Welcome to the 107th edition of the Log Buffer. My name is Keith Murphy and I am a MySQL database administrator for the Pythian Group. In addition, I am the editor of MySQL Magazine. This is my second go for the Log Buffer, so I must be doing something right!
This week for the open source world brings OSCON in Portland Oregon. There are plenty of MySQL people present and there have been more posting this week from these realms than normal. Also, Lewis Cunningham, among others, posted news that EnterpriseDB released the results of their open source survey at OSCON. The 451 CAOS Theory published their thoughts on the survey.
Of interest to all DBAs is John Duncan’s post about what is called the “five minute rule”. This was introduced in 1987 by Jim Grey. And finally, before we dive into the specific server news, here is a post on Facebook’s project to build a distributed database similar to Google’s BigTable.
MySQL News:
Friday saw the release of the summer issue of MySQL Magazine. The highlights of the issue include the first annual MySQL Usage Survey. The magazine is available here. Peter, over at Percona, shows some initial benchmarks for the latest version (0.9.8) of Sphinx. If you aren’t familier with Sphinx, it is a full text search engine that easily integrates with MySQL.
Probably the biggest news this week was the announcement by Brian Aker of “Drizzle”. It is what amounts to a slimmed down version of MySQL server. These comments are from his initial post “Stored Procedures, Views, Triggers, Query Cache, and Prepared Statements are gone for now.” Interesting. My co-worker, Sheeri K. Cabral, posted a video of Brian Aker talking about the Drizzle project at this week’s OSCON. Monty Widenius writes a good summary how Drizzle can/might integrate with the MySQL “ecosphere” at large. It was very good to hear Monty say that Sun management is encouraging this project. There has been some other interesting posts about this as well including Arjen’s thoughts, and Paul McCullagh’s. Brian Moon gives a very thoughtful view on how Drizzle could potentially fit in at dealnews. While I could probably fill up the entire Log Buffer with links to post about Drizzle, I better leave it at that.
Greetings from Wisconsin! Welcome to the 106th edition of the Log Buffer. Mr. Edwards is on a brief holiday and kindly asked me to fill in for him. So join me as we take a tour of some of this week’s database blogging activity.
I’d like to start by sharing the story of MySQL engineer Andrii Nikitin’s young son, Ivan. The short story is that Ivan is in need of a bone marrow transplant and that would also require travelling outside of their native Ukraine for the procedure. The family is asking for donations to cover the cost of the operation and trip, so please consider donating via the previous link.
Now, moving on to the database topics, we begin with my own area of (relative) expertise, Oracle. The big news this week is the July 2008 CPU, or Critical Patch Update, which Oracle releases quarterly. The Integrity blog has a nice summary of what’s included in this latest patchset. I’m sure plenty of you will be heading to Oracle OpenWorld 2008 as well, and OTN’s Justin Kestelyn announced a community preview page with some sneak peeks of what to expect (spoiler: beer!).
In a quick round-up of Oracle 11g topics, Amit Bansal at AskDBA.org has a nice guide for installing Oracle 11g on Solaris 10. Meanwhile, Oracle performance guru (and fellow Wisconsin native) Greg Rahn makes a great case for using incremental global statistics on partitioned tables. I see that Tim Hall has taken a break from reviewing summer blockbusters to write up a nice article on AWR baseline enhancements in Oracle 11gR1, and Alex Nuijten at AMIS has a nice presentation on using Oracle 11g’s virtual columns to clean up your data model.
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This week, database blogs seemed to talk about conforming to stereotypes as well as breaking them.
Fulfilling the stereotype of Microsoft software being unsecure, Microsoft released a very important SQL Server update that Aaron Bertrand notes patches “four elevation of privilege vulnerabilities.” That’s right, not one, not two, but four!!! At least there is a patch now……go forth and patch! Usually it is MySQL that throws ambiguous warnings or errors which are not an accurate representation of the actual error, but Bertrand also notes that there is A Little Management Studio Oops.
Contrary to stereotype, Microsoft is giving away content with NO DRM! Kalen Delaney asks, Did You Know the History of SQL Server? and shares a link to a chapter from a book on SQL Server 2000 in the Inside SQL Server series.
The PSS SQL Escalation Services team has fought many times about SQL Server I/O Bottleneck, I don’t have one, YES YOU DO! The team gives some reminders about how to interpet averages properly.
Allen White asks about Tools for the Reluctant DBA — that is, a programmer or administrator so good at databases that they were promoted to DBA, but may not actually want the job. Check out the comments and add your own.
Tibor Karaszi shares his stored procedure to find physical index details. Now you can use one stored procedure does what a stored procedure plus 3-4 tables ordinarily does.
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!
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?