Oracle Open World 2009 is just few weeks away and I firmed up my presentation schedule now. I will present three “normal” presentations and couple unconference sessions. I’m arriving in San Francisco few days before the conference (7th of October) get to the Oracle ACE Directors briefing so I’ll spend the first few day in Redwood Shores and then off to Moscone Center.

Before I get to the schedule, if you want to catch up with me during OOW — tweet me @alexgorbachev. You are likely to see me in the OTN Lounge or in “The Cave” if you know what I’m talking about.

Here is a quick summary of my presentations:

Update 16-Sep-09: Apparently, all this was true and you can find more details after the announcement that posted here.

OK. It’s not often that I make predictions these days but this was on my mind for a while so here we go. Mind you, I don’t have any confirmed insider information so it’s based on some assumptions, my perspective on Oracle-Sun acquisition and some vibes I can feel in the air.

The rumors are that Oracle Exadata v2 and Oracle Database Machine v2 are going to be announced within few weeks and my take is that it’s going to happen at the Oracle Open World. I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that it will be configured with Oracle Database 11g Release 2.

Moving on to …

Welcome to the 160th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

MySQL

Blame it on MyISAM, says Mark Callaghan of High Availability MySQL, on considering sql_mode and type coercion. “I think that MyISAM has its place,” writes Mark. “It does fast table scans, but InnoDB is much faster on just about everything else. I am just not thrilled with the impact it has had on MySQL.”

Not that those other engines are without flaw. Peter Zaitsev reports on an InnoDB performance gotcha with larger queries.

Here on the …

This is the 149th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

MySQL

Let’s begin with the big-picture stuff. Jeremy Zawodny laid out his view of the state of MySQL in Linux Magazine’s blog, noting the rough transition between versions 5.0 and 5.1, the status of storage engines, and outside contributions.

Like Baron Schwartz’s Maatkit, for example. Baron announced this week that he is writing a book about Maatkit, and also …

What: Sydney Oracle Meetup #3 - Focus on E-Business Suite + Oracle/Sun deal
When: April 28, 2009 5:30 PM
Where: As usual - Sydney Mechanics School of Art
How: just register at the SOM website.

We have to limit the number of people to 40 this time so make sure you RSVP timely!

We are gathering at 5:30pm and technical goodies are starting at 6pm so use this time to catch up with other members. We should finish by 8:30pm including a beaks and some post follow up. The presentation schedule is a bit floating this time.

As usual, we should have some pizza and beverages facilitating seamless peer networking. ;-)

In addition to the main topic, we plan to have some overview of Oracle / Sun deal and share what everyone thinks about it + report from the …

This is the 96th edition of the weekly review of database blogs, Log Buffer.

Let’s start this one in SQL Server Land, with a question from Dennis Gobo — should SQL Server have the CREATE [OR REPLACE] PROCEDURE syntax? There are, he writes, advantages: “When scripting out a database you don?t have to generate if exists…..drop statements,” and disadvantages: “I can overwrite a proc without even knowing it.” Of course, the commenters have opinions of their own, and the piece becomes a straw poll for the desirability of that syntax as a feature.

Aaron Bertrand has one too: …

Welcome, readers, to the 92ndLog Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Brian “Krow” Aker started an interesting blog-thread with his post, The Death of Read Replication, the crux of which is that object caches, such as memcached, make the DBMS itself a little less central, particularly in “Web 2.0″ scenarios. “What does this mean? Less database servers. Bringing down your load means you push off the load to another tier. . . . Why do I need to go through MySQL at all… unless I just want it as a backup or for ad-hoc reporting?”

Ronald Bradford responds with …