Last week, I wrote about how to use bash arrays and the MySQL database to create unit and integration test scripts. While the MySQL example was nice for some users, there were some others who wanted me to show how to write bash shell scripts for Oracle unit and integration testing. That’s what this blog post does.

If you don’t know much about bash shell, you should start with the prior post to learn about bash arrays, if-statements, and for-loops. In this blog post I only cover how to implement a bash shell script that runs SQL scripts in silent mode and then queries the database in silent mode and writes the output to an external file.

I’ve copied the basic ERD for the example because of a request from a reader. In their opinion it makes cross referencing the …

In version MySQL 5.7.7 Oracle presented a new promising feature: optimizer hints. However it did not publish any documentation about the hints. The only note which I found in the user manual about the hints is:

• It is now possible to provide hints to the optimizer by including /*+ ... */ comments following the SELECT, INSERT, REPLACE, …

About 2 weeks ago Oracle published the MySQL 5.7.7-labs-json version which includes a very interesting feature called “Generated columns” (also know as Virtual or Computed columns). MariaDB has a similar feature as well: Virtual (Computed) Columns.

The idea is very simple: if we store a column

`FlightDate` date

in our table we may want to filter or group by year(FlightDate), month(FlightDate) or even dayofweek(FlightDate). The “brute-force” approach: use the above Date and Time MySQL functions in the query; however it will prevent MySQL from using an index (see below). Generated columns will allow you to declare a “Virtual”, non-stored column …

Wanted to send a pointer to the slides from my session at #GIDS 2015.

Will followup with an impressions blog soon.

My sql5.7 whatsnew_presentedatgids2015 from Sanjay Manwani

This is the continuation of my efforts to stage an awesome Fedora developer’s instance. It shows you how to install Java 1.8 software development kit, which is nice to have. Though you can’t use Java 1.8 officially with Oracle SQL Developer 4.0.3 it is required for Oracle SQL Developer 4.1. Fortunately, the Oracle Product Manager, Jeff Smith has advised us that you can use Java 1.8 JDK with Oracle SQL Developer 4.0.3, and he’s written a comment to the blog post that it runs better with the Java 1.8 SDK.

After you install Oracle SQL Developer 4.0.3 or Oracle SQL Developer 4.1, you can watch Jeff Smith’s YouTube Video on SQL Developer 3.1 to learn how to use the basics of SQL Developer. I couldn’t find an updated version of the video for SQL Developer 4 but I didn’t try too hard.

You …

Planning out my year, I decided to take the Oracle OCP and MySQL OCP exams. I checked for review books and was pleasantly surprised to find the soon to be released OCP MySQL Database Administrator Exam Guide (Exam 1Z0-883). However, I noticed that the book was actually prepared for the obsolete and discountinued Exams 1Z0-870, 1Z0-873, and 1Z0-874. As it turns out, Steve O’Hearn has informed me that there isn’t a book and that the posting in Amazon.com is in error.

It’s with great pleasure we announce the general availability of VMware Continuent 4.0 – a new suite of solutions for clustering and replication of MySQL to data warehouses.

VMware Continuent enables enterprises running business-critical database applications to achieve commercial-grade high availability (HA), globally redundant disaster recovery (DR) and performance scaling. The new suite

Data inconsistencies in replication environments are a pretty common. There are lots of posts that explain how to fix those using pt-table-checksum and pt-table-sync. Usually we only care about the data but from time to time we receive this question in support:

How can I check the table definition consistency between servers?

Replication also allow us to have different table definition between master and slaves. For example, there are some cases that you need some indexes on slaves for querying purposes but are not really needed on the master. There are some other cases where those differences are just a mistake that needs to be fixed.

…

First of all a disclaimer: I don’t work for Oracle nor do I speak for them. I believe this information to be correct, but for licensing questions, Oracle themselves have the final word.

With that out of the way, followers of this blog may have seen some of the results from my testing of actual CPU capacity with public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine. In each of these cases, a CPU “core” was actually measured to be equivalent to an x86 HyperThread, or half a physical core. So when provisioning public cloud resources, it’s important to include twice as many CPU cores as the equivalent …

I use a Fedora 20 VM image to teach Oracle and MySQL technology. Last week, I expanded the Fedora VM image to support a full LAMP stack. This blog shows you how to install Ruby on Fedora and successfully generate the Rails gems.

Connect as the root user and use yum to install the libraries. My approach is by library or small groups. Naturally, you start with the ruby library.

yum install ruby

You will see the following:

Loaded plugins: langpacks, refresh-packagekit
mysql-connectors-community                                  | 2.5 kB  00:00     
mysql-tools-community                                       | 2.5 kB  00:00     
mysql56-community                                           | 2.5 kB  00:00     
pgdg93                                                      | 3.6 kB  00:00     
updates/20/x86_64/metalink …