Welcome to the 139th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Let us begin with a look at the best from the Oracle ’sphere.

Oracle

Many of you might be considering some more training or certification. Coskan Gundogar has already been there, and has returned with the tale to tell, What I learned during Oracle SQL Expert Exam Study Part-1.

In Jared Still’s Ramblings a discussion of the evils of encoding meaning into data.

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Welcome to the 138th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. If you aren’t aware of who I am, my name is Nick and I am a Senior DBA at The Pythian Group. This is my second run at hosting Log Buffer, and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did creating it.

As we see winter giving way to summer, I thought I would start with Informix.
Over at Informix-technology Fernando talks about FUD for thought where he talks about the future of Informix vs. DB2.

Sticking with IBM, I thought that we …

This is the 137th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Dave Edwards is enjoying a week off, and so as part of my plot to take over the world, I am writing this week’s Log Buffer.

First, the fun stuff: Josh Berkus tells us that the American English Translation of the Manga Guide to Databases is available in Japanese Fairies and Third Normal Form.

Then, the basics:
Giri Mandalika points to an article on Using MySQL with Java Technology. This is a basic article on how to connect, and …

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, …

One of the most common patterns I see in my consulting work is identifiers that are generated by MD5() or UUID(). Many times this is done in an application framework or something similar — not software the client has written. From the application programmer’s point of view, it’s just an incredibly handy idiom: generate a unique value and use it, you’re done.

Those values tend to appear in session identifiers, but that’s not the only place; I especially notice them in apps that use Java’s Hibernate interfaces, whether session IDs are involved or not. They propagate themselves all around the other tables, where they become secondary indexes and even get combined with other columns to make even bigger keys.

What’s wrong with this? There are two major things that hurt performance in such cases: larger data and indexes, and non-sequential values. I’ll ignore the latter in this article, since whether an identifier is …

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 …