Sometimes you don’t want to do anything. This is understandably human, and probably a sign you should either relax or get up and do something.

For processors, you sometimes do actually want to do absolutely nothing. Often this will be while waiting for a lock. You want to do nothing until the lock is free, but you want to be quick about it, you want to start work once that lock is free as soon as possible.

On CPU cores with more than one thread (e.g. hyperthreading on Intel, SMT on POWER) you likely want to let the other threads have all of the resources of the core if you’re sitting there waiting for something.

So, what do you do? On x86 there’s been the PAUSE instruction for a while and on POWER there’s been the SMT priority instructions.

The x86 PAUSE instruction delays execution of the next instruction for some amount …

There is no great joys for the bloggers to mark the holiday season with some blistering and lightweight blog posts. This Log Buffer Edition in Log Buffer #302 shares that mirth and presents you with another medley of blogs.

Oracle:

Eddie Awad asks; Have you installed or recently upgraded to Oracle APEX Listener 2.0? Have you used SQL Developer 3.2 to manage APEX Listener settings? If you answered yes to both questions then you are in for an unwelcome surprise.

It’s the end of the year, and the start of the year, and thus time for the ‘best of’, ‘ten best’ and perhaps even …

Pythian is pleased to announce our speaking schedule at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld 2011, October 2-6, 2011 in San Francisco, CA.

We’re excited to be joined by our customers Western Union, and Worldwide Technologies (WWT) as we present real-world experiences and project success. If you’re attending, don’t miss the chance to hear our team of experts. Bring your toughest questions to be answered as they relate to any of the subjects below.

• Follow Pythian on LinkedIn for up to date OOW info
• Schedule a meeting with Pythian at OOW to discuss your database …

This is the 150th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Someone accidentally left Dave Edwards‘ cage unlocked, and he escaped, thus leaving me with the pleasurable duty of compiling the 150th weekly Log Buffer.

Many people other than Dave are finding release this week. Giuseppe Maxia explains some details of MySQL’s New Release Model. Andrew Morgan announces a New MySQL Cluster Maintenance Release. Aleksandr Kuzminsky of the MySQL Performance …

Larry Ellison is announcing a major new feature this Wednesday at Open World. For the first time in a while, his keynote is dedicated to the “database” as opposed to the usual high level ERP/Apps/Fusion. Even the title of his keynote is catchy — “Extreme Performance”.

Oracle has been keeping the new feature a secret. Even the 11gR2 beta program had very few participants to prevent information leaking out. It’s, “Something’s coming, but I am not telling what.”

Okay, it worked on me, I’m excited about it. Let’s think what it could be. What single database feature is so major, that Larry himself will announce it during OpenWorld?

What do we …

ASM is definitely one of the coolest technologies inside the Oracle Database. On the other hand, the ability of the storage arrays to provide a read/write access to a copy or a “snapshot” of its content is something we can easily leverage as an Oracle DBA. For a couple of weeks, I wanted to [...]