It is that time of the year when many PostgreSQL fans gather in Ottawa, Canada for PGCon 2008 next week. This will be my first visit to PGCon in Ottawa. Earlier this year I had presented two sessions "PostgreSQL and Benchmarks" and "Best Practices of PostgreSQL on Solaris" at PostgreSQL Conference 2008 East in Maryland. Thanks to that visit, this time I might recognize many people by face this time around.

Sun is a Gold Sponsor at PGCon 2008. There will be quite a bit of presence from Sun in PGCon. Josh, Max, Robert, Magne, Zdenek, Jim, Mayuresh et all will be present out there.

Josh Berkus is doing a tutorial on  "GUCs: A Three Hour Tour" on …

The 97th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published on Brian “Krow” Aker’s Idle Thoughts.

We have Jeff Smith and Ward Pond standing by for two upcoming editions. And if you’d like to contribute, make yourself known in the DBA community-at-large (and have some fun in the process), you too can do Log Buffer! Read the homepage and send me, the Log Buffer coordinator, an email.

And now, Brian …

Welcome to the 97th week of Log Buffer. I am Brian Aker, and I will be your cruise director :)

Synchronisation in via scripting in the Database? Jonathan Lewis has a write up on making use of a locking package for Oracle. How about some published release notes for Oracle 10gR2?

On the MySQL side we have a post about "Time Delayed Replication", or what I often refer to as "we break our databases a lot, so we would like some more length in the rope please".

Ever seen a DBA run through a data center in the hopes to …

EnterpriseDB is sponsoring a survey to track which open-source databases people use. Make your voice heard: Vote today. It takes less than 30 seconds to answer, and covers such questions as why you use an open-source database, with which operating system do you use it, etc.

During my morning reading, I happened upon this verse from Ecclesiastes:

1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:...

2 a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted....

It made me think of the ongoing debate around open-source business models (illustrated well in a recent post by Savio and perhaps more so in the comments section to that post), kicked up by MySQL's recent decision to offer closed extensions to its core (100 percent open source) database, but one that has been simmering for a long time. MySQL is essentially saying, "We've spent a decade planting. We'd like to reap a little of what we've sown …

I have thought about putting up forums on my blog for LONG time and even thought about writing my own. But after playing with phpBB3 for a while on my other site (http://totalplaystation.com/forum), I have decided to use it instead. Let’s just face it; I don’t have the time or resources to write all of the functionality phpbb3 provides. Isn’t it a big reason why we all love open source?

If any of the phpbb guys read this, Thank you and keep up the good work!

Check out the forums: http://crazytoon.com/forum/ and feel free to post  questions, comments, suggestions, rants, etc.

Here are a few ways I found Views to be useful for me.


Data Cleansing

If I have a column that needs to be cleaned or tested in some way. For example:
Select mycolumn, if(mycolumn is null, TRUE, FALSE) as mycolumnisnull from mytableThis example is not that amazing, but it lets you place conditions for the data. Then instead of re-writing these conditions in your application layer, you can re-use the View from the database.
Another example:
Select email, regex ['some amazing email verification/cleaning regex line'] as cleaned_emails from emailsHere again, we have some condition that placed in the database. We can now call the emails table and tell it to give us only the cleaned emails according to the defined conditions.


Decision Making

You can place some business logic in your Views. I …

Altering a big table sucks, and to make it worse you have no idea what’s happening or how long it will take. I’d like a progress bar, or some status output, or something that gives me the feeling like my server didn’t die.

I am speaking at the Italian Free Software Conference, an event with the aim of considering the state of the art of Free Software in Italy.

The conference is held in Trento, Italy, sponsored by public institutions, the local university, and private industries.
My session is about MySQL as open database, which is a philosophical walkthrough of how MySQL has become successful, why Sun has bought it, what is in store for the future.

LewisC's An Expert's Guide To Oracle Technology

Do you know which open source feature is the most important? Do you know which open source database rocks and which one sucks? Is MySQL better than Postgres? Is Ingres worth considering? How does Firebird compare? Have you used, or have you considered using, an open source database?

Take a survey. It's only 15 questions so it takes just a few minutes.

I'll post a link where you can get the results once they have been compiled and prepared.

BTW, this isn't my survey. I'm just passing on the link.

LewisC