Welcome to the fifth edition of Log Buffer. There’s lots to cover this week, so here goes.
First, we join Pete-s random notes in congratulating Tim Hall on his Oracle ACE of the Year award. People like Tim deserve a lot of recognition for the help they provide so many others.
By the way, does anyone know what “ACE” means? I searched for a while, but found no satisfactory answer. It looks like an acronym, however I theorize that Oracle might simply have meant “Ace” (as in “expert” or “hotshot”) but capitulated to creeping TLA-ism.
If you’re curious about what DBAs are getting paid (ACEs or not), and what affects their pay, you might participate in The Unofficial Oracle Developer/DBA Salary Survey on Eddie Awad’s Blog. It’s un-scientific (i.e. not accurate within 4%, 19 times out of 20), but should yield some interesting results nonetheless — depending on how much response Eddie gets.
He also has a question about Oracle’s documentation search, and Steve Chan elucidates the same subject on Oracle’s Blogs.
Perhaps you’re an tyro DBA looking for your first job in the field. On OLAP BI IM stuff, Duncan Lamb points to interview tips for aspiring junior DBAs.
It’s important that qualified, dedicated DBAs are taught and hired because they are the front-line workers in our world of ubiquitous data. How is all that data secured? In Confessions of a database geek, Beth Breidenbach has some thoughts on this, and an open question to all of us about practices. It seems especially relevant in the wake of AOL’s little mistake.
We now return to Monster Chiller Horror Theatre’s presentation of “3D House of SQL Injectors!” Joey De Villa of the Tucows Farm looks the monster in the face, covering two articles that thoroughly dissect what SQL injections attacks are in practice. Scary stuff!
Turning to things that are improved, Francisco Figueiredo Jr posts that release candidate 3 of Npgsql, a .NET data provider for PostgreSQL will soon be available.
Raven Zachary of 451 CAOS Theory posts some business news about PostgreSQL. In short, EnterpriseDB signed a deal with Sun Microsystems to provide PostgreSQL support to Sun’s customers. This could be a big step forward for Postgres’s enterprise adoption.
MySQL AB’s VP of Community Relations, Kaj Ärno, tells of a possible step forward for MySQL — making MySQL Linux Standard Base 3.1-compliant.
If you want to learn how to contribute code to MySQL with the MySQL Contributor License Agreement, Kaj has that too. However, Bogomil Shopov of the Open Ideas Company suggests that the new license will hinder, rather than help, MySQL. Several people including Ärno respond, and a worthwhile discussion follows.
Strong Open Source projects like MySQL have strong communities. Bogomil also posts an item about the first meeting of the MySQL Users Group in Sofia, Bulgaria, slides and photos included.
And Jay Pipes announces the birth of a wiki for the upcoming MySQL Camp.
Turning to technical posts — on Tuesday, Pythian’s Shervin Sheidaei wrote the first of a series of articles on a new STATSPACK methodology, and Herod T, Yet Another Oracle DBA, offers some info on finding, installing, and using STATSPACK.
Unorthodoxy may give advantage, suggests Pete-s random notes. Pete explains his approach to tables for M-VIEW queries in Oracle.
Likewise, maybe scripting in one of the “P-languages” is too in-crowd for you. Maybe you like dark horses… or dark birds. mythago introduces Raven: A Scripting Language for MySQL.
Adam Machanic of data manipulation for fun and profit shows his crafty approach to side-stepping the performance penalty of scalar user-defined functions in SQL Server 2000.
Xapbr has a brief tutorial on how to give locking hints in MySQL, and the comments expand on it.
A post about LOCK IN SHARE MODE in MySQL/Innodb was one of several items this week on Peter Zaitsev’s MySQL Performance Blog. Peter introduces his new MySQL forums, too.
On MySQL-dump, Kristian Köhntopp gives a quick (and thorough) tour of DRDB, MySQL’s RAID-1-like “distributed raw block device” functionality.
If you’re a DB2 administrator and like to know all the little details (a good trait in a DBA), Craig Mullins’s article Where exactly is a DB2 plan stored? will make you happy.
Archive Log
On July 30th, Jay Pipes began a series of posts about the MySQL Build Farm Initiative. This project is quickly moving from proposal to fact.
This week, Log Buffer came back from abroad, ate me out of house and home, and left again without so much as a “goodbye”. It’s going off to Mike Kruckenberg’s for a week, and after that, who knows — your place?
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