Log Buffer #183, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Hello folks, it’s great to be back from hiatus. This is the 183rd edition of Log Buffer (arguably the best edition of Log Buffer yet!), the weekly review of database blogs.

The last time I wrote this was just under 2 years ago!!! WoW. Things have changed. Sun bought MySQL, Oracle bought Sun. Those were bombshell deals. At least you can rest assured that some things can be constant. I still eat my daily serving of broccoli (among other healthful “things”). I urge you all to go the fridge and grab some veggies prior to sitting down for this week’s… ahem… digest.

Starting with Oracle, Pythian’s own Alex Fatkulin illustrates a bug (?…likely) that could lead to logically corrupted data. Doug Burns provides an update on his Hotsos 2010 trip with some serious thumbs-up action pointing in Tanel Poder’s direction and his affinity toward SQL*Plus.

Over at Mark Rittman’s Oracle Weblog, Venkatakrishnan J talks about Oracle Warehouse Builder 11gR2 – Importing Essbase Cubes using ODI Knowledge Modules – Part 1. This should drive the MySQL folks bonkers (in a good way) since he points to an example by David Allen to import MySQL Metadata over and vice versa.

Oracle Virtualization Blog’s Adam Hawley let everyone know about a Best Practices around Oracle VM with RAC RAC SIG webcast. It was on March 18th, but it was recorded and should be available online. I’m interested in this stuff so I included it here. I hope you can enjoy it too.

I had the honour to recently provide a training session at a customer site on tuning methods and tools. A key topic of the discussion was related to Oracle statistics and the CBO. It was timely that the Oracle Scratchpad’s Jonathan Lewis posted a series created by Doug Burns all about stats. Nice.

Has anyone ever told you (or maybe you deduced it on your own) that leaving out where clauses is a bad thing. Well, leave it to Charles Hooper on his Oracle Notes to prove to us that sometimes, they are actually more efficient for solving certain types of problems. In another excellent post titled Physical Reads are Very Fast, Why is this SQL Statement Slow Charles also dives into why a slow query is “actually” slow. There’s an interesting discussion taking place. More performance tuning goodness was posted by Joel Goodman discussing some interesting behaviour with Oracle Index Leaf Blocks contention. Tell RAC to Leave Your Leaves Alone! Kerry Osborne illustrates the use of an interesting hidden parameter (_high_priority_processes) to resolve “log file sync” issues.

Over on the other side of the fence in the MySQL world, Jay Pipes @ Join-Fu gives us some background on the MySQL Transaction Log. Vadim Tkachenko with the MySQL Performance Blog has a number of posts on Percona 9.1 as well as a list of related sessions at the 2010 MySQL conference. Check it out.

On a more somber note (and by somber I mean legal, we all hate legalese don’t we?), Giuseppe Maxia over at The Data Charmer discusses Protocol, the GPL, and how Bazaar can help. He also has some good takeaways from the Linux MySQL distros meeting in Brussels. Baron Schwartz at xaprb has a new tool he’d like the MySQL folks to take for a spin. Try mk-query-advisor, a new Maatkit tool. It uses heuristics to find problems in SQL. Please use it and give feedback!

Are you interested in MySQL Clustering? I am. Andew Morgan has a new post introducing a tutorial to Build MySQL Cluster 7.1 from source – including MySQL Cluster Connector for Java. With Alex Fatkulin maybe running into an as yet possibly, sort of , kinda non-discovered bug, it’s only fair we also get some vision into the dark side on the MySQL front. Shlomi Noach states But I DO want MySQL to say “ERROR”!.

Brian Aker invites readers to participate at this year’s O’Reilly MySQL User’s Conference where they will be doing their first ever Ignite talk series.

Lastly, Stewart Smith has a very good set of posts illustrating Stored Procedures/Functions for Drizzle. Check this out (from Stewart’s post).

drizzle> select libtcc("#include <string.h>\n#include <stdlib.h>\nint foo(char* s) { char *a= 0x199c610; strcpy(s, a); return strlen(s); }") as result;
+--------------+
| result       |
+--------------+
| Hello World! |
+--------------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

I dare you.

On to SQL Server….

Scary DBA SQL MVP Grant Fritchey discusses Undocumented Virtual Column: %%lockres% and also recaps the SNESSUG March Meeting.

Jamie Thomson gives keyboard junkies some tips to Kill your temp tables using keyboard shortcuts : SSMS. Anyone interested in distributed queries should read Buck Woody’s Using linked servers, OPENROWSET and OPENQUERY.

Finally, Aaron Bertrand says with conviction “Yes, you can benefit from both data and backup compression”.

Having now exhausted my supply of munchies, it is time for me to retire. I bid you all a fantastic week. Keep your data safe, folks.

Shakir