It’s Friday already, and we know what that means! Log Buffer, the industry’s weekly review of database blogs is here again for your reading pleasure in the 188th issue.

Starting off this week’s issue is a request from Mark Grennan a DBA who would like to let the community know about his blog MySQL Fan Boy, where he wrote an interesting post on including a script to replace MySQL table files on a live system, making it faster and limiting locking on large table loads. Also a post this week on whether MariaDB is a drop in …

Welcome to Log Buffer. This week’s issue #187 was another group effort. Thanks to all our contributors – you rock!

Suggested by Pythian’s Bradd Piontek, is a post he really liked because he used to write pipelined functions for Dynamic Search queries, – Tom Kyte’s something new I learned about estimated cardinalities. He’s also highlighted something new Tom learned about sqlplus. And the fact that Richard Foote announced the …

Welcome to the 186th Edition of Log Buffer. Lots to report this week, so read on…

In Oracle news:

We begin with Gary Myers at the Sydney Oracle Lab who mixes GUI and CLI and shows how to manage your database from EMACS. You have to read a post that starts with: “There is a place of shadow, a place between the dark lands of the command-line interface, and the shining brightness of the GUI. In the days of yore, many dwelled in the shadow lands, but almost all have been attracted to the lights of SQL Developer…”

Tanel Poder gives a step by step tour of his …

It’s a busy time of year for Pythian. With many of our team tied up on client engagements, away at MySQL conference this week, and Collaborate 2010 next week, I’m pinch hitting as volunteer editor in helping to pull together this week’s edition of Log Buffer. Enjoy!

MySQL Conference 2010

Big news this week from MySQL Conference as Oracle’s Edward Screven elaborates on Oracle’s plans for MySQL in his opening keynote. Pythian’s Paul Vallee was interviewed by Network World’s John Brodkin, before the conference in anticipation of the session.

Ronald Bradford responds, writing about his …

This is the 184th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. I’ve edited a couple of Log Buffers before, but this is the first time I get to post directly to the Pythian blog. Just one of the many perks of being a Pythian employee ;)

On the Oracle front:

It is always good to start the day with a pop quiz to get the brain into gear: Charles Hooper posted a 3-part series with seemingly innocent True/False questions. He covers sorting, SQL tuning and …

In an application such as a database server, instrumentation is like sex: it’s not enough to know how often things happen. You also care about how long they took, and in many cases you want to know how big they were.

“Things” are the things you want to optimize. Want to optimize queries? Then you need to know what activities that query causes to happen. Most systems have at least some of this kind of instrumentation. If you look around at… let’s not pick on the usual targets… oh, say Sphinx, Redis, and memcached. What metrics do they provide? They provide counters that say how often various things happened. (Most of these systems provide very few and coarse-grained counters.) That’s not very helpful. So I read from disk N times, and I read from memory N times, and I compared rows N times… so what? I still don’t know anything relevant to execution time.

That’s why we need to measure how long things took. It’d be …

I would like to announce a couple of new Tungsten versions available for your database clustering enjoyment.  As most readers of this blog are aware, Tungsten allows users to create highly available data services that include replicated copies, distributed management, and application connectivity using unaltered open source databases.   We are continually improving the software and have a raft of new features coming out this year.  

First, there is a new Tungsten 1.2.3 maintenance release available in both commercial as well as open source editions.  You can get access to the commercial version on the Continuent website, while the open source version is available on SourceForge. 

 The Tungsten 1.2.3 release focuses on improvements for MySQL …

To program is human, to instrument is divine. Complex systems that will support a heavy workload will eventually have to be tuned for it. There are two prerequisites for tuning: tunability, and measurability.

Tunability generally means configuration settings. Adding configuration settings is a sign of a humble and wise programmer. It means that the programmer acknowledges “I don’t understand how this system will be used, what environment it will run in, or even what my code really does.” Sometimes things are hard-coded. InnoDB is notorious for this, although don’t take that to mean that I think Heikki Tuuri isn’t humble and wise — nobody’s perfect. Sometimes programmers set out to create systems that are self-tuning. I’m not aware of any success stories I can point to in this regard, but I can point to plenty of failures. Perhaps I can’t think of any successes because I don’t need to.

Measurability …

I’m pleased to announce the first release of Kontrollcomm – “The Server Command Automation Interface” is a web-based application that automates remote command execution on linux and unix based servers. There are three main areas of the application: Hosts, Templates, and Commands. The use is very simple: all of your hosts are setup in the [...]

Hello folks, it’s great to be back from hiatus. This is the 183rd edition of Log Buffer (arguably the best edition of Log Buffer yet!), the weekly review of database blogs.

The last time I wrote this was just under 2 years ago!!! WoW. Things have changed. Sun bought MySQL, Oracle bought Sun. Those were bombshell deals. At least you can rest assured that some things can be constant. I still eat my daily serving of broccoli (among other healthful “things”). I urge you all to go the fridge and grab some veggies prior to sitting down for this week’s… ahem… digest.

Starting with Oracle, Pythian’s own Alex Fatkulin illustrates a bug (?…likely) that could lead to logically corrupted data. …