Category: Server Tuning

Dorsal Source has a list of where you can get MySQL binaries — official and unofficial — up at:

http://www.dorsalsource.org

From: http://tinyurl.com/299h29

Oracle Updates Free SQL Developer Tools
Oracle Corp. has released the first major upgrade to SQL Developer, its free visual database development tool. The new version can browse non-Oracle databases, including Microsoft SQL Server and Access and MySQL AB’s open-source MySQL. The SQL Developer 1.1 tool simplifies the creation and debugging of code in standard SQL and in Oracle’s proprietary PL/SQL programming languages.

Roland Bouman has an excellent blog post on it:
http://rpbouman.blogspot.com/2007/01/oracle-sql-developer-11-supports-mysql.html

December 29th, 2006 – by Sheeri Kritzer

Welcome to the 25th edition of Log Buffer, the DBA community’s Carnival of the Vanities-style blog of blogs about the database world.

This is the last Log Buffer of calendar year 2006. The database world seems to be a series of series lately, so let’s jump right in:

If, like me, you have no idea what doors and signals are in Solaris 10, you might want to read part 4 of Frank Mash‘s “Managing MySQL on Solaris 10”, entitled Solaris Doors and Signals.

On a more theoretical level, Random Notes describes lack of easy and complete access in the 3rd part of the series, “What stops a BI implementation from being a success?”

There’s always lots of spam in my inbox about enhancement of one thing or another. Chris Eaton uses enhanced views in An Expert’s Guide to DB2 Technology‘s series on using SQL to monitor DB2 9 with SQL scripts and enhanced views:

• Viewing Notification Logs
• Viewing Database History and
• Viewing Long-Running Queries

The similarly-named An Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology has a series on Oracle Streams. This week part 2 describes how to Send CDC [Change Data Capture] Data to 9i Jonathan Lewis‘ Oracle Scratchpad scratches out a second part to his Analysing Statspack.

Fulltext search is a pretty hot topic no matter what database you’re using, and zillablog has PostgreSQL full text search testing PART II. MySQL users beware — Kevin Burton‘s Feed Blog reveals a MySQL Bug with FLUSH TABLES and Fulltext Indexes in >=4.1.

If you’re the type that likes to type their own data by typing in new types, Radio Free Tooting toots their series on Programming with Oracle SQL TYPE constructs with Part 2.

The new year is almost upon us, and 2007 is when the US and Canada are affected by Daylight Savings Time pattern changes. Oracle’s Director of Applications Technology Integration Steven Chan has Documentation Available for Daily Saving Time 2007 Changes for Apps 11i.

And speaking of corny transitions between paragraphs, Oracle “springs ahead” with a USD $54 million grant to Indian polytechnical schools. CRM Chump has the scoop at Oracle Academy Gearing Up for Spring Semester in India.

In case you prefer Halloween over Christmas, Arjen Lentz gives users a “trick” instead of a “treat” in his Christmas Challenge: getting information out of INSERT/UPDATE in MySQL — the post contains how to get information out of a MySQL UPDATE, and the comments have Data Charmer Guiseppe Maxia INSERT answer.

Brian Duff of Duffblog has a link to a Flash Virtual Tour of Oracle’s “Unbreakable” Datacenter.

In the “How-to” department, Alexander Gladchenko writes about how to RESTORE onto RAW partition in SQL Server. Oracle is not Magic, it just takes years of experience writes about How to apply patch when adpatch is currently running? Oracle Online Help shows how to find the Execution plan of a running SQL statement. Step-by-step How to stop a DB2 Instance will remove even the most stubborn DB2 processes.

Insights of DB2 & Application Development takes a stance In Defence of Microsoft stating that while “DB2 is the first data server to offer programmers a choice of using Windows Vista”, Microsoft has made a patch available so that SQL Server may be run on Vista. How often do geeks defend Microsoft, anyway?

Reading between the lines of Tom Moertel‘s Never Store Passwords in a Database! it’s implicitly stated that companies should assume that customers use the same password regardless of security — Reddit should have assumed that people use the same password for Reddit as their e-mail and bank accounts, and secure their passwords accordingly. Explicitly, the comments state that “Never” means “As a general rule” and “Passwords” means “cleartext passwords”.

Firebird news reminds us that the 8th International Free Software Forum (fisl8.0, for “Free and Open Software”) call for papers is still open until January 7th.

Kevin Closson’s Oracle Blog debunks the latest benchmarking record set by Oracle on SAP, and also talks about the high availability of RAC. It’s always interesting to see the facts behind the facts, and how the scientific method can go astray when the background is revealed.

Log Buffer ends 2006 with some food for thought. Sean McCown’s Database Underground asks and answers, “Where Does Database Auditing Belong?”

Has anyone used MySQL Turbo Manager? What do they think?

From: http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=36474

Mentat Technologies, Inc. announced it will offer MySQL Turbo Manager Free Edition, a brand new, free graphical tool for database development and administration. With MySQL Turbo Manager Free Edition, you can browse database objects, run SQL statements and SQL scripts, edit and execute Stored Procedures. MySQL Turbo Manager works with any MySQL Server versions from 3.2.3 to 5.1 and supports all MySQL objects and all MySQL options.

You can download MySQL Turbo Manager Free Edition at: http://www.mentattech.com/themes/mentat/download.html

I think the Sysadmin of the Year is a great idea, and I wish I knew about it when nominations were happening! DBA’s and network administrators also count.

