Welcome to the 89th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Welcome, welcome everyone.

In writing this week’s Log Buffer, I’ve had a chance to sit down and read some excellent posts on all sorts of platforms. The depth and breadth of what’s available to house and retrieve data is astonishing.

Many of you who have read my posts will know that I’m a fan of vegetables. They are something most of us don’t eat enough of. Come on DBAs! I think we need to make a collective effort to get healthy. We need you to keep all these systems alive. I say this because I have a new found appreciation for the work we do day in and day out.

Six months ago my wife and I said hello to our baby girl for …

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. [...]

No, its not alphabet soup. Just some notes from the session at the Sun Tech Days. I’ve not looked at DTrace much (my only look into instrumentation, has been from SystemTap, which doesn’t deal with applications), but plan on doing so soon… I’ve managed to get OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 installed in VirtualBox, so it can only start being more fun from here…

Want to learn more about DTrace and MySQL? Then come to the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, in Santa Clara, California, because on Thursday, Ben Rockwood, from Joyent, will be presenting a session on DTrace and MySQL (read the abstract, its good). The talk covers the fact that you can get useful information currently, …

Welcome the the 87th of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. First up, a couple of items responding to news about H-Store, the new database technology. Nigel Thomas of Preferisco wonders if H-Store is a new architectural era, or just a toy? Too much information, in turn, asks, Is H-Store the future of database [...]

In my previous post I briefly mentioned Database Appliance with Project Indiana. Now that Sun has acquired MySQL (or as some people say MySQL has acquired Sun) and with our existing work in progress with PostgreSQL, there are quite a bit of options available of using some combination  of Storage, System, Operating System, Database  along with some end user application and present it as either Database Appliance or use it as Embedded Database. 

I thought I will just discuss the audience, symptoms, merits, cons etc regarding the two approach and how they can be useful. 

 The first question is who likes database appliances and who wants embedded database? To answer that I would put the question back: What do you in hand? A hammer or a screw-driver? Because if you have a hammer, the whole world is a nail to you and …

I've known about the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views (or system tables) in SQL Server for a while, but I just leared recently that they are actually part of the SQL-92 standard and supported on other database platforms.

The INFORMATION_SCHEMA views provide meta data information about the tables, columns, and other parts of your database. Because the structure of these tables are standardized you can write SQL statements that work on various database platforms.

For example suppose you want to return a resultset with a list of all columns in a table called employees

SELECT table_name, column_name, is_nullable, data_type, character_maximum_length
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.Columns
WHERE table_name = 'employees'

Quite a handy feature, but it's hard to find what versions the of various database platforms started supporting this feature, here's a quick list:

• Microsoft …

Day 2 for me started with watching Simon Phipps talk about Sun’s FOSS Philosophy and Strategy. It rained in the morning, so the talk started a little late, and there were hopes of better attendance. Nonetheless, the talk was interesting, and the announcement that there was money in it for FOSS developers, was just fabulous. I took away a few points, which I ended up Twittering:

• There’s this idea of a global mesh nowadays, and its leading to a changing society. FOSS is all about it. And “Its Going Mainer Mainstream”!
• Investment in skills is important for any country. There should always be a …

One of the workshops on our Barcamp two weeks ago had to do with the MySQL-Proxy from Jan Kneschke.

Yet, we found out, that the proxy is rather unuseable for our task. Read here why.

Continue reading "Playing arround with the MySQL-Proxy on Mayflower-barcamp"

With the acquisition of MySQL I expect that many people might end up comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL using sysbench. It is like a micro-benchmark utility which includes an oltp mode which is used quite a bit to show MySQL performance. It can actually also be used with PostgreSQL. So this post is about how to configure sysbench to work with PostgreSQL. (Primarily a note for myself since I had to do hunt around to get it configured for PostgreSQL).

 
First download the latest version of sysbench. I had downloaded the version sysbench-0.4.8. After gunzip/untar I had to to figure out few steps to get the right configure script for it.

I am going to use the Sun Studio Compiler (since PostgreSQL in my case is also built with Sun Studio Compiler). So I will need the compiler cc in my …

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.