQL Server Data Services - Invitation to attend the event
After Microsoft released its beta version of “SQL Server Data Services“; I was more interested to know what kind of considerations were taken care in the design and architecture of SSDS in order to get performance, distribution of data and scalability as it is developed on top of SQL Server.
To my surprise, I noticed Microsoft is conducting the live event to answer some of these questions by following up Ryan Dunn blog; Today I also got the confirmation to attend the event and I look forward to get some of my general questions answered.
It will be interesting to see the pricing model of SSDS in the coming days, and might even attract if they make it FREE for initial customers and/or by setting the limit on the data usage by distributing it as part of OS. It will be really cool if they could also integrate some kind of access mechanism as part of the windows operating system itself to access/store the data.
I hope Microsoft will also change the name of SSDS to something else before the final release as Data Services is not catchy and does not sound right (check yet another post on the similar lines).
Log Buffer #92: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
Welcome, readers, to the 92nd Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Brian “Krow” Aker started an interesting blog-thread with his post, The Death of Read Replication, the crux of which is that object caches, such as memcached, make the DBMS itself a little less central, particularly in “Web 2.0″ scenarios. “What does this mean? Less database servers. Bringing down your load means you push off the load to another tier. . . . Why do I need to go through MySQL at all… unless I just want it as a backup or for ad-hoc reporting?”
Ronald Bradford responds with an overview of the MySQL-plus-replication scene. Farhan Mashraqi concurred with Brian’s post, while Arjen also agrees, adding, “I’m not sure the new memory based MySQL storage engines coming out are so relevant, they might be fixing the wrong thing in the wrong place.”
Ronald (who, by the way, is on-deck for a his third Log Buffer on the 25th) also surveys both the storage-engine stuff to be had at the MySQL Conference, and the prevalence lately of talk about Kickfire in MySQL blogs, something also mentioned by Peter Zaitsev on the MySQL Performance Blog.
Peter has another question on his mind: should you have your swap file enabled while running MySQL? He wants to hear your approach to this matter, having himself experienced variable results. Lots of responses already.
Here on the Pythian Group Blog, Paul Moen posted about a situation in which SHOW SLAVE STATUS lies.
Moving into Oracle stuff, our Alex Gorbachev also pointed out something that doesn’t quite work: the ASMCMD cp command in ASM 11g. He sure gives it a try, but finally concludes: “I couldn?t make the cp command work even a single time.” Except maybe on datafiles.
Log Buffer #91: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
Welcome to the 91st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
For a change, let’s begin with some PostgreSQL stuff. On Tending the Garden, Selena Deckelmann gives her retrospective thanks to those who attended and presented the PostgreSQL Conference East.
On Esoteric Curio, Theo Schlossnagle gives his thoughts on the keynote address by Joshua Drake, touching on the perennial versus, Postgres vs. MySQL.
Hey, there was a MySQL ambassador there, too — Baron Schwartz of xaprb. Here’s Baron’s recap of his experiences at the conference.
When pet projects bite back! reasserts that SQL is in fact a programming language. Sometimes one can forget that and need a little reminder. Or a not-so-little reminder, such as a three-pages-long query. The discussion ranges into questions of design, a matter that Baron Schwartz also pursues: he asks (on behalf of his wife), what is your favorite database design book? (I want to know too — um, for . . . a friend of mine.) Lots of good responses so far.
For huge queries to huge tables. On the MySQL performance blog, Aurimas Mikalauskas walks us through using MMM to ALTER huge tables. He writes, “When it comes to changes that really require table to be rebuilt - adding/dropping columns or indexes, changing data type, converting data to different character set - MySQL master-master replication especially accompanied by MMM can be very handy to do the changes with virtually no downtime.”
Rajaraman?s First Law: More Data will beat Better Software
After the interesting comment storm on Doug’s blog when he posted some of Tim Gorman’s comments on the value of data in his career experiences as compared to the value of the applications manipulating that data, I hesitate a little to post this.
But, I can’t stop myself because it’s such an interesting insight!
