The Pythian Group added another feather to its cap today. Our Nicklas Westerlund passed his MySQL Cluster DBA Certification exam, making him part of an elite group of 57 MySQL Cluster Certified DBAs worldwide, and now two here at Pythian, the other being Augusto Bott. We have a wealth of hands-on experience setting up and maintaining the MySQL Cluster. Nick’s and Augusto’s certified creds make them our go-to guys for MySQL Clustering.

Congratulations, Nick!

Welcome to the 130th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Oracle Blogs

Tanel Poder began a new series on Oracle memory troubleshooting with an introduction to his heapdump analyzer script.

Richard Foote asked, is it possible to shrink a newly created index? His answer? Just.

On the Oracle DBA and Apps DBA blog, Sabdar Syed also has a …

This post is more of a personal note than most on the Pythian blog, but over the holidays, I couldn’t help thinking about my turbulent last year.

First, MySQL

In 2008, I worked at three different companies. It was about a year ago (January 15th will be a year) I was at MySQL AB’s first company-wide meeting in a few years with more than 400 of my colleagues, when all of a sudden we get the announcement: “Sun acquired MySQL for 1 billion dollars”. Many thought it was a joke, just in time to watch Jonathan Schwartz come up live on video to greet us. Talk about an intense way of starting a year! For some reason, nobody thought that toasting with a shot of vodka before 9:00am was the oddest thing to happen that morning.

Working for MySQL was, most likely, the wildest ride I will ever have. True Open Source spirit (no matter what the rest of the world says), start-up mentality, and growth equal to one order of magnitude …

Welcome, readers, to the 129th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome also to 2009, so fresh it still has that wonderful new year smell. Let’s take ‘er out on the road and see what she can do.

Starting with Oracle (and reaching back here a little into the holidays), Doug Burns had performance on his mind—to be precise, his own at UKOUG; and some performance-related blogs he’s found worthwhile. Doug’s recommendations themselves always perform well.

Tanel Poder was on the same road. In his item, …

Hello everyone! Before I move to the seasonal greetings, let me share some exciting news.

2008 was quite remarkable for Pythian and, in addition to our ongoing success and growth, we established Pythian Europe back in May. To top it off, we have now laid the foundation for Pythian East Asia Pacific.

Pythian Australia Pty Ltd was incorporated and started official operations in Australia this month, taking over service delivery for the region. We have a few local clients and already signed some new ones, so this is quite an exciting beginning.

Today, there are three of us working in Sydney office:

A little bit of history. Pythian has operated in Australia for almost three years by now (well, longer than …

Welcome to the 128th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Let’s begin with some PostgreSQL blogs. Jignesh Shah shares his recipe for making a PostgreSQL 8.3 appliance based on OpenSolaris using VirtualBox. While we’re on appliances, Dave Page shows off PostgreSQL management on the iPhone with an application he himself wrote. Stealth DBA for the bus-rise home.

On Database Soup, Josh …

The 127th edition of of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published by Robert Treat on zillablog.

As the web’s only technology-neutral compendium of database blogs, Log Buffer thrives on reader contributions, such as story suggestions, comments, and foremost, volunteer editors like Robert (who, by the way, today joins LB’s multiple-edition group). He knows that publishing an edition of Log Buffer on his blog is an excellent way (and a fun way) to present his perspective on database blogs in an established venue. I invite you to do the same— send me an email and I’ll get you started.

Here is Robert’s …

Welcome to the 126th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Just to be different, let’s start with PostgreSQL this time.

The Postgres OnLine Journal offers their PostgreSQL 8.3 PLPGSQL Cheatsheet.

The ever-reliable Hubert Lubaczewski of select * from depesz; has a couple posts this week. He has a howto for recovering from a lost PostgreSQL password. Thanks, Hubert. We’ve all been there. He also introduces …

It’s time for another exciting installment of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

On Prestidigitation of Oracle, Bradd Piontek gets it started with the second in a series on migration to 10g—Making the database a safer place, reviewing security-related changes in 10gR2. (Full disclosure: I should also mention that Bradd is now sitting just a few desks away from me.)

The ORACLE-BASE Blog has a dynamic duo of articles—one each on installing Oracle 11.1 and installing Fedora …

(The basics — comment here if you’d be interested to hear a non-partisan talk about the technical challenges faced by the IT team during the Obama campaign [particularly if you’re not an American who likes the idea of Obama as President, but even if you are].)

So, we all saw when Jonathan Schwartz posted this on election night:

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/change_has_come_to_america

Now, back in December 2001 one of the speakers at LISA (a system administrator’s conference) was a William LeFebvre, who spoke about what it was like to run CNN.com during the extremely high peak times of …