We’re well into summer and almost at our 200th edition of Log Buffer, a blog of blogs about the database world.

Remember if you find a link or interesting blog post that you think Log Buffer should mention, send a note to the editor at Log Buffer and be sure to include the link, and a short note outlining why you think that particular post would be of value to other DBAs, or what you learned from reading it.

Now on to our weekly reading in Log Buffer #194:

Oracle Exadata is a topic that is getting hotter and hotter. Following Pythian’s announcement of Exadata services Oracle’s Greg Rahn …

There’s been a surprising amount of drama (in some circles, at least) about database technology recently.  I shouldn’t be surprised, given the volume of reactions to the I Want a New Datastore post that I wrote. (Hint: I still hear from folks pitching the newest data storage systems.)

The two things that caught my eye recently involve Cassandra and MongoDB (and, indirectly, MySQL). First was what I read as a poorly thought out and whiny critique of MongoDB’s durability model: MongoDB Performance & Durability. Just because something is the default doesn’t mean you have to use it that way. Thankfully there was reasoned discussion and reaction elsewhere, including the …

Web Operations

Web Operations. By John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins, O’Reilly 2010, with a chapter by myself. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site).

I wrote a chapter for this book, and it’s now on shelves in bookstores near you. I got my dead-tree copy today and read everyone else’s contributions to it. It’s a good book. A group effort such as this one is necessarily going to have some differences in style and even overlapping content, but overall it works very well. It includes chapters from some really smart people, some of whom I was not previously familiar with. John and Jesse obviously have good connections. A …

Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly roundup of DBA industry happenings.

Read on for the latest updates in Log Buffer #193. Don’t forget, we’re always looking for volunteer editors to publish and host an issue of Log Buffer. If you’d like this to be you, contact the Log Buffer coordinator.

ODTUG/Kaleidoscope 2010 roundup:

Sheeri …

It’s Friday, and summer’s here. While it seems the industry is slowing down to a lazy pace, there is still some action so let’s splash right in to this week’s edition of Log Buffer DBA industry news in Log Buffer #192.

Alex Gorbachev had a few minutes to suggest the following interesting tidbits to me before running off to attend Oracle ACE Director activities at ODTUG/Kaleidoscope this weekend. One of these days we’ll have to see if he can share some of what goes on behind closed doors at those hush …

1. Membase -- an open-source (Apache 2.0 license) distributed, key-value database management system optimized for storing data behind interactive web applications. These applications must service many concurrent users; creating, storing, retrieving, aggregating, manipulating and presenting data in real-time. Supporting these requirements, membase processes data operations with quasi-deterministic low latency and high sustained throughput. (via Hacker News)
2. Sergey's Search (Wired) -- Sergey Brin, one of the Google founders, learned he had a gene allele that gave him much higher odds of getting Parkinson's. His response has been to help medical research, both with money and through 23andme. …

OpenSQLCamp is less than 4 months away, and I have finally gotten around to updating the site. Special thanks go to Bradley Kuzsmaul and the folks at Tokutek for getting the ball rolling and making the reservation at MIT. Using MIT means that we will have *free* reliable wireless guest access and projects.

OpenSQL Camp is a free unconference for people interested in open source databases (MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, Drizzle), including non-relational databases, database alternatives like NoSQL stores, and database tools such as Gearman. We are not focusing on any one project, and hope to see representatives from a variety of open source database projects attend. As usual I am one of the main organizers of Open SQL Camp (in previous years, Baron Schwartz, Selena Deckelmann and Eric Day have been main organizers too; this year Bradley Kuzsmaul is the other main organizer). The target audience …

Dr. Richard Hipp gave a talk at Southeast Linux Fest today on choosing an open-source database. He thinks that NoSQL is not a very good name for the new databases we’re seeing these days, so he proposed a new name: postmodern databases. Why postmodern?

• The absence of objective truth
• Queries return opinions, not facts

I thought this was the best proposal I’ve heard for an alternative to the NoSQL moniker. And this is not bashing — the absence of objective truth can actually be an enabling quality, not necessarily a drawback. There’s a lot to compliment about the new databases, and calling them NoSQL is really a disservice — like calling a car a horseless carriage.

Related posts:

1. …

Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly roundup of database blogs.

Kicking off this week in Log Buffer #191 are posts from Alisher Yuldashev:

Randolf Geist blogs on an Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting Session – PGA/UGA memory fragmentation for when a batch process takes significantly longer than expected.

…

Having just written an interview response about NoSQL concepts for a RDBMS audience it was poetic that an inconspicuous title “(4 of 3)” highlights that both a MySQL read scalable implementation via replication and a NoSQL solution can share a common lack of timely consistency of data. For the sake of Group Commit I hope my data is always consistent at some location at some point in time as soon as possible.

In attempting to comment to Kristian Nielsen’s Fixing MySQL group commit (part 4 of 3) I was forced to watch an ad before I could even add a comment. Go jump Live Journal, it’s quicker to write my own blog post.

And if anybody is still reading, I had just written the following.

“There is clearly a place for NoSQL solutions. The two primary types of products are a key/value store and a schema-less solution. You need to learn …