Anand Rajaraman, ex-Director of Technology at Amazon.com posted this useful insight that builds on Tim’s. It’s not data vs software as seen by Tim, it’s one step further - more data vs better software.
I like this idea so much I’m hereby dubbing it Rajamaran’s First Law. (Anand, if you haven’t been numbering your laws yet this’ll get you started!)
Log Buffer #90: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
Welcome to the 90th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
First, SSQA.net’s SQL Master offers his walk-through of best practices for installing SQL Server 2005, with clustering as the destination.
If you read SQL Server blogs, you already know Adam Machanic. I’m very pleased to mention his first post for the Pythian Group blog, covering the basics of minimal logging and its enhancements in SQL Server 2008.
Also looking at Katmai was Bob Beauchemin, with his tip on accessing multiple servers with the SQL Server 2008 PowerShell provider, something right out in the open that nonetheless you might have missed.
Bob also figures out a little more about 2008’s new sparse columns and column_sets.
Joe Webb’s site mentions his appearance on Buck Woody’s Real World DBA podcast, where they tackle the question, does JOIN order matter?
On OraStory appears a very-commented post by Dominic Brooks, tantalizingly called, The dea(r)th of Oracle RDBMS and contracting?. From the piece: “I feel like the war has been lost and there are only a few pockets of resistance left now, resistance that will sooner or later be squashed. The database is under attack. . . . A newly created hierarchy have decreed that databases are indeed bad. . . . And I was speaking to a friend today at a previous employer, a major media / entertainment company. They are planning to abandon their pragmatic approach to Oracle and switch wholely [sic] to open source databases, ORM tools, and the like.”
And speaking of “Oracle versus X” (why doesn’t HTML have a <segue> tag?) — in last week’s LB#89, Shakir Sadikali criticized a post by Sean McCown’s Database Underground that compared Oracle and SQL Server to the latter’s advantage. Sean follows up the original piece, with this second item on Oracle’s community. He writes, “. . . one area I think Oracle has it over Microsoft is in its downloads. When I go to Oracle to download anything, all the downloads are clearly marked on a single page. Microsoft just isn’t like that. Sometimes even finding a service pack for SQL is like finding help for Oracle. . . . to those of you who said Oracle is easier to admin that SQL, you’re just crazy.”
Log Buffer #89: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
Welcome to the 89th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Welcome, welcome everyone.
In writing this week’s Log Buffer, I’ve had a chance to sit down and read some excellent posts on all sorts of platforms. The depth and breadth of what’s available to house and retrieve data is astonishing.
Many of you who have read my posts will know that I’m a fan of vegetables. They are something most of us don’t eat enough of. Come on DBAs! I think we need to make a collective effort to get healthy. We need you to keep all these systems alive. I say this because I have a new found appreciation for the work we do day in and day out.
Six months ago my wife and I said hello to our baby girl for the first time. I don’t say this to elicit any type of congratulations, but to illustrate something entirely different. If you have ever been to a hospital for any reason — to celebrate, to hope, or to say goodbye — you know the sheer complexity of the vast numbers of systems that need to interact. Daily, these systems save lives and help bring new ones to this world. I saw first-hand how the work I do on a everyday keeps the wheels turning.
Some of our customers run systems used by hospitals and I saw them in action. In a simple world, treating people can be done without technology, but this is an issue of scale, and our involvement directly affects the sheer masses of people whose lives are better because of our behind-the-scenes support. It’s true here, and it’s true for the most serious, most mission-critical systems, to the least critical and most trivial systems. The work done by DBAs from all platforms should be recognized for what it is.
I’m proud of what I do for a living and happy that I get to work in an industry filled with so many savvy folks. Oracle, Microsoft, MySQL, Postgres, IBM, and countless other organizations, and the people involved in them have together created an industry filled with opportunities and challenges, and above all, they have together elevated our ability to communicate and share. It’s in this spirit that Log Buffer was created, so let us proceed!
Since I’m an Oracle guy, we’ll let Oracle go first this time.
