Welcome to the 88th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. SQL Server To begin, Simon Sabin, on SimonS Blog, offers the proposition: SQL Server tools suck, do you agree? He elaborates, “When I moved from Oracle 7 to SQL Server 6.5 I was amazed at the tools you got with SQL Server. [...]

If you have Monolith installed in a RedHat cluster environment and are wondering how to make the cron job scripts only execute on the active cluster node, this script is a working example. It needs to be installed and running on each cluster node. The only variable to change is “MYHOST” depending on which node the script is running on. This analyzes the output of /usr/sbin/clustat for active node status and service type.

Feel free to use this as a starting point for other RH cluster aware wrappers.

Here are the associated crontab entries for the monolith cluster aware wrappers.

# Monolith Monitor Wrapper Scripts
02 * * * * root /usr/local/bin/monolith_cluster_report-generator.sh > /dev/null 2>&1
*/15 * * * * root /usr/local/bin/monolith_cluster_agent.sh > /dev/null 2>&1
02 * * * * root /usr/local/bin/monolith_cluster_cronexec.sh > /dev/null 2>&1
…

I am a very strong proponent of Open Source (excluding my Macbook). Joining MySQL Inc was a wonderful achievement, being part of the team behind the most popular open source database. Leaving MySQL was not an easy decision due to the people, but the Sun transition and requirements did help. However it is no surprise I am joining another open source company - Primebase Technologies in Hamburg, Germany. My association with the MySQL Community will only be strengthened with my full work and support behind the PBXT and Blob Streaming pluggable storage engines for MySQL.

It is actually poetic that I am joing Primebase for I have the auspicious recognition while an active part of the MySQL community of introducing Paul …

Sometimes technology gets in the way of getting things done, and us tekkies must do what we can to make our data warehouse work for the purpose it is intended. Ralph Kimball makes 10 good points about the common pitfalls to avoid when implementing a data warehouse, as listed in his book "The Data Warehouse Toolkit", published by Wiley.Become immersed with technology rather than the requirements

 MySQL geeks worldwide unite!
 
I am proud to announce that Georg Richter (our Community Engineering Lead) has updated the MySQL Community Development Program.
        http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Community_Contributions   The updated program gives explicit suggestions for items you can work on, if you want to help out yourself and/or MySQL in development.   We have published a list of Development Worklogs (read: design outlines) and Bugs which we are very interested in getting help with. If you let us know your interest in coding one of the items, we can assign a MySQL developer to guide you in your work.    The intent of this assistance is to help you develop good code for MySQL. We hope this makes your end result function well, and makes it possible to merge your code easily with other …

The last day I’m suffering from different thoughts. So I’ve decided to share’em with you.

It is really possible to create the application such as gears, but independent from Google, that will run on most platofrms and browsers. What we need:

• Compile embeded MySQL (very lite edition) for most platforms (Windows, Linux and MacOSX, I believe that would be enough)
• Create Java Applet and JNI-wrapping library to access MySQL
• Create JavaScript library that will access MySQL through the applet

And that’s all. To use it you will need just to include the applet and JS-library into your page, after the first load applet will detect platform and will download embeded MySQL and native libraries.

Today in Kiev, we had a great time with MySQLers in Engineering and Support. And I got competition in the area of photography from Oleksandr “Sanja” Belkin. Other than that, this blog entry is again of the sit-back-and-relax type, not going into lots of MySQL detail. That’s not to say that we wouldn’t have gone into detail, though, although we saw more churches under the leadership of our Kiev team than we had seen in a long time.

This is how much I like my Sigma 8mm lens

We started the day by looking at Sun’s on-boarding procedures for MySQLers in the Ukraine, sipping tea and coffee at the Hotel President. And we went through Sun’s business model, through the importance of retaining the Eventum systems for Support, about how MySQL-time contractors are managed as part of Sun, as well as other topics familiar from other MySQL locations. Our Sun colleagues noted that our values, topics and concerns seem to …

I have just released the first fully durable version of PBXT. Because of the amount of new code I have reverted PBXT to Alpha status. This version, 1.0-alpha, can be downloaded from: http://www.primebase.org/download.

Oh, which reminds me: PBXT now has a new home at http://www.primebase.org, so take a look around! I have actually found a bit of time to write some documentation. Right now the documentation describes building, installation, and the PBXT system parameters. Future additions will include information on performance tuning and a road map for PBXT development.

But there is more to the new home than just a new web-site. The PBXT project is now owned and funded by PrimeBase Technologies, an open source software development …

I think every person responsible for Development or Operations of growing application sooner or later have to decide on couple few questions on how to tackle application performance. These questions are:

• Should we Optimize Application or get more Hardware ?
• Should we do things ourselves or hire an experts to help us ?

The answer on these questions actually depend on a lot of things, some of which we'll try to cover here.

The things which usually define best solution are economics , resources and risks .

First lets talk about optimizing application vs getting better hardware.

With application optimization typically you have rather interesting relationship between "effort" and "result" typical application would have number of low hanging fruits …

Thank you all for taking the time to respond to the little challenge I posted yesterday! I am pleasantly surprised to note that so many people took the time to post a solution. And most people provided the correct answer too: you are all entitled to a well deserved discount to register for the MySQL User's conference!!!

For those of you interested in the solution: there are two different forms of the CASE statement syntax: the so-called simple case and the searched case.

The simple case selects one WHEN...THEN branch by comparing the value of the expression that appears after the CASE …