Welcome to the 167th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Since all that OOW news forced Gerry to give them short shrift last week, let’s begin with blogs on . . . 

SQL Server

Jeremiah Peschka gets our week going with his refresher introduction to SQL Server system databases.

Likewise, Pinal Dave reviews the difference between candidate keys and primary key.

…

OpenSQL Camp Portland 2009 is coming up on the 14th and 15th of November. Eric Day (of the Drizzle project) is the lead organiser this time around.

I went to the first edition in Charlottesville VA last year which was organised by Baron Schwartz (Percona). It was a great event, like other unconferences but with specific focus on database technologies. Monty (MySQL), Brian (Drizzle), Richard (SQLite), Jim (Interbase/Firebird/Falcon), Bruce (PostgreSQL) were all these, as were various storage engine builders. Very interesting, and lots of informal fun. If you’re anywhere near, do go!

Even though noone from our gang is able to make it to this one, Open Query is sponsoring this event – for all the above reasons. It rocks and deserves every support.

Larry Ellison promises funds for MySQL, commits to community. The “open source vendor” debate in a nutshell. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Larry Ellison promised MySQL will receive more money for development and research, while Oracle maintained that it is committed to Java and open source developer communities.

# GroundWork raised $5m series D funding from Canaan Partners, Mayfield, JAFCO Ventures and SAP Ventures.

# InformationWeek reported that Motorola has vacated …

I encountered a situation at work that I feel would be a good brain teaser. I was working on a project and needed a way to swap values from 2 different rows in a SQL table. Obviously I can do it on client side (like PHP) to do it; but that wouldn’t be a good […]

Welcome to the 165th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Since they haven’t had any Log Buffer love for a couple weeks, let’s start this one with . . . 

PostgreSQL

Selena Marie Deckelmann was tending the garden and found a Snow Leopard amongst the Macintoshes. The result, her post Snow Leopard and PostgreSQL: installation help links.

Josh Berkus posts a poll on encrypted backup. he writes, …

Last week I've participated in several Performance Conferences and Trainings in Kiev. Events mainly were dedicated to the latest improvements within MySQL performance, as well Solaris and Oracle tuning / performance analyzing and best practices. The week was very hot :-) but I've enjoyed every day discussing with creative and smart people! People hungry on knowledge and ready to stay 2 hours more overnight outpassing all allowed timing - it was a real pleasure to share all I know! :-))

So, I'd like to thank all participants! As well Sun@Kiev and i-Klass teams who organized and prepared all these events! I may only wish to see such events more and more often, and don't forget to invite me again! :-))

NOTE : similar conference about MySQL performance improvement will be organized soon in Paris - so if you're …

Welcome, readers, to the 163rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, your sieve

Oracle

First, the ghastly news—Tom Kyte said “I’m not a DBA anymore.” Say it ain’t so, Tom! “After nine years and nine months of running the database that hosts asktom, I’ve retired . . . not from answering questions, but rather from being the DBA and semi-SA for the machine that was asktom.oracle.com.” Okay, so he said it ain’t so.

Meanwhile, Tom’s Oak Table colleague, Jonathan Lewis, played no head games on us, but he has been at the hash …

I had originally posted this on the 16th of September, but I had been changing hosting providers and such and it has managed to drop through the cracks.  So, if you didn’t see it before here it is..

I have long held the opinon that SSD (Solid State Disk) drives are going to be a major part of the database future. I just checked and I wrote a blog posting about them two years ago. I am not alone in this opinion.  It has long been realized that both I/O access speed and throughput increases have not kept pace with the increases in CPU power and the steadily decreasing cost of RAM. Storage space has increased, but both access speed and throughput performance have only had marginal increases in performance.

Solid state disks have long held the promise of lowered access speeds, especially when it comes to random access.  Even so, prices for SSD drives have been high and space small (compared to standard hard …

Just a short heads up on what is going on with the Open Database Alliance.

read more

We’re supporting the OpenSQL Camp, which will be held in Portland on November 14. 

One of my objectives for the camp is to make progress on a universal storage engine API, to make it possible to use the same storage engines in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Ingres, or any other database.  I’m also looking forward to hearing other people’s great ideas.

After OpenSQLcamp, I’ll be attending Supercomputing’09.  Supercomputing and database hardware technology seems to be converging.  Many of the fastest databases today look like a supercomputer with disks attached.  Will there be other kinds of convergence?  For example, what kind of convergence will we see between multicore computing and cluster computing?  Today we program multicore machines very differently from clusters.  I think in the future that difference will vanish.