Blog Aggregator - Amardeep Sidhu

I have always had trouble with dealing with multiple oraInventories and multiple oraInst.loc files in a server. If there are lots of people installing products in a server or if you are handed an environment which is in such a mess it is a big trouble to get things tidied up (if the installer people used a central inventory instead of each one using their own inventories, you a re lucky). You

Welcome to Log Buffer #74 and a big thanks to Pythian in general and Dave Edwards in particular for the opportunity to participate in this weekly review of the DBA blogging world.

Oracle

I’m primarily an Oracle guy and this week has been pretty busy with a lot of coverage of the UKOUG conference in Birmingham so that’s where I’m going to start. John Scott of Apex fame has been covering the conference on a daily basis, starting here . Those of you who don’t have UKOUG membership and so can’t get at the content can get a sneak preview of the sort of thing presented there in Jonathan Lewis’ its the data paper also presented at conference. Meanwhile an entertaining and highly useful insight into the life of a conference speaker involving teaspoons, technology, lack of sleep and empty rooms is Marco Gralike’s description of his day over on the AMIS technology blog

Away from the conference decipher infosys have been covering Oracle New Features in 11g - the latest on invisible indexes is here, and perhaps the most important news for followers of the rdbms technology this week is the news that the guys that code the Cost Based Optimiser have started a blog.

SQLServer

Over in the world of my second RDBMS SQL*Server SSI Bits and Bobs are pondering the best way to implement logging in your application - you may not agree, but it’s a great topic for dbas and developers to consider. Andy Warren has also been pondering he wants to kill the BEGIN END construct. Mark Seeman meanwhile is demonstrating an automated script installer over on the MSDN blogs. Euan Garden is also in reflective mode wondering whether the absence of a dependency on IIS in sql 2008 reporting services really matters

Postgres

Postgres has it’s own news round-up and you can find David Fetter’s PostGres Weekly News right here. Depez is sharing some interesting performance metric on shared buffer usage right here

DB2 and mySQL

In the db2 world Scott Hayes over on DB2 Mag is drilling into io performance. Mark Robson has a rather important reminder about mySQL dumps, namely that they aren’t text files and they aren’t editable. Database administration often seems like magic, but the mySQL Data Charmer has news of a free seminar that will help you demystify the process of lua scripting, and Hakan has news of Falcon previews for those who want to get up to speed with the upcoming release

General

Ronald over at the mySQL Technical Notes and Articles blog asks a question of broad general interest to DBAs everywhere,

What is the optimal OS partition layout for a database server? I’ve seen so many different configurations for OS partitions of recent time, none to my satisfaction.

There’s a good discussion going on over at the blog, but as an Oracle guy I’d refer readers of all to the Oracle contribution to exactly this issue from 1991 - the OFA Paper

Meanwhile in a move that I’m sure all database professionals will appreciate Brian Kelly points us to an upcoming tribute to Jim Gray

Finally and this should really be read in general terms rather than in personality terms a potentially rather nasty and embarassing instance of inappropriately obtained material being presented with due credit is documented here , especially note the comments. Marco Gralike has a really nice example of the normal and correct way to do this sort of thing.

As I have learnt from Greg Rahn’s blog Structured Data, the people behind the optimizer started blogging. In their first technical post they talk about bind peeking in 11G. I think we will see lots of examples and explanations about the optimizer in there. Their blog is here.