Log Buffer #59: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

As I’ve hinted at the beginning of the week, this week I’m writing up edition #59 of Log Buffer. Dave Edwards of Pythian Group contacted me couple of weeks ago and offered this opportunity. I hesitated quite a bit, this is a big responsibility, and I was not sure my rather new blog is ready for such exposure. I’m glad I agreed. Dave Edwards sent me a bunch of helpful links to other interesting blogs, so I got to discover many valuable blogs I’ve managed to miss so far, and to read about databases that I usually don’t see much. Despite the fact that the links Dave sent included many databases besides Oracle, this Log Buffer will probably be a bit biased toward the worlds most popular DB.

Oracle 11g is still the hottest topic in Oracle blogsphere. Tanel Poder started an 11g internals series with an article about automatic memory management, getting into the implementation in Linux. Kevin Closson continued looking into this topic with a typically well researched article.

Blogging About Oracle also has a series about Oracle 11g, written by different authors. I particularly liked Part 7 – Function Result Cache, written by Roel. He gives a good example that demonstrates the value of this feature.
Virag Sharma, in Database, RAC, Dataguard and Apps writes about SQL Performance Analyzer, one of the hottest features in 11g, and Oracle Brains explain how to tune using 11g’s invisible indexes.

If you are still not tired of 11g, Eddie Awad posted 40+ links to 11g articles and blog posts. This should keep everyone busy during the weekend.

Oracle Open World is three month away, but Dan Norris and Shay Shmeltzer are already getting ready for the event. I also need to start looking for interesting sessions. there are always so many to choose from.

And in other news: Tanel Poder published a seriously cool script for tracking session level performance stats that work even when you are not allowed to do anything on the database.
Alex Niujten, on the highly useful Amis Technology blog explained how to create table as select when you have nested tables.
In Eye on Oracle, Mike Brunelli is collecting information about the quality of Oracle support. I hope his project will generate many responses and maybe it will even cause Oracle to rethink their support organization.

Daniel Fink, the Optimal DBA has fun with SQL and SQL*Plus while dynamically assigning column names. Don Seiler at Die Seilerwerks writes how he used trace 10053 to determine how CBO does its job, and Jakub Pawlowski points to training material about PL/SQL that Steven Feuerstein published in his site.

SQL Server fans continue to blog about SQLServer 2008, Bob Beauchemin writes about SQL Server’s support for extended events. Jeff Smith writes about composite primary keys. I truly hope that everyone already knows about them, but if you don’t – its a must read, and Mladen Prajdić , at I want some Moore, explains how to modify data in a result set that uses joins. I wish he had written this article few month back when I needed it.

Meanwhile, on the OpenSource web:
Ronald, at Technical Notes blog posts a bunch of links for Oracle DBAs learning MySQL and also advice regarding backup and recovery. Last week I received a task to take ownership of MySQL server and write a recovery procedure for it, I can testify that both articles are very useful.
Charlie Cahoon ends in his Summer of Code blog with a release of his MySQL proxy. Corra is already using MySQL Proxy on Ubuntu.
Morgan Tocker and Brian “Krow” Aker try to decide how big transactions should be, and last but not least </depesz> explains how to secure PostgreSQL.

Whew, that has been one long post. I didn’t realize how much interesting things are being written by DBAs every day. There were so many great articles that choosing and picking them for this post was much more difficult than I expected. I highly recommend every database blogger to try writing Log Buffer once or twice, its a unique experience.

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