This week I was the invited speaker to give a 4 hr presentation to the Federal Government Sector in Washington DC on “Best Practices in Migrating to MySQL“. This was a followup to my day long “MySQL for the Oracle DBA Bootcamp” which I presented in Washington DC last year. It was good to see a number of attendees from my first DC presentation.

There was good attendance across various government departments and companies providing services to the government sector, as well a variety of job descriptions.

Thanks to Carahsoft and Sun/MySQL for organizing and sponsoring the event. Thanks also to Phil Hildebrand who provided fantastic support during my preparation answering all my SQL Server questions.

Thanks also …

This is the 136th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome.

Let’s start with the bad news first. The relational database is doomed. Or is it? That is the line of inquiry taken by the item by Tony Bain on ReadWriteWeb. “Recently, a lot of new non-relational databases have cropped up both inside and outside the cloud. One key message this sends is, ‘if you want vast, on-demand scalability, you need a non-relational database’.  . . .  Is this a sign that relational databases have had their day and will decline over time?”

Whether or not you believe that your beloved relational DB’s days are numbered, you will be …

I don’t want to post the link to this (perhaps, it was left public unintentional?) but here is what I stumbled upon recently. This is a log of production maintenance of IT systems in Perth, Western Australia (as far as I could say):

Good idea but shouldn’t companies keep this sort of information private?

Pythian DBA’s have daily reports for each monitored database and some of the components are using charts to visualize the data. I’m a big fan of charts myself (when applied appropriately) and want to show how you can generate simple charts directly from the database. You’d be very surprised how easy it can be done from *any* database without installing any additional software or configuring something special.

This method is not limited to Oracle by any means — use it with MySQL, SQL Server or any other database as well as without a database — yes, visualize your sar data now!

In this example, we will plot a pie diagram with Oracle tablespaces. This would be very handy when you are starting to analyze the space allocation for a database. Here is the end result of the report for my Grid Control repository test database:

The secret …

Welcome to the 135th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

How about a little DB2 news to whet the palette? On IT, Life, DB2 pureXML, House Construction, Henrik Loeser Friedrichshafen has an item about Organic Food and pureXML. Completely unrelated! In the on-topic second part of this duo, Henrik relates the news: “I am happy to tell you that the so far separately priced pureXML feature will now be included in the core DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows.” And relevant links are included in this blog.

On the DB2PORTAL Blog, Craig Mullins admonishes, …

Recently, a lot of new non-relational databases have cropped up both inside and outside the cloud. One key message this sends is, "if you want vast, on-demand scalability, you need a non-relational database".

If that is true, then is this a sign that the once mighty relational database finally has a chink in its armor? Is this a sign that relational databases have had their day and will decline over time? In this post, we'll look at the current trend of moving away from relational databases in certain situations and what this means for the future of the relational database.[more]

Last week, I was at the NetApp office in North Sydney for the presentation on NetApp SnapManager for Oracle. It was good opportunity to learn more about NetApp snapshots while working on a project for one of our clients in Sydney. It was an especially interesting topic as I have some experience using Veritas Checkpoints (see my presentation on test systems refreshes), and it was interesting to see what’s different and new in the NetApp implementation. But I digress.

I learned that NetApp can provide access to the same LUNs via either Fiber-Channel (FC) or iSCSI. And this is when the interesting argument surfaced. Apparently, some companies aim to have the technology stack on their …

Welcome to the 134th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. There’s no time to lose, so let’s begin—with MySQL.

The big news this week, the epoch-shattering event, is of course, Monty Widenius’s departure from Sun, his time to move on. Perhaps not much of a surprise, given his famously underwhelmed response to 5.1’s GA release.

But Monty, your thunder has been stolen! MySQL boss Marten Mickos is leaving Sun too. So says Matthew Aslett on 451 CAOS …

Point-in-time recovery or PITR is one of my favorite PostgreSQL features. Most database servers have a transaction log for recovery. (MySQL is one of the few exceptions; more on that shortly.) However, PostgreSQL PITR allows and even encourages users to manipulate the logs to perform some very useful tasks:

* Creating a bit-for-bit backup of a server without halting
* Restoring a server to a specific point in time
* Creating a warm standby server

The third task is especially interesting because it's so common. One of the most pronounced trends in computing is the decreasing cost of computing power through Moore's law improvements and virtualization. Standby solutions nowadays look like a good investment compared to the cost having a server down or worse …

Hello and welcome to my Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. My name is Keith Murphy and I am the editor of MySQL Magazine, a free digital magazine with information for MySQL administrators and developers, released quarterly.  I am also a MySQL database administrator at Pythian.

I am losing count of how many of these Log Buffers I have done. If I recall correctly, this is number three. But then again, it could be number four. You know what they say though—the more the merrier!

This week’s Buffer features a great allegory about a database, some tips, feature requests, and breaking news. It seems that this week, people shared information that was relevant across database servers, so I recommend that no …