Welcome to the 22nd edition of
Log Buffer, a
weekly compendium of postings and news from database-related blogs across the
Internet.
Starting things off with a bang is
MySQL Performance Blog where he records his observations on a
recent set of benchmarks for both MySQL and
PostgreSQL. He offers some comments on the InnoDB concurrency scaling issue
that some might not be aware of (as indicated in the comments). Dropping
in for Database Soup, Josh Berkus also takes a look at the same set of benchmarks in
Validating PostgreSQL Performance.
Speaking of PostgreSQL, Devrim Gündüz
writes in Devrin's
PostgreSQL Diary about the
public release of PostgreSQL version 8.2. With respect to updates, if your
interest is DB2, check out Fred Sobotka's
DB2 News & Tips where he provides
links to
new FixPaks for DB2 versions 8 and 9.
Switching back to performance, Doug Burns pens in
Statspack success story and then begins looking at a
Statspack example to show its value to the Oracle DBA. He continues looking
at the example in
Part 2 and Part 3. Doug compares
the performance between two environments, his organization's and the vendor's. As
many of us DBAs have faced, the vendor claims things perform just fine on its
system... but is it an apples to apples comparison? Mr. Burns delves in to find
out. Jonathan Lewis also scribbles on Statspack at the
Oracle Scratchpad, explaining how to
the statistics while taking new ones by creating a "stats table" for that
purpose.
Marco Russo at
SQL BI points us to a
paper on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services which covers a case study
in hardware tuning for a large data warehouse (based on Barnes and Noble's
sales and inventory analysis requirements). If you're responsible for
administering SSAS for your organization, you may want to take a look at this
document on Project REAL from the folks at Unisys.
Staying on the SQL Server performance track, at the
Ji Village News Haidong Ji blogs about
rebuilding full text scripts. Haidong worked with some folks from Microsoft
at the recent 2006 Professional Association of SQL Server to come up with this
script.
Concluding the topic of database performance we travel over to the
Eric S. Emrick Blog where he
writes about
Increasing the Longevity of Your CPU. Proper optimization can sometimes
eliminate the need for additional (and costly) hardware purchases. Mr. Emrick
proposes the questions to ask to help identify where optimization efforts can
make the greatest impact.
Switching over to security, at the
Oracle Security Blog Integrigy's CTO,
Stephen Kost, writes about
"mystery patches" for version 9.2.0.8 from the Oracle October 2006 Critical
Patch Update scheduled to finally be available on December 15, 2006.
On the MySQL front, Paddy Sreenivasan writes an entry for the
Zmanda Blog about how ZRM for MySQL can be
used to detect malicious activity by
examining database backups. Examining the logs is a good way to determine
what happened after the fact.
Are you carrying a database-related certification and wondering about how
your salary stacks up with others carrying the same cert? Check out Craig
Mullins' post at his
Database Management blog on
DBA salary levels. Not surprisingly, certified DB2 and Oracle DBAs make more
than their Microsoft certified counterparts. However, the good news for all DBAs
is "average salaries are up."
Speaking of certifications, if you are a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional
(MVP) or Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT), Brian Lockwood, the owner of
ApexSQL,
is offering a free set of tools, the ApexSQL Universal Studio, according to
the Apex SQL Tools Blog.
Want to enhance your knowledge by attending the 2007 MySQL Users Conference?
Head over to Jay Pipes' Design, Develop, Discover, Define and read a post
about a
new survey on MySQL features and usage. If you fill it out you have a chance
to win a free pass!
One of the neat things about an Open Source product like MySQL is we can
track the changes in code. Mike Kruckenberg has done just that in
his blog and has made some
interesting observations after wading through code commits over the last few
weeks.
In the "Tips and Tricks" department, read at
OracleBrains.com how to recognize
Along those same lines, find out how to Get the
Domain Name of Your SQL Server Machine at
SQL Server Code, Tips and Tricks,
Performance Tuning. Looking to install Firebird on your new Vista machine?
Look no further than Peter van Ooijen's post at
Peter's Gekko on
Firebird database, VS 2005 (sp1) and Vista. Finally,
Rogerson rambles about how to
trace trigger execution using SQL Server Profiler.
Looking for a diversion that involves some SQL coding? Check out Lucas Jellema's Writing a Word
Search puzzle solver in SQL at the
AMIS Technology Blog. Along
the same lines, take a look at
Nielsen's blog entry of
Short Range Scan Mr. Spock where he begins posts about his efforts to
create SQLTrek, a port from DEC-Trek which is a port from SuperTrek. Finally,
read on Peter DeBetta's work to get his
iPod/iTunes library into SQL Server over at his
Blog.
