The 132nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published by Lisa Dobson on the Oracle Newbies Blog.

Log Buffer is a the-more-the-merrier kind of thing, so please leave a comment on Lisa’s LB with your favourite database blogs from this week. Or, get in touch with me and get started on publishing an edition on your own blog. Fun. Readers. Glory. These can be yours with when you do Log Buffer.

And now, on with Lisa’s Log Buffer #132.

Welcome to the 131st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Fundamentals are always a good place to start, so let’s do that courtesy Craig Mullins of Data Management Today. Craig’s fundamental question is, what does a DBA do? A good one for blank-faced relatives and dinner-party companions.

Perhaps you’re just a little blank-faced too, a least on the subject of DB2 LUW? If so, Susan Visser of Build your Skill on DB2 shows the way forward with a compilation of …

This may come as a complete shock based on the title of my website… but I have come to the conclusion that all DBA’s should be eliminated from all companies hierarchies. WHAT? Yep I do not think any company should employ a “DBA” ever again.

Before the mob comes and beats me up for heresy, Let me explain. The term and more specifically the job title “Database Administrator” is way to broad. More so then most titles in my opinion. In fact I feel it is an ancient description that does a disservice to most modern database professionals. I have seen titled DBA’s responsible for entire infrastructure stacks, and I have seen DBA’s who only know how to run SQL and perform backups. It hardly seems fair that all these folks end up lumped in together. I think we need better definitions and a somewhat common vocabulary to truly tell what sorts of tasks and responsibilities people have.

...Beta-4 to be precise. Downloads are available on the Continuent Forge. You can get more information about Tungsten in general from our community pages.

The Beta-4 build has a number of nice improvements. The best new feature is a utility to look and manage at events in the transaction history log. It's our version of mysqlbinlog but without any funny options to look at row updates.

Speaking of row updates, we now support all standard datatypes used in MySQL 5.1 row events. Error handling now works on the "WALL-E model"--if there's a serious error the Replicator goes into a restartable state called OFFLINE:ERROR and waits for you to bring it back on-line. Recovering from …

I have a friend who needs some Adobe Acrobat automation. The project description is:We need to find a programmer who is willing to do some high-end Adobe form work for us.We need to embed a "send to" button in some of our company forms so we can email the form to clients who can input the data and submit the form back to us by clicking on a submit button on the form.If anybody has this skill set

This post is about a PL/SQL feature that doesn't get enough respect, "invoker's rights".First off, what's its real name? Depending on the source, you'll see the feature name spelled "invoker's rights", "invokers' rights", or "invoker rights". That makes a difference -- you'll get different results in Google depending on what combination of singular, plural, and possessive you use. And to be

Welcome to the 130th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Oracle Blogs

Tanel Poder began a new series on Oracle memory troubleshooting with an introduction to his heapdump analyzer script.

Richard Foote asked, is it possible to shrink a newly created index? His answer? Just.

On the Oracle DBA and Apps DBA blog, Sabdar Syed also has a …

Welcome, readers, to the 129th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome also to 2009, so fresh it still has that wonderful new year smell. Let’s take ‘er out on the road and see what she can do.

Starting with Oracle (and reaching back here a little into the holidays), Doug Burns had performance on his mind—to be precise, his own at UKOUG; and some performance-related blogs he’s found worthwhile. Doug’s recommendations themselves always perform well.

Tanel Poder was on the same road. In his item, …

Ok - this has been stewing for some time now, and I think now is the right time to announce that I am working together with Jos van Dongen from Tholis Consulting to create a book for Wiley with the tentative title "Building Pentaho Solutions".

My personal aim is to make this book the primary point of reference for DBAs and Application Developers that are familiar with Open Source products like MySQL and PostgreSQL but have no prior BI skills, as well as BI professionals that are familiar with closed source BI products like Microsoft BI and Business Objects that want to learn how to get things done with Pentaho.

The book will cover all distinct components and sub-products that make up the …

So it’s that time of year again when everyone puts out their predictions for the year ahead.  I think predictions are a bit of a waste of time because to be interesting predictions have to be big, but a year really isn’t all that long so actual changes over the course of 2009 are likely to be just small progressions.  So instead I have been thinking about the top issues that we face heading into 2009 and here is my Top 10 list for issues in Data Management.  In this post I avoid offering solutions to these issues, while I have several ideas on solutions these can be the subject of subsequent posts.

10 - Limits on Scalability

While scalability is on my list it is at number 10 because against popular belief, scalability is only an issue for a very small number of data based applications.  Almost all data based applications in use today can be scaled without major issue by increasing the underlying …