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Log Buffer #51: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

29 June 2007 at 18:00 CEST | In Blogging, Oracle, Other |

I’m honored to publish my first ever Log Buffer, the 51st edition. Thanks to Dave Edwards of the Pythian Group blog for inviting me.

Let’s get started with the aftermath of the yearly ODTUG conference. Michael Armstrong-Smith starts of with his memories focused on Oracle Discoverer. Dimitri Gielis blogs about being interviewed for the 8th Oracle Buzz podcast by Lewis Cunningham. For me personally, ODTUG has been the event of the year with me winning the Editor’s Choice Award. Another big conference, the UKOUG is finalizing its abstract review cycle, as Andrew Clarke explains.

Frank van Bortel blogs about a whole bunch Firefox plugins for Oracle users. Alex Gorbachev from the Pythian Group finally got his voice heard on being able to change your OTN email address.

I also came across a number of handy programming tips for Oracle programmers; Eddie Awad writes about regular expressions and the never-ending discussion about implicit vs explicit cursors. Gerd Volberg shows how to calculate the day of the week for non-US calendars. Finally, Lucas Jellema from Amis shows off some fancy SQL to create a conference schedule.

Performance tuning an Oracle database will always stay a hot topic. This week I found a number of articles; Tanel Poder writes about session level statspack. Coskan Gundogar talks about sub latch wait events and finally Jeremy Schneider has a very interesting part 1 article about statspack and AWR latch waits. Hang around for the second part. Another DBA topic this week was a reminder to check your local_listener parameter when using RAC by Paul Gallagher. Decipher completes the list with an example to resize a undo tablespace by switching tablespaces.

Oracle will be launching version 11 of their database on July 11. The Oracle blogosphere is getting ready for this with a number of articles. Laurent Schneider has the link to the live video webcast for July 11th. Eddie Awads has a link to an official Oracle presentation on new features. Alex Gorbachev of the Pythian Group is wondering what the name will be; 11g, 11f, 11w, or what… Gary Myers has the news that Application Express (APEX) will be included with Database 11 by default. Then there’s a whole list of blogs by the AMIS guys on specific new or improved features: Transparent Tablespace Encryption, the SQL Performance Analyzer, New sql.bsq structure, XMLType Storage Options and their First Impressions.

Although I’m a true Oracle guy, I did stumble upon some SQLServer blogs that looked interesting; Sean McCown has a handy (but dangerous - do not include yourself) script to disable all users in the database. SQLJunkies writes about a new version of SQLQueryStress being released. James Pipe has something about passing variables into an OPENQUERY argument. Finally, SQLskills has two articles on the new SQLServer 2008; table valued parameters and a list of new features.

I even found two interesting DB2 articles; Philip Nelson is writing about DB2 going more the “automatic way”, just as Oracle has been doing over the last few versions. Willie Favero has its second podcast on upgrading to DB2 for z/OS Version 8.

The MySQL scene has been buzzing with people writing their top 5 wishes for MySQL: Cybersite Consulting, Jim Winstead jr and Dormando. Ronald followed up on this with a list of 5 best practices for MySQL.

And there’s always the miscellaneous category ;-). Just the stuff that wouldn’t fit in any of the other paragraphs. Curt Monash has an interesting article about SolidDB, a memory-centric database. Sue Harper, from Oracle, has a great tip for using a screen magnifier. Also great when showing of code on a beamer. Jeff Hunter is wondering why everybody is always blaming the database. Finally, Josh Berkus has a list of golden rules for database contracting. Joshua Drake has some editions to this list.

And that’s a wrap. As you can see there is a whole lot going on in the database blogging community. Be sure to add any interesting blogs you see to your favorite RSS reader. If you haven’t got one yet, check out Google Reader. And don’t forget to add my feed