Welcome to the 93th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Conference season is upon us, so it’s been a busy week. There was the MySQL Conference & Expo, so let’s look at that.
Arjen Lentz posts about Sunday’s community dinner, including the arrival of an unexpected guest. Two photos: one of Pythian’s Paul Vallée getting some Sun; the second from the pre-conference dinner.
Zack Urlocker has a couple pieces with both photos and links to video of the keynote addresses from Marten Mickos, Jonathan Schwartz, and Rich Green. From Wednesday, and from Thursday.
Congratulations are due to Baron Schwartz, Diego Medina, and Sheeri Cabral. Baron reports from the conference that the three of them were awarded the 2008 MySQL Community Awards, and his piece makes for a very apt acceptance speech. Here’s Kaj Arn’s more official post on the Community Awards.
Baron also has good summaries of the conference course: day one, and day two.
Elsewhere on the MySQL scene, much ado about the immediate roadmap for the DBMS, as introduced at the conference. Jeremy Cole got things going, writing, MySQL to launch new features only in MySQL Enterprise: “MySQL will start offering some features . . . only in MySQL Enterprise. This represents a substantive change to their development model” previously they have been developing features in both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. However, with a shift to offering some features only in MySQL Enterprise, this means a shift to development of those features occurring . . . only in MySQL Enterprise.” This post got a lot of comments, including from MySQL boss Marten Mickos.
On The Open Road, Matt Asay follows the flare-up in Core, complements, and semantics, beginning by referring to Jeremy as, “a disgruntled ex-MySQL employee”, and later pondering why MySQL (under Sun) doesn’t adopt a model based on Red Hat’s very successful one.
On the MySQL Performance Blog, Vadim opines that MySQL is partially open-sourced. Marten, among others, shows up again with a rebutting comment or two. He must be a very busy man.
From inside the organization, here’s Zack Urlocker’s perspective on two markets in unison.
Matthew Aslett of 451 CAOS Theory writes that MySQL’s business model in a state of flux. He says, “. . . the problem MySQL has right now is a public relations problem (or a community relations problem). Given that there does not appear to be a vast change in strategy (despite the headlines this is a bend in the road rather than an about turn), this should not pose a long-term problem for the company.”
I guess given the controversy, it was inevitable that, as Stewart Smith reports on Ramblings, there would emerge a community member with a MySQL fork.
Staying on meta-issues for a moment, Ronald Bradford, a man of Opinions, Expertise, Passion, wonders what’s in a new name, specifically Sun’s recent announcement of, “pending general availability of MySQLâ„¢ 5.1”, which seems to him like announcing the arrival of the arrival.
Magnus Hagander’s PostgreSQL Blog says MySQL is now “not quite open source”, having read, “some new announcement from the dolphin-herders”. (Have you ever seen an elephant blush before?)
Robert Treat of zillablog says he’s “always a sucker to read about Yet Another MySQL Engine,” and has his say on the debut of Kickfire, pointing out that there are competing products out there built on Postgres.
The Oracle world had some fun this week too. It was Collaborate 08 week. Arnoud Roth of the AMIS Blog covered each day, beginning, naturally enough, with day one of the conference.
Pythian’s Alex Gorbachev was there, but he still found some time to publish his MySQL Plug-in 0.42 for Oracle Grid Control.
Dan Norris offers a thorough examination of PIPELINED PL/SQL function performance.
Oracle Today likewise looks into collect in 10G, beginning, “Collections can be a great help in speeding up the PL/SQL programs. . . . In 9.2 we needed to use the bulk collect clause to fetch rows into a collection. 10G brings a new function called COLLECT, which takes a column as a parameter and returns a nested table containing the column values. Using this we can get the data into a collection without using bulk collect.”
Jason Arneil has some thoughts on the April CPU, noting a flaw in the documentation and some overlap with the 10.2.0.4 Patch Set.
On his Oracle Scratchpad, Jonathan Lewis wishes the UK Oracle User Group a Happy 25th Birthday, and announces their call for papers for the UK Oracle User Group 2008 Conference and Exhibition.
Tom Kyte is looking for ideas for his talk at the next Oracle Open World, and he’s open to suggestions. Lots of good ones already.
SQL Server time now. Jamie Thomson, the SSIS Junkie, was on his way to MS’s MVP Summit 2008. He writes: “As I see it one of the assumed responsibilities of an MVP is to represent the views of the community as well as provide one’s own opinions and with that in mind I’d like to invite readers of this blog to leave a comment here answering the questions ‘What should the SSIS product team be concentrating on for future versions?'” Lots of responses there too.
Systems Engineering and RDBMS posts a link to a gazetteer of SQL Server Build Versions.
Here at Pythian, Adam Machanic says that more relief is on the way: “. . . I consider lack of procedure cache control to be a major SQL Server pain point. Badly written apps that use non-parameterized ad hoc queries can quickly flood SQL Server’s memory pools and bring the server to its knees. . . . The good news: SQL Server 2008 will include an sp_configure option called ‘optimize for ad hoc workloads’.” The bad news is there’s bad news too.
Joe Webb reports on SQL Server Security Vulnerabilities. “At the 2007 PASS Community Summit in Denver, a keynote speaker made a passing comment about how there has not been a security bulletin released for SQL Server in over three years! . . . Not a single security bulletin released in over three years! Could this be true?” He writes that it appears to be so — not since SQL Slammer. Get the facts from Joe’s piece.
Last, Bill G. of Thoughts on SQL Server posts some pictures from the PASS Europe conference. Wait a second . . . look at this:
And remember this pic of Arjen’s from the MySQL Conference?
Makes you think, doesn’t it — no matter which DBMS it is, DBAs still SELECT from tables.
And, having made an atrocious pun, I hastily make my exit. Ronald Bradford takes the reins next week for Log Buffer #94. See you soon!
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