Log Buffer #228, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Sun is shining and the warm wind is blowing and bringing in new and novel ideas for the technology  blogs and database are no exception. From the SQL Server to MySQL and up to Oracle, blogs are bubbling with warm and cool blog posts and we present you the pick of the week in this Log Buffer #228 edition of Log Buffer.

Oracle:

There is an Exadata Virtual Conference, which has been organized by Tanel Poder on August 3rd and 4th. Kerry Osborne has more details.

The new release of  DB Optimizer , version 3.o, from Embarcadero has awesome new feature : explain plan overlay onto VST diagrams! Kyle Hailey blogs here.

Randolf Geist starts series of blog posts that shed some light on the enhancements Oracle has introduced with the recent releases regarding the optimizations of logical I/O.

And Kyle has noticed a number of people posting queries using DBA_HIST_SYSSTAT instead of DBA_HIST_SYSMETRIC_SUMMARY which leads him to believe that there is some confusion or lack of information on the metric tables.

What is the purpose of segment level checkpoint before DROP/TRUNCATE of a table? Tanel Poder answers.

SQL Server:

Chris Shaw shares a great news which has to do with the results of the DBTechCon for which he was the track mentor.

GROUP BY groups the result set into summary rows by provided columns. Vishal gives a working example.

Indexes are the single most important structure in our relation database world. So, it is understandable that Wes Brown does everything he can to gather information, monitor their health and maintain them to the best of his ability.

Todd McDermid gets the “what’s a pipeline got to do with Integration Services” question out of the way.

Michael Swart guides as how to make your life easier with fun Denali tricks.

MySQL:

Lachlan Mulcahy blogs about a performance issue which sprouted when they deployed a new NFS filer running on top of Nexenta using ZFS.

Michael Bender talks about a talk entitled “Don’t Thrash: How to Cache your Hash.” The talk took place at the Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (ADS) in a medieval castle turned conference center in Bertinoro, Italy.

Even if you think you know everything about LEFT JOIN, Ilan Hazan bets you will learn something or two in this post.

Shlomi Noach is listing some useful sed / awk liners to use with MySQL.

Keith Larson says that having multiple ways to achieve a task is something we all enjoy as developers and DBAs. We find, develop and learn new ways to do things better and faster all the time, and then he risks a debate.

Happy Blogging!!!