Today I’ve read the following email on the mailing list of Sydney Oracle Meetup. I thought that this question is asked many times in attempt to find a silver bullet to learning Oracle so I wanted to publish my reply here on the blog, especially, that I’m a firm believer in one silver bullet that exists — there are no silver bullets.

Hi everybody,

My name is Sebastian and I’m new in the group. Yesterday I arrived late because I had a problem at work at the very last minute. However I found the meeting super interesting.

I’d like to see if someone could give me some piece of advise… I have ZERO experience with Oracle. I’m a Software Engineer and I’ve been working for more than 7 years in development (open source technologies basically). When it comes to DBs, I …

Gerry Narvaja has published the 178th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

LB is always looking for contributors, so if you’d like to publish an edition of your own, drop a line to the Log Buffer coordinator. It’s an excellent way to put your stamp on the database blogosphere.

Here is Gerry Narvaja’s Log Buffer #178.

Welcome, everyone, to the 177th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. It was another week heavy with technical posts, so let’s waste no time, and get it all started with . . .

PostgreSQL

David Fetter shares his recipe for adding only new rows: “Let’s say you have a table and a data set, and would like to add only those rows in your data set that aren’t already in the table. There are hard ways, but here’s an easy one.”

Simon Riggs, the Database Explorer, offers his thoughts on …

Last month at the Boston MySQL User Group, I went through the meanings of INNER, LEFT/RIGHT OUTER, CROSS, NATURAL joins, how to do a FULL OUTER JOIN in MySQL, and what STRAIGHT_JOIN means. I also explained how to recognize when you want those types of joins, and best practices for the semantics of writing joins and design patterns. Subqueries were explained in this session, and some examples of how to think differently so that you end up writing JOINs instead of subqueries. The slides (slightly different from the slides in the video — due to error correction) can be found at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2010_01MySQLJoins.pdf.

Here’s the video:

This is the 176th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

There were heaps of mostly technical posts this week. I think bloggers are tired of kicking around the ins-and-outs of Sun and Oracle, and wanted to talk about what really matters. So let’s start with . . .

Oracle

Harald van Breederode shows how to setup a private DNS for your virtual cluster.

Pythian’s Alex Fatkulin discusses Oracle GoldenGate …

The Call for Proposals for the 2010 MySQL User Conference and Expo ended about 6 hours ago. However, birds-of-a-feather sessions (BoFs) have a separate call for proposals. From the MySQL Conference page at http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2010/, select the “Program” menu item, then “Birds of a feather sessions”, and you will be directed to the proper page. Which, for easy clicking, is http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2010/public/cfp/90.

The call for proposals for Birds of a feather sessions closes at 11:59 pm PST on Thursday, February 18th, 2010. Sessions can be added during the conference, but if you submit and your BoF is accepted it will be printed in the schedule.

Note: If you submitted a BoF proposal in the regular call for proposals, it’s much much easier if you submit the proposal again …

In light of the official Oracle acquisition of Sun, I dug out a presentation video I realize I never officially shared with either the MySQL or the Oracle community. It’s the presentation I did at the 2008 Oracle Open World conference called, “So, you want to be an Oracle ACE?” and is a good resource for anyone who wants to contribute to anything — not just Oracle or MySQL, though certainly it’s based on my experiences with contributing to MySQL.

Oracle has lots of resources for the community. While I have joked about Oracle calling its conference “Open World”, I have also experience it, and the Oracle community first-hand and second-hand — through professional contacts such as my colleagues at Pythian who work on Oracle databases, and also through personal contacts such as my mother who has been to a few Oracle conferences herself.

…

On first glance, it looks like TEXT and VARCHAR can store the same information. However, there are fundamental differences between the way TEXT fields and VARCHAR fields work, which are important to take into consideration.

Standard
VARCHAR is actually part of the ISO SQL:2003 standard; The TEXT data types, including TINYTEXT, are non-standard.

Storage
TEXT data types are stored as separate objects from the tables and result sets that contain them. This storage is transparent — there is no difference in how a query involving a TEXT field is written versus one involving a VARCHAR field. Since TEXT is not stored as part of a row, retrieval of TEXT fields requires extra [edited 1/22] memory overhead.

Maximum VARCHAR length
The maximum row length of a VARCHAR is restricted by the maximum row length of a table. This is 65,535 bytes …

Welcome to the 175th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Oracle

Let’s begin with remoteDBAexperts blog, and Chris Foot’s prediction of the future of database tuning and database administration. It will be, ” . . . administrators interpreting and implementing the recommendations generated by the intelligent advisors and ADDM.  . . .  I also think that Oracle will eventually become self-tuning.”

Here in the present, DBAs (Oracle and otherwise) are still Striving for Optimal Performance as Christian Antognini is. Here’s his item on join …

We’re looking for an intermediate to expert MySQL DBA who can jump right in. We have several offices in Ottawa, Boston, Sydney and Hyderabad, India.

Working at Pythian is different than working in-house or as a consultant, because you’ll be making your contributions available to each of the customers assigned to your team, allowing you to see more use cases, more technologies, and work with more and varied environments, all the while building interesting and long-lasting working relationships with your peers. I will gladly sponsor a work visa for the right candidate anywhere in the world.

We support some of the most interesting internet-scale MySQL environments in the world, see http://www.pythian.com/about/customers/ for a sampling of customers across many industries.

Top Criteria

* Outstanding MySQL production administration …