Log Buffer #459: a carnival of the vanities for DBAs

This Log Buffer Edition arranges few tips and tricks from the blogs of Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL.

Oracle:

Oracle ® Solaris innovation is due in part to the UNIX® the standard (1), the test suites (2) and the certification (3). By conforming to the standard, using the test suites and driving to certification, Oracle ® Solaris software engineers can rely on stable interfaces and an assurance that any regressions will be found quickly given more than 50,000 test cases.

Building on the program established last year to provide evaluation copies of popular FOSS components to Solaris users, the Solaris team has announced the immediate availability of additional and newer software, ahead of official Solaris releases.

Tracing in Oracle Reports 12c.

Issues with Oracle Direct NFS.

An interesting observation came up on the Oracle-L list server a few days ago that demonstrated how clever the Oracle software is at minimising run-time work, and how easy it is to think you know what an execution plan means when you haven’t actually thought through the details – and the details might make a difference to performance.

SQL Server:

Manipulating Filetable Files Programatically

Auto-suggesting foreign keys and data model archaeology

Create/write to an Excel 2007/2010 spreadsheet from an SSIS package.

Tabular vs Multidimensional models for SQL Server Analysis Services.

The PoSh DBA – Towards the Re-usable PowerShell Script.

MySQL:

MyRocks vs InnoDB with Linkbench over 7 days.

MySQL has been able to harness the potential of more powerful (CPU) and larger (RAM, disk space.

Setup a MongoDB replica/sharding set in seconds.

MySQL 5.7 makes secure connections easier with streamlined key generation for both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise, improves security by expanding support for TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2, and helps administrators assess whether clients are connecting securely or not.

While EXPLAIN shows the selected query plan for a query, optimizer trace will show you WHY the particular plan was selected. From the trace you will be able to see what alternative plans was considered, the estimated costs of different plans, and what decisions was made during query optimization.