From http://www.sysadminoftheyear.com/

The first annual Sysadmin of the Year (SAOTY) contest has been a huge success. Nominations for SAOTY closed at midnight on October 31, 2006 with more than 5,000 sysadmins nominated. The nominations were outstanding and inspiring.

Grandprize: Washington DC Trip to Attend LISA and a $2,500 Splunk Professional License
Michael Beck — Emerging Technologies Group, USA

1st Place: MacBook
Sean Thomas — True Prism Technologies (Ulanji)

Runnerup: Splunk License
Darren Barry — US Air Force

Micah Anderson — Eggplant Media Workers’ Cooperative
Dawn Lovell — CenturyTel
Mike Jennings — Rackspace

Honorable Mention: Case of Bawls Soda
Nik Keating — digital.forest
Russ Steffen — Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (US Navy)
Denis Roy — Eclipse Foundation
Justin Hartwell — Yarn Lady

About SysAdmin of the Year

SAOTY is a contest inviting business professionals to nominate their company’s system administrator to receive recognition and prizes for their outstanding achievements. Any network, system, database or application administrator can be nominated. Nominators are required to submit an online nomination entry form summarizing why they believe the nominee deserves the honor of being named the Sysadmin of the Year. Submissions are judged by a panel consisting of representatives from the sponsoring organizations and other IT professionals. The contest is open to U.S. and Canadian resident IT administrators currently employed as an IT administrator.

Mike Kruckenberg posted recently a tip he found to create easy text bar charts using the REPEAT function, that he found at:

http://www.squarebits.com/blog/2006/11/generate_simple.html

Today I stumbled across this link:
http://www.webcheatsheet.com/php/dynamic_image_generation.php#diagram

Which, using PHP, creates a graphical bar chart using the data in a MySQL database and a small bit of math.

Both are very neat!

“Nokia Foundation has granted its 2006 award to Marten Mickos for his merits in advancing the use of Open Source technology and for his inspirational leadership of an international software company.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself, but I don’t have an award to give. Cheers to Mårten!

Read the whole article here:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061122/ukw015.html?.v=70

(Happy Thanksgiving to US folks stateside or expatriots)

I just read this post, thanks to the database log buffer:

http://marist89.blogspot.com/2006/11/where-am-i-deploying-mysql.html

I think the major point is subtle, and can be gotten by taken the first and last few sentences of the post:

“If cost were no object, I’d always deploy Oracle. I’m comfortable with Oracle technology and I think I have a pretty good idea how to implement and administer it….My company is sold on MySQL and as our confidence grows in the software, so will our installed base.”

He says that MySQL is an “80% solution” but he would not use it for “mission critical applications.” I will venture to say that this is because he is not familiar with MySQL. If he were, he would be more comfortable with the fact that MySQL is an enterprise-level, mission-critical solution. James Day recently commented on a blog post (http://sheeri.net/archives/141#comment-7043) saying,

“Well, I work for MySQL and I’m happy enough to say it: the Community Edition is fine for production systems with huge loads like Wikipedia, where two of the members of the MySQL Support team come from. Merely one of the top 20-30 web sites in the world, doing around a couple of billion queries a day.”

The article goes on to say where MySQL is good, which I actually appreciate. However, it basically says “MySQL is good as a database, but does not have as many ‘extras’ as other DBMS’s have.”

Take the first example:

The first [sweet spot of MySQL] is small to medium size OLTP databases (<100 GB) that are fronted by something like a java middle-tier. These applications typically control most of the business logic and authentication/authorization in the middle-tier (right or wrong) and use the database as a big storage bucket. These applications rely on the backend serving data as fast as it can and MySQL can serve data just as fast as the next guy.

Is there something wrong with expecting a database to be “a big storage bucket”? Isn’t that what it’s for? Isn’t that like saying “HTML is great, but it sucks for business logic.” That is the entire point — it’s the UI layer.

Similarly, databases are the storage layers. In a good theoretical model, databases are not supposed to have business logic embedded in them.

Sure, if the database does it faster, then put the business logic there. But know that you are doing that, make a conscious decision, and say “yes, we’re breaking from good theory for better performance”. Much like, say, denormalizing a table.

And MySQL isn’t “just as fast as the next guy”. It’s FASTER, otherwise why would people use it, because it’s much less featured than Oracle? This I’ll admit — however, you can code around features. No amount of code can make Oracle faster.

In the 2nd “sweet spot”, it says that MySQL excels at retrieving data. Hot damn, isn’t that what a database is supposed to do? Is Oracle not good at retrieving data? If Oracle is better at storing business logic than retrieving data, shouldn’t it be called a programming language, not a database?

In the third sweet spot, you say MySQL is good at stuffing lots of data into denormalized tables. I’ve been using MySQL for quite a long time, and I missed the part where stuffing lots of data into normalized tables is slow. It’s fast for stuffing lots of data into tables, period.

And yes, it’s snappy for retrieving data. So it’s good for putting data in and taking data out. I am not sure how this says “it is not good for mission critical applications.” It does everything a database is supposed to do. So does the blog post implying MySQL doesn’t have 24×7 reliability?

What’s your uptime with Oracle?

MySQL has fabulous uptimes, multi-threaded processing, etc. My company relies on MySQL, and we make > USD $220,000 per week.

Is it perfect? no. But is it reliable? Damn skippy.

To Jeff Hunter’s comment I say: Incremental backups exist — that’s what binary logs are.