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Log Buffer #22: A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

,

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

Peter Zaitsev and his

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

Doug's Oracle Blog a

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

save

the statistics while taking new ones by creating a "stats table" for that

purpose.

Marco Russo at

SQL BI points us to a

new

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

Perspectives on

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

the Oracle release number.

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,

Tony

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

Paul

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

SQL Programming

Blog.

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