Log Buffer #88: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
Welcome to the 88th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
SQL Server
To begin, Simon Sabin, on SimonS Blog, offers the proposition: SQL Server tools suck, do you agree? He elaborates, “When I moved from Oracle 7 to SQL Server 6.5 I was amazed at the tools you got with SQL Server. They made the product so much easier to manage and pickup. Things like enterprise manager, profiler and query plans where amazing. That was almost 10 years ago, and whats changed. Well very little.” There is some improvement with Katmai, he writes, but, for for most DBAs to benefit from it, it needs to be decoupled from the engine. There’s a poll.
Not one to merely complain, Simon also posts on what’s new in SQL Server 2008 tools.
Staying with things Katmai, in the Database Underground, Sean McCown has a critical look at Katmai’s backup compression. Here’s an excerpt: “[What] does Katmai’s backup compression offer? Well, it offers you the ability to compress your backups. Period. That’s it. . . . [What] about the implementation? . . . Well, simply, it’s too limited. Even if you could put up with the missing features, backup compression in Katmai is limited to the enterprise edition. Personally, that’s unacceptable as a backup solution because I don’t want to have several backup processes to manage.”
Systems Engineering and RDBMS has what a lot of SQL Server DBAs want, a basic overview of DTS vs SSIS, the data-transformation tools associated with SQL Server 2000 and 2005, respectively.
High Availability (SSQA.net) tell their story of setting up database mirroring using a local account with 2005. Three problems encountered and solved.
Kimberly L. Tripp issues the call for abstracts the fall 2008 SQL Connections conference, taking place in Las Vegas in November. Kimberly writes: “The conference will take place shortly after the SQL Server 2008 launch (when it actually RTMs, not the ‘launch’ that happened February 27th), and will focus heavily on SQL Server 2008. Abstracts are still welcome on best practices for SQL Server 2005 and how to upgrade and migrate applications from SQL Server 200x to SQL Server 2008. However, we will consider all topics . . .” And hey, it’s a paid gig, too.
Failing tests against the database
I found myself trying to fix a bug in the nHibernate source today.With nHibernate its a pleasure to have a lot of unit tests to make sure you (hopefully) haven't broken anything with your changes. I did what i always do, checked out the nHibernate trunk ran all the tests and no failures. Then i messed around with the source made some changes and wanted to make sure all tests still passed. However in the middle of my fiddling i had dropped the nHibernate database used for unittests and recreated it, but that shouldn't be a problem. nHibernate creates tables needed during its unit testing so all is good.
Then a test failed, and this test had nothing to do with the things i worked on, so i went to investigate the failing testcase called NHibernate.Test.SubselectFetchTest.SubselectFetchFixture.SubselectFetchWithLimit the testcase tries to fetch 2 rows from the database out of tree added and do various asserts on their children to check that collection fetching using the subselect fetch strategy is working. The assertion that failed was that a wrong number of child elements were on one of the parents, and a little investigation showed that the 2 rows returned was not the ones the test expected. To reproduce the error a test like this could be written:
[Test]
public void WrongElementReturnedFromLimitQuery()
{
//Save three objects to the database with different names
ISession s = OpenSession();
Parent p1 = new Parent("foo");
Parent p2 = new Parent("bar");
Parent p3 = new Parent("aaa");
s.Save(p1);
s.Save(p2);
s.Save(p3);
s.Flush();
IList<Parent> parents = s.CreateQuery("from Parent order by Name desc")
.SetMaxResults(2)
.List<Parent>();
Assert.Equal("foo", parents[0].Name); //Fails expected "foo" was "aaa"
Assert.Equal("bar", parents[1].Name); // Fails expected "bar" was "foo"
}
I was a bit puzzled at first, these sort of queries in nHibernate is pretty well tested and as i said i had not changed anything related to this, but to be sure i quickly reverted my changes and ran the tests again. And it still failed... Then i suddenly realised what was wrong and why this test suddenly failed. Take a moment and give me your guess on why...
Yep, you guessed it. My new database running the tests were created using danish collation for sorting and in denmark aa is the same as the danish charecter å which is last in the alphabeth.