Log Buffer #298, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

It’s always sunny in the database arena, even if the data is engulfed in the clouds. Innovation rays keep databases illuminating, and bloggers make hay while the sun shines. This Log Buffer Edition sifts through all these blog post.

Oracle:

Michael Abbey writes: My account of this year’s fascinating UKOUG conference is simply awesome. Pythian’s Paul Vallee, Vanessa Simmons, Luke Davies, Paul Logan, Alex Gorbachev, and many other presenters were there to set the stage on fire.

Jonathan Lewis is sharing a funny little glitch – typical of the sort of oddity that creeps into the data dictionary from time to time.

Thinking of adding disks to VMware Workstation 8 on the fly on RHEL 6? Martin Bach blogs about it.

Enqueue – is it a PK, FK, or Bitmap Index problem? Kyle asks.

Profiling PL/SQL is an Oracle feature since Oracle 9i (2001), and yet, Frits Hoogland hasn’t seen anyone actually use the profiler.

Should you use BIGFILE temporary tablespaces in an Exadata system? Marc Fielding answers.

SQL Server:

Free SQL training is happening right now, Jen McCown informs.

James Serra is giving SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) – November 2012 update.

Jason Strate is talking about Deprecated System Tables – syslockinfo.

Why are Corporate BI and Self-Service BI both necessary? Chris Webb answers.

Valentino Vranken is wasting some time because of a silly bug.  This time, it was due to the OLE DB Source component and the way it works with parameters.

MySQL:

Tungsten Replicator is a popular replacement for MySQL replication. It has now become a mature and robust product, with an easy-to-use installer. Petri Virsunen has more.

Martin Farach-Colton is reviewing fractal tree indexing and answers questions about how Fractal Tree indexes work. It’s a write-optimized index with fast queries.

Tony Darnell is using the MySQL Script mysqlfailover for Automatic Failover with MySQL 5.6 GTID Replication.

Gerrit is talking about the differences between SQLite and MySQL and when to use them.

Jay Janssen is giving tips on how to quickly find unused indexes and estimate their size.