There are so many great blogs out there regarding Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and various other database technologies. Keeping track of all of them is no less than a Herculean task. This Log Buffer Edition is an effort to pick few of those great blog posts to appreciate the oceans of database blogs out there.

Oracle:

Nial Litchfield recently reviewed a table with no fewer than 23 indexes on it.

Toon Koppelaars asks. And what about table constraints?

Can Oracle Database Release 2 (11.2.0.3) Properly Count Cores? No. Does It Matter All That Much? Not Really..

Oh yes, 2012 was an incredible year for the MySQL Community!
That’s why I would like to change the rules this year and I would like to offer you a new survey for this [Plus] reader’s choice 2012.

Community users, bloggers and events made the whole community last year, tell us how you used this community?
It will only take 5 minutes of your precious time, votes will be closed Jan. 31.

Vote for what you used! (with your heart, again…)

In honour of our fifteenth anniversary, I have assembled a few nostalgic items from our earliest years in business.

On September 7, 1997 I went to the Ottawa U public library to come up with some names for the company Steve Pickard and I wanted to found the next morning, the goal was to choose the company name, register the dot-com, and then go incorporate it. I really felt that I lucked out when I discovered the word Pythian, which means about the Pythia and of course the Pythia was the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece (remember that we launched as an Oracle ecosystem services company, our other practices came afterwards with MySQL launching in 2002 and SQL Server launching in 2005).

I was also delighted that the Pythian Games were also hosted

Pythian’s Oracle ACE, Fahd Mirza appears in this month’s Community: Peer-to-Peer review “In With the New“, as published in the September/October 2011 issue of Oracle Magazine.

Fahd states that “Oracle Exadata Database Machine” has most changed his life – changing the game, and setting very high standards of performance, support, scalability, reliability and unification.

Shout out to Fahd from your peers at Pythian!

I guess there might be just a little truth to Pythian’s growing reputation as an “Oracle ACE Factory” ;), as recently mentioned by Justin Kestelyn in the May 11, 2011 OPN PartnerCast:

Pythian is pleased to announce our speaking schedule at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld 2011, October 2-6, 2011 in San Francisco, CA.

We’re excited to be joined by our customers Western Union, and Worldwide Technologies (WWT) as we present real-world experiences and project success. If you’re attending, don’t miss the chance to hear our team of experts. Bring your toughest questions to be answered as they relate to any of the subjects below.

• Follow Pythian on LinkedIn for up to date OOW info
• Schedule a meeting with Pythian at OOW to

Sometimes I get questions as to whether Pythian is one of the competitors battling with Oracle for MySQL support. The answer lies in the distinction of product support and operational support.

At Pythian, we are laser focused on supporting applications and data infrastructure using Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server products. A vast majority of our Oracle customers (there are few customers who have very old 7.x and 8.x products running without vendor support) have Oracle maintenance subscriptions that include product updates and product support. Product support entitles the customer to open support requests when the product doesn’t perform according to the specifications (bug reports) as well as fill in enhancement requests. It also covers

It’s that time of the year again — Oracle OpenWorld time — and it’s my pleasure to announce our regular Oracle bloggers meetup again this year. We all know that Oracle community has grown this year so we expect to see folks from all the different technologies including MySQL, Java, Sun hardware folks in addition to the core Oracle database and apps crowd.

So… all of you Oracle bloggers attending Oracle Open World 2010…
… you are invited to attend this Oracle Bloggers Meetup during OOW 2010 — a chance to meet your online buddies face-to-face in relaxed and informal atmosphere.

When: Wed, 22-Sep-2010,

Today marks my last day at Pythian. I have been at Pythian for almost three years. In those three years, Pythian’s already thriving MySQL practice has grown even more. I have worked with big and small clients alike, across many industries, managed a team of up to 4 DBAs, and learned a lot not just about MySQL, but what my goals are in general.

Though I am leaving, everything I said in the blog post I made when I announced I was coming to Pythian still holds true. Pythian is a challenging environment and one I would recommend to anyone who finds their current DBA environment boring that they should come to Pythian and experience what it is like to work here. I had lunch with Paul Vallee yesterday and we even discussed possible future collaborations (hence the title, a joke that I am

At Kscope this year, I attended a half day in-depth session entitled Data Warehousing Performance Best Practices, given by Maria Colgan of Oracle. My impression, which was confirmed by folks in the Oracle world, is that she knows her way around the Oracle optimizer.

See part 1 for the introduction and talking about power and hardware. This part will go over the 2nd “P”, partitioning. Learning about Oracle’s partitioning has gotten me more interested in how MySQL’s partitioning works, and

At Kscope this year, I attended a half day in-depth session entitled Data Warehousing Performance Best Practices, given by Maria Colgan of Oracle. My impression, which was confirmed by folks in the Oracle world, is that she knows her way around the Oracle optimizer.

These are my notes from the session, which include comparisons of how Oracle works (which Maria gave) and how MySQL works (which I researched to figure out the difference, which is why this blog post took a month after the conference to write). Note that I am not an expert on data warehousing in either Oracle or MySQL, so these are more concepts to think about than

At Kscope this year, I attended a half day in-depth session entitled Data Warehousing Performance Best Practices, given by Maria Colgan of Oracle. In that session, there was a section on how to determine I/O throughput for a system, because in data warehousing I/O per second (iops) is less important than I/O throughput (how much actual data goes through, not just how many reads/writes).

The section contained an Oracle-specific in-database tool, and a standalone tool that can be used on many operating systems, regardless of whether or not a database exists:

If Oracle is installed, run DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER.CALIBRATE_IO:

SET SERVEROUTPUT ON
DECLARE

In October 2008, Baron posted How to Check MySQL Replication Integrity Continually. Here at Pythian we have developed a method based on that post, and added “verifying that masters and slaves are in sync” to our standard battery of tests.

We call it “Continual replication sync checking”. This article will explain how it works, how to test and make the procedure non-blocking, benchmarks from the real world, issues we encountered along the way, and finally

IOUG has a free series of three webinars on upgrading MySQL. Each webinar is an hour long, and it starts with a webinar by me tomorrow at 12 noon Central time (GMT-5) on “Why and How to Upgrade to MySQL 5.1″. The webinar assumes you are upgrading from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1, and talks a little bit about the new features, server variables, and what you need to know when upgrading to MySQL 5.1.

The software used is GoToWebinar (formerly GoToMeeting), so you will need to install that software. To register, use the links on the IOUG MySQL Upgrade Webinar Series page.

The complete list of webinars in the MySQL Upgrade Series is:
* MySQL 5.1: Why and How to Upgrade
Sheeri Cabral, The Pythian Group
Tuesday, July 27, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. CT (GMT-5)

One common question I get is how to use partitioning instead of MERGE tables. The process I use involves using stored procedures to create and drop partitions. This article will go over the stored procedures I use; special thanks to Roland Bouman for taking a look and giving great feedback to optimize this process.

First, a simple table, not partitioned (yet):

use test;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS my_part;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS my_part (
  id int NOT NULL,
  creationDate datetime NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (id,creationDate)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

In real, life there is more to the table than just id and creationDate. The most important part is that the partitioned field(s) need to be part of the primary key.

Now, add the partition definition. This can be done in the