Welcome to the 151st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. We’re going to take a fast tour through the best blogs from the week gone by, beginning this time, with Oracle.

Jonathan Lewis writes, “It occurred to me recently that I might be making casual use of terms that weren’t necessarily very well known to the less experienced user. So I’ve decided to build a glossary of terms – and I’ll try to add to it from time to time whenever I have a few minutes.”

Jonathan might want to add “Method R” to the glossary. Cary Millsap was making it understood, …

My old friend and collaborator Theo Schlossnagle at OmniTI posted his slides from his Scalable Internet Architectures talk at VelocityConf 2009.

The slides are brilliant even without seeing Theo talk and I highly recommend the time it takes to flip through them, for anyone who is interested in systems performance. If anyone took an mp3 of this talk I’m dying to hear it, please let me know.

For those of you unfamiliar with OmniTI, Theo is the CEO of this rather remarkable company specializing in Internet-scale architecture consulting. They generalize on Internet-scale architecture, not on one specific dimension the way Pythian specializes on the database tier. This allows them to see Internet-scale workloads from a unique systemic, multidisciplinary point of view; from the user experience all the way up the stack, through …

This is the 150th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Someone accidentally left Dave Edwards‘ cage unlocked, and he escaped, thus leaving me with the pleasurable duty of compiling the 150th weekly Log Buffer.

Many people other than Dave are finding release this week. Giuseppe Maxia explains some details of MySQL’s New Release Model. Andrew Morgan announces a New MySQL Cluster Maintenance Release. Aleksandr Kuzminsky of the MySQL Performance …

About six months ago, the question of storing images in a database came up. This is one of my favorite topics, and has many database-agnostic parts.

Personally, I think “tell me about storing images in a database” is actually a great interview question, because you will be able to see the difference between someone who has just memorized “what’s right” versus someone who is really thinking. It also helps you see how someone will communicate — if they just say “NEVER do it, it’s as bad as crossing the streams!” then they are a type of person that gives you a short answer, without much explanation, and without many nuances. (That may be what you are looking for, but usually you want someone who gives reasons for why they strongly feel one way or another).

Consider the following cases:

What about storing …

This is the 149th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

MySQL

Let’s begin with the big-picture stuff. Jeremy Zawodny laid out his view of the state of MySQL in Linux Magazine’s blog, noting the rough transition between versions 5.0 and 5.1, the status of storage engines, and outside contributions.

Like Baron Schwartz’s Maatkit, for example. Baron announced this week that he is writing a book about Maatkit, and also …

Devart has released today the improved version 1.10 of dbForge Schema Compare for SQL Server, a sophisticated tool specially designed to meet your specific comparison tasks, help analyze schema differences at a glance, and synchronize them correctly, saving time and efforts.

dbForge Schema Compare for SQL Server 1.10 features the following enhancements:

• Faster comparison of database objects
  The tests proved that dbForge Schema Compare for SQL Server 1.10 compares databases twice faster than the previous version did. This improvement is of great value especially for comparison of large databases.

  For example, Schema Compare for SQL Server 1.10 compared databases located on SQL Server 2008 and containing 958 tables, 60 views, 3736 stored procedures, and 469 …

This is the 148th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome.

PostgreSQL

Since PGCon ‘09 has concluded not long ago (and not far away), let’s start with Postgres stuff, much of which has to do with the convention.

Here are Robert Treat’s reflections on PGCon 2009, on his zillablog: “ . . . PGCon always presents the strongest line up of Postgres information available, and this year was certainly no exception.”

Josh Berkus was there, of course, and he sends two detailed reports: …

Welcome to the 147th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Let’s start this week, with blogs from the SQL Server world, where a number of excellent technical posts appear. Alexander Kuznetsov surprises his readers with this assertion: without ORDER BY, there is no default sort order. “Sounds trivial? Right, but different flavors of this myth still persist.  . . .  Because apparently many visitors agreed with this myth, I decided to post a repro script which demonstrates that this is simply not true.”

In their post on …

Hello and welcome to the 146th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. I have to make this a quick one, but I hope (as always) that the links give you the highlights of this week’s blogs.

Oracle

Let’s start with Jonathan Lewis’s report from IOUG Day 4: ” Not so much a little gem today as a little surprise and a few consequential thoughts. In a presentation on optimising star transformations the presenter pointed out that bitmap indexes are only available in Oracle Enterprise Edition.”

Here’s Doug Burns with the first of a series on …

A year ago, the outline was being written. A lot of work was crammed into the intervening months, and I am happy and proud to announce that the MySQL Administrator’s Bible has been published, and is sitting on the shelf at many major booksellers already. The official publication date is today — Monday, May 11th, 2009 — although some stores have had copies for a week, including Amazon.com.

The MySQL Administrator’s Bible, published by Wiley Press (available on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/MySQL-Administrators-Bible-Sheeri-Cabral/dp/0470416912/, fully covers how to administer MySQL 5.1. It is suitable for people new to MySQL, although as an experienced MySQL DBA I can say that I learned a lot while researching and writing this book, and I believe that even veteran DBAs can learn from this book.

This book for …