Log Buffer #192, A Carnival of The Vanities for DBAs

It’s Friday, and summer’s here. While it seems the industry is slowing down to a lazy pace, there is still some action so let’s splash right in to this week’s edition of Log Buffer DBA industry news in Log Buffer #192.

Alex Gorbachev had a few minutes to suggest the following interesting tidbits to me before running off to attend Oracle ACE Director activities at ODTUG/Kaleidoscope this weekend. One of these days we’ll have to see if he can share some of what goes on behind closed doors at those hush hush sessions.

He’s happy fellow OakTable member and Oracle ACE Director Tanel Poder is back to blogging with low-level undocumented internals for Oracle troubleshooting geeks.

Also an OakTable Network member, Jonathan Lewis, posted about the experience of one client migrating to 64 bit and increasing their SGA to see performance going down. The moral of this story is make sure your memory configuration is right.

Tom Kyte continues a series of blog posts about things he’s learning and likes, this time on SQL*Plus. And, at the same time includes something he doesn’t like, a feature in Windows 7 that he has mixed feelings on.

In the SQL Server world:

On his blog, In Recovery, Paul S. Randal runs some experiments to explore whether multiple data files can lead to an improvement in performance.

Adam Machanic smashes a DMV Myth: session_id > 50 == User Process on SQL blog.com.

Pinal Dave has two interesting posts this week on SQL Authority.com. In the first he shares his experience meeting and learning from trainer and industry guru Bryan Oliver. Secondly, he provides valuable advice for SQL Server developers dealing with XML from friend Jacob Sebastian on Select * FROM XML which he suggests looking at before reading his own advice on the same topic.

We continue to see the traction of MySQL within Oracle communities. More and more user group and Oracle-focused events are adding MySQL content to their agendas. At ODTUG/Kaleidoscope, Sheeri Cabral and Ronald Bradford were instrumental in developing the MySQL track of 19 sessions, and are speaking themselves.

Aleksander Kuzminsky announced that Percona Server 5.1.47-rel11 is available for download, noting new features and fixed bugs.

Craig Mullins writes how to access your DB2 Catalog “Poster” online for any of you constantly looking for DB2 Catalog table and column names.

Dave Page does a bit of comparison and gives his opinion on VoltDB, the new database server architected by the ‘father’ of Postgres, Dr Michael Stonebraker.

Until next week.