Welcome to the 83rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Little things can make big differences. Archimedes (no blogger, but a very smart guy) said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” and With CLUE as (Select * from Random_Thought ORDER BY Common_Sense DESC) proves him right with a story of leverage: “This story is how changing one character in a 300 line stored procedure removed 90% of the impact of the worst single query on the entire server.”

On Third Abnormal Form, Paul McMillan shows that in SQL Server 2005, …

Yesterday I starting testing PBXT using the DBT2 benchmark. Following the implementation of durability and SELECT FOR UPDATE for the engine I was more interested in the benchmark as a test for stability and concurrency than performance. I was not disappointed...

Which bug first?

Well I immediately ran into 3 bugs. Isn't it funny how bugs often come in batches, which leaves you thinking: "Oh sh.. where do I start?". Here's my advice: start with the bug that is most likely to disappear if you fix the others!

A simple example, you have 2 bugs: an unexpected exception is occurring, and you're loosing memory. First look for the memory loss, because it may disappear when you fix the exception (because you may be loosing memory in the error handler).

Take things one problem at time:

Another thing: once you have decided for one of the bugs, stick with it (no matter how hard it gets) …

In some ways, MySQL is a victim of its own success.  Because of the focus on reliability, performance, and ease-of-use, MySQL usage continues to grow at a heavy pace.  This being the case, the demand for skilled MySQL pro’s has quickly outstripped the current supply.  Go to monster and put in ‘mysql’ and you’ll get back thousands of hits. So if you’re wondering whether getting MySQL expertise as a DBA is a good investment, wonder no more.

Without a doubt, one great way to drink in lots of MySQL DBA knowledge is to attend the upcoming MySQL User’s Conference.  At this year’s conference, there are more tracks than ever designed to help the DBA get a handle on security, performance tuning, backup and recovery, high-performance schema design, and much more.  Plus, you’ll get to see some new tools we’ve been working on to …

After some delay we are proud to present MySQL Proxy 0.6.1.

This is a pure bug-fix release and fixes some assert()oins and the win32 support. It was branched off in December and it took a while to clean up the windows package until it passed the tests.

Download it from:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql-proxy/index.html

Changes:

• added new features to run-tests.lua (see README.TESTS)
• fixed error handling for socket functions on win32
• fixed sending fake server-greetings in connect_server()
• fixed assert()ions on write-errors

These three open-source databases, now in OpenSolaris SXDE 1/08, offer all the needed features for most of the applications out there.

"Three databases to run them all"...

... and of course, Sun offers solutions with commercial database vendors, like the Sun and Oracle's Enterprise Grid Solutions.

Sun Microsystems has released Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08, Sun's free OpenSolaris-based distribution targeted at developers.

This release brings together integrated web stack (Apache, MySQL, Ruby, Php, PostgreSQL), NetBeans 6.0, interoperability with Microsoft's CIFS protocol, support for virtual machines via Sun xVM hypervisor, based on  technology developed by the Xen community, Sun HPC ClusterTools based on the Open MPI effort.

There are …

During the last day of the Linux Conference Australia, I and Colin had the choice between joining the crowd for the open day, or meeting a semi-private invitation from Greg Lehey a well known icon in the open source world. He organized a hackers barbecue in his very isolated place, and we could not resist. In his original invitation, Greg said that he lives "down the road", without specifying how long the road is. It turned out that it's a 90 minutes drive, which is an indication of the relative sense of distance that you get in Australia.

In the Australian bush, Greg leads a quiet life with his wife, his horses and dogs, and a few not so distant friends, dealing occasionally with stray kangaroos invading his fields, and brewing open source beer.
The barbecue met everybody's expectations, and so did Greg's famous home brewed beer, thus stimulating that sort of hacker talk …

After some delay we are proud to present MySQL Proxy 0.6.1.

This is a pure bug-fix release and fixes some assert()oins and the win32 support. It was branched off in December and it took a while to clean up the windows package until it passed the tests.

Download it from:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql-proxy/index.html

Changes:

• added new features to run-tests.lua (see README.TESTS)
• fixed error handling for socket functions on win32
• fixed sending fake server-greetings in connect_server()
• fixed assert()ions on write-errors