Log Buffer #143: A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

This is the 143^rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

So . . .  Anything happen while I was away?

Okay, so I heard the big news. And just in case you haven’t, here it is from Sheeri Cabral: Oracle Buys Sun. This is a sea-change in the hi-tech world, and the DB part of it will also get rocked, Sun being the home of MySQL. There’s lots of comment in Sheeri’s post, and indeed, all over the database blogging world. I will try here to cover the best of it.

Oracle + Sun + MySQL

First, Monty Says: to be (free) or not to be (free), that is the question. He projects three possible ways Oracle could treat MySQL, and extends a hand to what he expects will be yet more disenchanted MySQL employees.

On The Open Road, Matt Asay asks, Oracle can help Sun, but will it lose MySQL?: “Given the fracturing we’ve already seen with MySQL . . . I suspect that we may be in for several more forks of the MySQL code base.  . . .  So here’s a thought: could Red Hat fork MySQL, hire some key developers, and effectively assume the mantle of MySQL leadership?”

Pythian’s Paul Vallée obligingly gathered links to Curt Monash’s analyses of the Sun/Oracle deal. Those are very worth reading.

In his post MySQL, Sun and Oracle, Kristian Köhntopp bases his predictions on this premise: “MySQL has been instrumental in building a completely new database market. 12 years ago most people were . . . storing data in flat files. SQL knowledge was expert knowledge, and if you knew SQL you were either out of academia or have been on the career and certification-programme of some vendor.”

Mark Schoonover offers his thoughts on Oracle’s Purchase of Sun: “Who could be impacted by Oracle’s purchase? That huge computer company in Redmond. For years, their database team has had access to the operating system source code.  . . .  Oracle not only gains the source code to Solaris, but also their hardware too. No company in my 22 years in IT has had access to everything – hardware, operating system and the database. It’s going to be a wild ride.”

On the Oracle side, Glenn Fawcett takes a pragmatic point of view: “Could you imagine… ‘Dtrace probes for Oracle?’ How cool would that be?”

In his post, So Oracle buys Sun, Andrew Clarke says, “The notion of Oracle as a hardware vendor is an intriguing one. Oracle will be able to offer appliances such as Exadata without the trouble (and loss of potential revenue) incurred by partnering with a hardware vendor. The flip side is that hardware vendors may be less happy to accommodate Oracle on their boxes.”

From PostgreSQL, Peter Eisentraut writes, “Now with MySQL actually owned by Oracle, this makes PostgreSQL the primary alternative.  . . .  I don’t expect that MySQL will be “killed” either.  . . .  Much of the MySQL momentum already lies outside of Sun anyway, in the hands of Percona, Open Query, the Monty Program, Drizzle, and others, so killing MySQL is already impossible for a single company. Which is probably a good situation for the extended open-source database community.”

Now, I’m not sure exactly what Christopher Powers means by this image from his post Whither MySQL?, but it certainly captures the portent of the moment.

MySQL

Okay, enough of that. It was also, coincidentally, the week of MySQL Conference. Shlomi Noach took home the Community Member of the Year Award. Congratulations, Shlomi.

Colin Charles observes that it’s a storage engine world, after all, recounting the storage engine-related news from the conference.

Jeremy Cole related why he was skipping the MySQL Conference and Expo.

In the wake of the announcement of MySQL 5.4 at the conference, Ronald Bradford noted a change in the MySQL Binary distributions. Hide-and-SQL tried to answer the question, Why 5.4?

SQL Server

On In Recovery…, Paul S. Randal looked inside the storage engine: more on the circular nature of the log.

Alexander Kuznetsov gave part one of avoiding infinite loops by Alexander Kuznetsov gave part one of avoiding infinite loops by . . .  Mm, guess I’d better go read that.

Here’s an important question: Is it Time for a Professional Code of Ethics for DBAs?, discussed by Kevin Kline and his readers.

syscomments had one too: What’s the deal with SQL Server 2008 implementation?. “I was talking with a Microsoft representative at PASS and he asked me about our SQL Server 2008 implementation plan.  . . .  ‘I don’t have one.'”

Michelle Ufford, SQL Fool, explains her favourite 2008 feature—Filtered Indexes: What You Need To Know.

On Journey to SQL Authority, Pinal Dave offers an excellent introduction to JOINs.

PostgreSQL

Jignesh Shah published a HOWTO on trying Postgres 8.4 Beta1 using OpenSolaris Appliance for VirtualBox.

Bruce Momjian has setup a poll for people to vote on the anticipated release date of Postgres 8.4 final.

IBM DBMSs

On An Expert’s Guide to DB2 Technology, Chris Eaton writes, DB2 9.7 is Announced by IBM – I think it has something for everyone.

On his Informix technoology blog, Fernando Nunes has published a very thorough overview of Informix authentication and connections.

Oracle

Chen Shapira is back with a gazetteer for those of us who may have got lost following the NoCoug SQL Challenge.

Frank van Bortel has three excellent posts on special characters: “Special” Characters – part I; “Special” Characters – part II; and “Special” Characters – part III.

On The Dutch Prutser’s Blog, Harald van Breederode demonstrates flushing a cursor out of the library cache.

Kerry Osborne wonders about Hidden SQL – why can’t I find my SQL Text?, beginning, “A very frequently executed statement on a database was generating some waits on ‘SQL*Net more data from client’. ASH shows the statement, as does the V$SESSION view, but the statement never shows up in the V$SQL view nor in the AWR tables.”

Dion Cho responded to that with his item on LOB, sql_id and LCO.

And that is all. Oracle, Sun—no more big news for a while, if you please.

See you in a week’s time.