As Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 is launched along with the Open Application Services solution which includes PostgreSQL, the talk I gave at PostgreSQL East 2008 on "Best Practices with PostgreSQL on Solaris" might be helpful for many new users.

If there are questions let me know.

I started working on my upcoming talk at PGCon 2008 and realized that I haven't put my talk from PostgreSQL Conference East 2008  - PostgreSQL and Benchmarks online yet.

 More on the upcoming presentation later.

Welcome to the 91st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

For a change, let’s begin with some PostgreSQL stuff. On Tending the Garden, Selena Deckelmann gives her retrospective thanks to those who attended and presented the PostgreSQL Conference East.

On Esoteric Curio, Theo Schlossnagle gives his thoughts on the keynote address by Joshua Drake, touching on the perennial versus, Postgres vs. MySQL.

Hey, there was a MySQL …

It is interesting to read RedmondDeveloper News’s take on Oracle’s attitude to open source this morning, especially this paragraph quoting Monica Kumar, Oracle’s senior director for Linux and open source product marketing:

“”We haven’t seen our customers asking for open source databases,” she told me. “Not many customers are interested in looking into the code and mucking around with it, and making changes to it. All they care about is ‘give me the best support, give me the lowest price of entry’.” For that Kumar pointed to Oracle Express.”

It is difficult to disagree with the second part of Monica’s statement. Cost savings are routinely cited as the biggest driver for open source database adoption, while the lack of robust support is the biggest barrier to open source adoption.

Certainly these were the findings of our …

As a I wrote a couple of days ago, I went to the second day of PostgreSQL Conference East 2008 last Sunday. I had a good time and really enjoyed meeting everyone, listening, learning, and occasionally talking. I asked a number of fearless-newbie questions that paid off handsomely: people were very willing to humor me. I also left with a beautiful t-shirt, mug, and bag combo thanks to EnterpriseDB. The bag has already been put to use for a grocery shopping trip.

Note to conference/website organizers: I can’t link to anything but the front page, so I assume my link above will someday point to the 2009 conference, or the 2008 West conference. It would be good to give each event a permalink right from the start…

One thing that surprised me was the distance …

Prompted by the usual Devshed's post, this time about pgAgent, here I am with a small "tutorial" (or maybe just a small collection of screenshots).PgAgent is a great little tool, much like SQLServer's SQLAgent or the built in scheduling abilities of Oracle and MySQL (which is a much nicer solution IMHO), what's weak is the installation and the docs, I mean, why the pgAdminIII installer does ask

I’m heading out to PostgreSQL Conference East in a few hours. Alas, I missed the first day but I’ll be there all day tomorrow. I hope to learn, meet people, and generally participate in goodness.

And no, I’m not an expert in PostgreSQL as I am in MySQL, but I have always held it in very high esteem. I am not going to try to spread the MySQL-ness into the PostgreSQL camp :-)

See you there.

mysql, PostgreSQL

Welcome to the 90th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

First, SSQA.net’s SQL Master offers his walk-through of best practices for installing SQL Server 2005, with clustering as the destination.

If you read SQL Server blogs, you already know Adam Machanic. I’m very pleased to mention his first post for the Pythian Group blog, covering the basics of minimal logging and its enhancements in SQL Server 2008.

…

While recently migrating Tschitschereengreen.com from Symfony to Django plus changing the database backend from MySQL to PostgreSQL, there were mainly two tasks more time-consuming than I’ve had thought beforehand:

SQL dump

The old database used a latin1 encoding for the database fields and utf-8 as the server and client connection encoding. With these settings, even trying to get a correctly encoded database dump from phpMyAdmin is a bad idea.

Using mysqldump with an explicitly specified character-set is much better:

mysqldump ? ?default-character-set=latin1 …

I've just finished reading two recent blog posts about new query optimizations in the upcoming MySQL 6.0, it's all fine and dandy but ...Looking at Correlated semi-join subqueries and PostgreSQL by S. Petrunia we can read something like Quote: The first thing we did was to take a look at PostgreSQL as it is easily available and seems to have at least decent subquery handling (or even better