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Welcome to the 103rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Starting with Oracle stuff, Chen Shapira (just a simple DBA on a complex production system) is looking for great PL/SQL. Why? To become a better PL/SQL programmer. “But,” she writes, “for PL/SQL , I’m a bit stuck. I can still read my own code for bad examples, but where can I find examples for great code?  . . .  Somehow, there is simply no open-source code written in PL/SQL that I can read to get a good idea of how PL/SQL should be written.” Niall Litchfield recommends the contents of $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin. Any other ideas …

With ndb_restore it is actually possible (talking MySQL Cluster 6.2 and 6.3 here, haven't looked at 5.0 for a long time) to restore a single table into a CSV file that can be loaded using LOAD DATA INFILE.

This can be useful if e.g:

1. You want to extract data from a cluster table and load it into MyISAM/Innodb. This can be useful for reporting/data-mining purposes.
2. You want to load data back into Cluster but into another table looking the same as the original table (not to spoil the original data) for some reason.

Number 2) could be used in scenarios where you want to upgrade the schema by e.g changing the column length of a char(10) to char(255) (not an online operation) and add a bunch of other stuff. Please note that add column is an online operation, changing the column length is not.

Here is an example on how you can do it generate a CSV file using …

Under the title of “From MySQL to Sun“, I’m writing a monthly column to a Swedish-language business publication called “Forum för Ekonomi och Teknik“, about the Sun-MySQL integration.

If you happen to read …

Lotame Solutions, Inc. is always looking for talented individuals. We have many openings in our Technology group, but the one I’m most interested in filling is the newly opened Database Engineer position. The Database Engineer will work with me to maintain Lotame’s entire database infrastructure – including design, development, testing, implementation, monitoring and support. Interested […]

I have been working on a set of efficient C++ classes for storing N-bit (N<=64) values at arbitrary bit offsets into a buffer. Essentially a way to address memory bit-wise, rather than the usual byte-wise or word-wise. The classes support either fixed-sized bitfield storage (eg. say 27-bit values), or compressed values where small numbers are stored in fewer bits than large numbers (for example 0-15 are stored in 6 bits, 16-2**24 are stored in 26 bits, and so on).

The basic idea is of course to save space when storing large amounts of data eg. for a relational database. Today most systems tend to pad much of their numbers to 32 or 64 or whatever bits, wasting space. This is done to allow efficient access, as it is much faster to access data when it is sized and aligned to one of the word sizes supported by the machine.

Or is it really?

Todays CPUs are so fast compared to I/O (disk, network) and even to main …

Teknologföreningen (or TF for short) is the Swedish language student corporation at Helsinki University of Technology. That’s where I started my studies in 1981 at the Department of Physics, together with Mårten Mickos and Michael “Monty” Widenius.

TF has a tradition of each year publishing “ …

Late February 2002 at the recommendation of our then-advisor Florian Müller, I first met with Ingrid Vos at Cafe Glockenspiel in Munich. Right thereafter, her company Marketing Communications became MySQL’s German PR agency.

Ingrid and her Munich based team have accompanied MySQL AB — and specifically MySQL GmbH — now for over six years. It has been a fantastic ride together. She has introduced us to numerous German journalists, and fixed plenty of meetings for Mårten, myself and others. Always with efficiency, a positive attitude, a happy smile and a friendly Austrian touch.

Being acquired by Sun Microsystems means changes in how we …

So I took my concerns over prepared statements to the #postgresql IRC channel on freenode. I pointed out that I think there should be a way to get server side handling of placeholders in statements but without the additional overhead of a second round trip or the drawbacks of overly generic query plans due to not being able to use the parameters in the planning stage. Some people have noted that this feature is available in MSSQL. It also seems to be available in PostgreSQL in the form of PQexecParams and its even exposed in ext/pgsql, though it's only used for sequence reading in PDO_PGSQL. It would be really cool if it could be used when emulating prepared statements (probably with a PostgreSQL PDO …