Welcome to the 72nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) is over, and Lucas Jellema of the AMIS Technology blog notes the OOW Content Catalog has been updated with most of the presentations available for download.
On his way home from OOW, Chris Muir of the appropriately titled One Size Doesn’t Fit All blog notes how OOW and the Australian Oracle User Group Conference and OOW compare with regards to 99% fewer attendees in AUSOUG Perth conference – from 45k down to 350.
Mark Rittman of Rittman Mead Consulting summarizes OOW’s impact on business intelligence and data warehousing in Reflections on Oracle’s BI Strategy. On his way home, Mark found time for A First Look at Oracle OLAP 11g, noting the pros, cons, gotchas and suggestions for improvement for many useful new features.
Microsoft SQL Server also has a new release in the works. Ted Malone in Agile Methods for the DB Dev is excited about SQL Server 2008 “Katmai” CTP 5 New Features and descries almost 20 of them.
Ian Barwick of PostgreSQL Notes talks about Converting tsearch2 to 8.3 now that the tsearch2 full text search engine has been integrated as a core PostgreSQL feature.
Patrick Barel of the Bar Solutions Weblog explains a new feature of Oracle 11g called Virtual Columns. While virtual data may be a new topic, using databases on virtual machines is an ongoing issue. Marco Russo of SQL BI gives his opinion on when to use virtual machines in SQL Server Virtualization.
Database professionals can be real characters, and set in their ways. Bad puns make good transitions, and Corrado Pandiani sheds light on MySQL’s rules for Charsets and Collations on Multicolumn Fulltext Indexes. Adam Douglas of Binary Expressions fixed some trouble with MySQL and French Characters not rendering properly.
Greg Sabino Mullane shows reasons for his Problems with pl/perl and UTF-8. In Tending the Garden, Selena Deckelmann goes through the very easy process of Automatic Character Set Conversion in PostgreSQL. Selena has also been busy organizing the development of ptop, an interactive, command-line tool for monitoring the current status of a PostgreSQL database. If you read this in time and are in the Portland, Oregon area you can join the ptop hackathon at noon (local time) tomorrow, Saturday November 24th, or you can read the ptop meeting summary from pdxpug.
While some of us are database tools, some of us prefer to contribute database tools. Baron Schwartz honors MySQL’s trademark by announcing that MySQL Toolkit is now Ma’atkit. Ma’at, pronounced “mott”, is the ancient Egyption patron saint of truth, harmony and order. In addition, Baron proclaims “Ma’atkit Version 1297 Released!”
Hubert Lubaczewski notes the changes to the analyze.pgsql.logs.pl script of pgsql-tools in update 3 and update 4.
Hubert also notes how to find overlapping time ranges and how to find the number of ranges a time belongs to in time ranges in postgresql – part 2. Though written for PostgreSQL, both posts can easily be applied to another DBMS. In the same vein, Yves Trudeau shares the DBMS-independent graphical images of Unix memory usage in Generating graphs from vmstat output.
Jeromy McMahon posts sample SQL code for viewing Oracle extent segments for tablespaces, temporary spaces and sort segment space. The Cheap DBA gets Oracle specific with a Slick Shell Script for Reporting on Oracle Workload. Krister Axel of codeboxer.com has A really clean dynamic insert proc for PL/SQL ETL packages, including validation checking and exception handling. zillablog‘s Robert Treat treats us to a function for tracking plperl shared variables.
Jen M is Keeping IT simple by coding capacity measurements to show How Not to Outgrow Your DB Infra: A Simple Step. She follows up with more code to monitor a specific cache to resolve unexplainable slowness/resource leak in SQL Server.
This post began with a conference, and so it shall conclude. The Call For Proposals for PgCon 2008 is underway, and David Fetter lets us know that PgCon 2008 will be held May 22-23 at the University of Ottawa. This is different from Joshua Drake‘s call for volunteers for Command Prompt’s Postgresql Conference East 08, on March 28-29 at the University of Maryland. Neil Conway informs us of a Jim Gray Tribute, consisting of a general session and 9 half-hour technical sessions reviewing some of the 1998 Turing Award winner’s work.
In case this edition did not give you enough to read, Beth Breidenbach of Confessions of a Database Geek created an aggregate blog feed for posts relating to information quality.
