I am passing this along — I am not sure if most folks reading this can make it, as it is last-minute and in the Boston area, but I figured I’d let people know that the New England Database Society exists. It’s free, sponsored by Sun (and has been for years, long before Sun bought MySQL), and is hosted by my college database professor, Mitch Cherniack. (To that end, I should probably make sure to promote the Boston User Group here more often! I keep forgetting…)

You can find information on how to be a part of the mailing list at http://www.cs.brown.edu/sites/neds/

The next New England Database Society will be held on Friday, March 27 and the speaker is Christian Jensen of Aalborg University.

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[N]ew [E]ngland [D]atabase …

This is the 140th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome.

Let us begin with Oracle this week. Dan Norris illustrates how to start database services automatically after instance startup. He says, “Services are an essential component for managing workload in a RAC environment. If you’re not defining any non-default services in your RAC database, you’re making a mistake.”

Vivek Sharma published his tale of, Latch: Row Cache Objects causing huge performance issue. Clever detective …

What’s going on at your favorite open-source database developer mailing list? Non-scientific memory of what I’ve been seeing lately:

• The Drizzle list is talking about test coverage and completeness, and schedulers.
• The MySQL internals list has recently been dominated with talk about coding standards.
• The PostgreSQL hackers list is talking about a ton of stuff. I don’t even try to keep up.
• The Percona launchpad list is talking about bugs, xtrabackup, and more bugs and patches for them. There’s also a Percona Google Group …

In about 15 minutes, Giuseppe Maxia will begin a webinar in which the main focus is a presentation on “How to have a good presentation”. Talk about meta!

Giuseppe posted how to join the free webinar.

The slides can be found at http://datacharmer.org/downloads/2009_03_Presentation.pdf.

Yesterday I posted about our release of Tungsten FSM, a package for building state machines in Java. Today we are publishing Tungsten Monitor, the second of four new Tungsten packages we are releasing on SourceForge.net during the month of March. Tungsten Monitor offers fast, pluggable resource monitoring for database clusters. We have a couple of specific monitor types already implemented; you can add new ones with minimal Java code.

Tungsten Monitor is focused on a single problem: providing continuous notifications of the state of resources in a cluster. Each monitor executes a simple process loop to check the resource and broadcast the resulting status. The status information …

It is my pleasure to announce publication of the Tungsten Finite State Machine Library (Tungsten FSM) as an open source package hosted on SourceForge.net. This is the first of four new components for database clustering and replication that we will be releasing into open source during the month of March.

Tungsten FSM is a Java library for implementing in-memory state machines. It is lightweight and very simple to use. Each Tungsten FSM state machine tracks the state of a particular instance (i.e., object) in Java. The model provides standard features of state machines including states, transitions, actions, and error handling. Source and binary downloads are available here--there is also …

The Oracle gateway for ODBC provides an almost seamless data integration between Oracle and other RDBMS. I won’t argue about its performance, limits, or relevance. It serves a few purposes; set it up and you’ll be able, for example, to create database links between Oracle and MySQL. After all, wouldn’t it be nice if you could run some of the following SQL statements?

• select o.col1, m.col1 from oracle_tab
o, mysql_tab@mysql m where o.col1=m.col1;
• insert into oracle_tab (select * from mysql_tab@mysql);

This post is intended to share, the same way Karun did it for SQL Server …

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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50 things to know before migrating Oracle to MySQL by Baron Schwartz is an interesting read, it points out clearly that MySQL is not Oracle. However, Oracle is not the benchmark by which all others are to be judged. So what do we compare with, or actually, why do we compare at all?

Hmm, so we take three steps back, and get a much better view... Marten Mickos (MySQL CEO from 2001 until the Sun acquisition in 2008) said it all along "MySQL does not compete with Oracle". I don't think people actually appreciated what he was saying, or even believed that he meant precisely what he said. They might have thought "oh that's just positioning and protesting too much to make the opposite point". But he wasn't, it was the clear plain truth and it still is today (and so it should remain, I think).

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During development cycle, I often come to a case where I need to compare two tables whether they are the same or not. For example, if you already have a running script that outputs to a database table in production that was written sub-optimally and you need to improve it. You want to make sure […]