This is the 150th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Someone accidentally left Dave Edwards‘ cage unlocked, and he escaped, thus leaving me with the pleasurable duty of compiling the 150th weekly Log Buffer.
Many people other than Dave are finding release this week. Giuseppe Maxia explains some details of MySQL’s New Release Model. Andrew Morgan announces a New MySQL Cluster Maintenance Release. Aleksandr Kuzminsky of the MySQL Performance Blog releases build16 of the Percona MySQL binaries (versions 5.0.77 and 5.0.82), which adds some 5.4 features and fixes some bugs.
Darran Cassar, the MySQL Preacher, has created a package for Security Roles and Password Expiry on MySQL. And for a future MySQL release, look for Two New Status Variable Patches, for query invalidation count and a last received datetime for replication heartbeat. These patches were contributed by MySQL Support Team member Andrew Hutchins.
Dave Beulke points out a new feature in DB2 9.7 — DB2 Compatible with Oracle.
To prepare for a future SQL Server release where CREATE DEFAULT, sp_bindefault and sp_unbindefault will be deprecated, Martin Bell advocates Changing Bound Defaults to Default Constraints. If you are going to upgrade SQL Server, definitely look at the notes from SQL Master of SQL Server QA’s presentation on SQL Server Upgrade Issues and How To Evaluate Potential Issues.
Stewart Smith lets is know that Drizzle Tarballs for the Next Milestone – Aloha are being released weekly. Meanwhile, Jay Pipes and the rest of the Drizzle team find, fix and explain the cause of a performance regression in Drizzle Performance Regression Solved – TCMalloc vs. No TCMalloc.
Lenz Grimmer has started organizing OpenSQLCamp 2009, Aug 22-23 in Germany; he posts details and links in Speaking at FrOSCon and Organizing the OpenSQLCamp 2009, European Edition. If you want to speak, Lenz also lets you know that Ronald Bradford gives out a discount code and reminds us that we can still attend OSCon 2009 at a Discounted Rate (until June 23rd). OSCon 2009 will be held July 20-24 in San Jose, California. And in Iowa, Michelle Ufford sends out the East Iowa SQL Saturday Call for Speakers to be held on Saturday, October 10, 2009.
Getting back to basics, Richard Foote explains Oracle’s cost-based optimizer in CBO and Indexes, an Introduction for Absolute Beginners. Speaking of optimizations, Valcora has Another Way To Do Performance Tuning — make sure you actually need the queries that are running against your system!
Tanel Poder points to a blog post on Using Perfsheet and TPT Scripts for Solving Real Life Performance Problems in an Oracle RAC environment. And Jonathan Lewis provides a script you can run if you are concerned about the potantial of Oracle PGA leaks. Over at Oraclue, Miladin Modrakovic shows how to discover memory “leaks and other problems with allocations of memory” in Memory Annotations and Oradebug.
If you are migrating a database from Oracle to MySQL, you may be interested in George Trujillo’s process of Converting an Oracle Schema to MySQL.
Kimberly L. Tripp reveals a lot of information about how SQL Server optimizes queries and common myths when she reveals The Tipping Point Query Answers. David Fetter shares Materialized Views Performance Tips in Postgres, and Leo Hsu and Regina Obe talk about Planner Statistics in the Postgres optimizer.
In the land of DB2, Henrik Loeser shares a PureXML Performance Tip: A Sequence of Good Indexes.
Coskan explains
How to Use Sysman Schema Without Oracle Enterprise Manager. John Hallas notes that using Oracle’s EM to migrate a database to ASM is easy, but seems slow, in ASM Metadata and Migrating a Database to ASM. He then goes on to share a coworker’s Script to Backup ASM Metadata. J. Arneil shows how to go about Fixing up ASM Disk Header Corruption, should you find yourself in a rough spot.
Aaron Alton has a great article telling us that in Defensive Programming, Assumptions Must be Guaranteed or Tested, and another one on handling tags efficiently in Full Text Search vs. Denormalized Tables Remus Rusanu provides a Transact-SQL stored procedure template for Exception Handling and Nested Transactions.
I’ll end with a link to another survey on What’s the hardest part of becoming an involuntary DBA? It’s one simple question, so go fill it out! You have the time, especially since Craig Mullins points out that on average, we got a 4.6% salary increase in 2008 in Salaries for Data Professionals Inching Upward. To learn more and become even better in your field, get a 15-day free trial to Safari Books Online from O’Reilly, with a 15% discount if you continue past the free trial, courtesy of Susan Visser.