Log Buffer #73: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Welcome to the 73rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database related blogs. Without further ado, here it is, in no specific order:

Lewis Cunningham of An Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology, in his RAT smelling post, asks about Real Application Testing (RAT) and its relationship with other acronyms like Fake Application Testing (FAT), Real Application Real Testing (RART), Real Application Fake Testing (RAFT) and even Fake Application Real Testing (FART).

Laurent Schneider of the Laurent Schneider blog is really having fun with the MODEL clause. After his unconference session in Oracle OpenWorld about this simple, yet complicated clause, Laurent uses MODEL to generate random statements.

Chen Shapira of I’m just a simple DBA on a complex production system, was inspired by Laurent’s post about generating random statements. So, she went ahead and created an algorithm for transforming any text into potentially humorous garbage, using SQL and PL/SQL. Chen was also excited to meet Mr. Pythian, a real live CEO who founded a company that she really admires.

Kevin Closson of the Kevin Closson’s Oracle Blog does not like the fact that it takes so long to get applications certified with new releases such as Oracle Database 11g, especially that a jump from 9i to 11g would breath a lot of life into a database.

Marco Gralike of blog.gralike.com uses, and sometimes updates, the table SYS.PROPS$ to change/view the database NLS character set. He asks if anyone has more information about the difference in the data in this table between 10g and 11g.

Alexander Kornbrust of red database security reviews the ebook Practical Oracle Security and lists some potential problems and inaccuracies he found in the book.

Yasin Baskan of Oracle Today, while upgrading to 10g, discovers that bind peeking has been extended to binds buried inside expressions. He demonstrates this change in his post bind peeking change in 10g.

Beth Breidenbach of Confessions of a database geek is still pondering unstructured data and asks: If knowledge contained within unstructured data is useful to an organization’s decision-making, what quality attributes shall we consider when assessing its quality?

Hampus Linden of Halis way describes how to convert MySQL “on update current_timestamp” to Oracle using a trigger.

Mark Rittman of Rittman Mead Consulting publishes information about the UKOUG annual Conference & Exhibition, the largest independent Oracle User Group Conference taking place the first week of December.

Pat Shuff of Pat Shuff’s Blog describes in length the process that he followed to learn OracleVM.

Jake Kuramoto of the Oracle AppsLab asks: what do you really want from a social network?. For Jake, LinkedIn is not interesting. Facebook is interesting but it’s no longer his primary network. He likes Twitter, but says that it suffers from an image problem. He wants a network to entertain and inform him, with minimal effort.

MySQL, SQL Server, DB2 and others:

Matt Asay of The Open Road announces that MySQL has released the Standard Edition of its MySQL Workbench under a proprietary license and draws a comparison between MySQL Workbench and a Thanksgiving pie.

Savio Rodrigues of rand($thoughts); believes that MySQL is doing the absolute right thing in delivering MySQL Workbench as an OSS product, with a commercial version that builds on the OSS version.

Parvesh Garg of Optim MySQL points out the pros and cons of using GET_LOCK and related functions.

Sheeri Kritzer of The MySQL She-BA is figuring out how not to cause duplicate information if a large INSERT statement fails before finishing.

Yves Trudeau of the Yves Trudeau’blog reminds you that vmstat is a very useful tool, especially when you are doing performance tuning of an application like MySQL. He also shows you how to generate graphs from vmstat output.

Sean McCown of Database Underground is a little disappointed with his new Katmai experience.

Euan Garden of the Euan Garden’s Blog reminds you about the spatial data type support in SQL server and points to a few related articles.

Tara Kizer of Ramblings of a DBA gives away the code of a stored procedure to defragment indexes in SQL Server 2005. It utilizes sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats, a dynamic management function, to retrieve the fragmentation levels.

Gavin M. Roy of Horses are terrible people shares a few observations after using PL/Proxy in production and working on scaling and partitioning projects.

Scott Hayes of DB2 Magazine takes a look at metrics for computing important read times so that you can understand “where the time goes” and uncover bottlenecks.

Chris Eaton of An Expert’s Guide to DB2 Technology tells you that there are two compression enhancements that you should be aware of in DB2 9.5: the creation of a compression dictionary as part of the LOAD command and the ease of estimating your compression ratios for tables.

Cantu of Firebird News shares a lot of pictures from the recent Russian Firebird Conference.

That concludes this week’s edition of the Log Buffer.

Filed in Links, Oracle with 3 Comments | Tags: db2, MySQL, sqlserver

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