Log Buffer #60: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

It has been a long time since I have posted on here (work and all, sorry about that), and so when I was asked to do another Log Buffer, it sounded like a great way to get back into the swing of things.

Not to say work is light; on the contrary, I couldn’t be busier! The sometimes wild world of database technology has literally been exploding. This brings us, of course, to the news.

The top news on the minds of most Oracle DBAs is the release of Oracle 11g for Linux. This action packed SQL to Oracle 10g (get it?) includes some amazing tools, such as the Query Result Cache. The Query Result Cache is a new area of the shared pool that speeds up often-run queries tremendously by caching their results. However, all good things come at a price, as Alex Fatkulin points out. It will be interesting to see how this feature pans out once more people get their hands on it.

Continuing on with the Oracle 11g theme, Laurent Schneider blogs about an outstanding feature in Oracle 11g that logs the errors produced by scripts that you have run. Be sure to check it out, even if you think your code is perfect. I couldn’t begin to cound the times this would have come in handy.

Lastly on 11g (for now), Jeremy Schneider has a great post that gives an overview on many of the new features included in the latest release. Even if you have been working with 11g for a while now, this is a great recap from the past week of the new functionality at your fingertips.

Eddie Awad reminds us of an important rule that applies no matter which database we use or what language we program: self documenting code is not enough!

Interested in keeping your MySQL database safe in the case of a disaster (I sure hope so)? Have a look at this post from a MySQL DBA that was once an Oracle DBA.

When does revoking a permission grant a permission? When it’s MySQL! This post, also by the MySQL DBA that was once an Oracle DBA, talks about how permissions work in MySQL, and what to watch out for when you plan your security structure.

Are you considering being a MySQL DBA that was once an Oracle DBA yourself? It can’t hurt to understand a wide variety of database architectures. An article by Paul Vallee explains why Oracle and SQL Server DBAs probably want to learn MySQL.

If you are interested in using BLOB objects in multiple engines in MySQL, have a look at this article by MooCow Productions, which shows some testing on performance depending on the engine you choose.

Having problems with variables in your scripted SQL Server tasks? The SSIS Junkie clues us in to a possible bug received after installing several patches.

I think that last time I did a log buffer, I posted something about dates and times in SQL Server. Once again another great article on the same topic has crossed my desk (browser), and this time it is an excellent article on using the DATETIME datatype for more robust functionality from Jeff Smith.

If you are on PostgreSQL waiting on your posts, you’ll be happy to see some tips and tricks by depesz that will help you bring back your queries in the order you are hoping for, which is not always the order that you get!

For those of you that think there should be more PostgreSQL posts in this Log Buffer, I invite you to remember that PostgreSQL is not a democracy, as noted in this article by Robert Treat.

And in the interest of multi-database posting, let’s not forget DB2! In fact, if you are interested in DB2 you can read this article and join up with other DB2 users on Facebook, as suggested by Chris Eaton.

But I can’t resist going back to Oracle. Tanel Poder has posted an outstanding article on advanced Oracle troubleshooting when the wait interface is not enough. Consequently, this is his first post on the new blog, and I hope to see more great articles like this in the future.

Sitting in your cube staring at top, wondering what to do next? Take a break and listen to three geeks talk about Oracle 11g.

Some people think that tuning is all about adding indexes on your WHERE clause columns. Think again! The MySQL Performance Blog posts about cases where an index might not be such a hot idea. This applies to Oracle as well of course, where sometimes a b-tree index just won’t cut it.

Kevin Closson has written an article that delves into 11g Automatic Memory Management (AMM) and Linux Hugepages support. This is a good read and sheds a great deal of light on both features, and how to determine the best course of action for your 11g implementation.

And to wrap all this up with some highly political debate, Howard Rodgers posts about a topic that may be of interest to some in the Oracle Community: is the Oracle ACE program devalued? Does being an Oracle ACE really prove anything about you as a DBA? Reading through this controversial entry and its comments, it would seem that some people feel it is nothing more than a title. As a note, I am proud to call myself an Oracle ACE and would hope that the ACE community continues to be held in high regard.

That wraps up this edition of Log Buffer! May your queries be tuned and your memory be plentiful!