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After enjoying the excellent hospitality of our host here in Pisa (6 courses) we were ready for our second day at YAPCEU 2010 here in sunny Pisa.

Larry’s new catch phrase “My Language is a four letter word” was the ‘Buzz word’ for today. We settled down to some very interesting talks, the highlight for me being Tim Bunce’s talk on using Devel::NYTProf to Optimize your code. Tim first gave us a quick and dirty overview of optimization which covered the basics of where to start and what to look for he followed up with real examples of Optimizer output and than wrapped up with a few before and after results on an optimization effort.

The rest of the day was dedicated in my opinion, to the future of DBs in with Nelson Ferraz giving an excellent presentation of his concepts for using Perl as to glue for a Data Warehouse application. Next on my agenda, Martin Berends reports on the present state of Perl 6 and interfaces database. There is progress here as we now have some access to the DBI for MySQL and some others. Also great news is the fact there is a good deal of development work going on.

Martin was quickly followed by Tim Bunce again who presented his proposal for the new Perl 6’s DBDI. Seems
we are going to use the JDBC specification with a little tweaking as our road map for the future. Tim also
showed of some Perl 6 black majik from Jonathan Worthington and he was able to how us DBI with DBD::Pg
running on Perl 6.

Allison Randal finished off today’s formal presentations with her “Migration Strategies” presentation. She
gave us some good insight into migration in that we, as developers, cannot force migration on the community. She also provided two examples of migrations: Apache, which took seven years but has almost full buy-in by users and Python, which was quick and dirty but has not received the same buy-in from the community.

Finally we all enjoyed the lightning talks as our wrap up. A number of neat quick ones such as ‘I speak Perl with a ‘c’ accent’, was a highlight for me.

Seems the videos and most of the slides (including my presentation on XS) may be online tomorrow. I will be sure to post them as soon as I see them.

Today marks my last day at Pythian. I have been at Pythian for almost three years. In those three years, Pythian’s already thriving MySQL practice has grown even more. I have worked with big and small clients alike, across many industries, managed a team of up to 4 DBAs, and learned a lot not just about MySQL, but what my goals are in general.

Though I am leaving, everything I said in the blog post I made when I announced I was coming to Pythian still holds true. Pythian is a challenging environment and one I would recommend to anyone who finds their current DBA environment boring that they should come to Pythian and experience what it is like to work here. I had lunch with Paul Vallee yesterday and we even discussed possible future collaborations (hence the title, a joke that I am “forking” off of Pythian).

So if it is so great, why am I leaving? It’s simple, really — Pythian is growing by leaps and bounds. I started when Pythian was about half the size it currently is. There is a lot of change happening within Pythian, and I believe it is very good change. However, I enjoyed the environment Pythian was when I started almost three years ago, and personally I am not ready to go with Pythian on the journey it is taking.

So where am I going next? For starters, I will take the month of August off paid work. I have an idea of where I might go for paid work in September, but you will have to watch Planet MySQL for the announcement. During August I will be doing some conference planning and organizing, for OpenSQLCamp in Boston in October first, and then for conferences in 2011. I will also be moving apartments, which is a big task. And I will be focusing on some personal goals, such as spending more time with my husband and becoming more active.

I am excited about having a month off, even though I have a lot to work on in that month.

In The Doom of Multiple Storage Engines, Peter talks about how the storage engine concept of MySQL is usually spoken of in positive terms, but there are many negatives.

I have a hard time trying to figure out the deeper meaning behind Peter’s post, given that Percona writes a storage engine for MySQL, XtraDB. Does this mean that Percona will stop developing XtraDB? Does this mean that the Percona Server will diverge farther and farther away from MySQL so that they’re not compatible any more and migrating from MySQL to Percona Server is very difficult?

Or maybe it’s just that Peter is saying one thing and doing the opposite; which just seems wrong because that would be blatant hypocrisy on Percona’s part.

(This idea was a comment on the blog post but seems to be trapped in the spam filter, so I’m posting it; apologies if the comment comes through eventually….)

My own opinion of the issue: Peter is factually correct with what he says. However, it’s nice to have the framework and be allowed to use more than one storage engine, or use exclusively one storage engine that’s not MyISAM.

I had an interesting conversation with Sheeri yesterday. She had pointed out that today was Ada Lovelace Day, a day devoted to highlight and thank the many women in the Information Technology industry for their contributions. She suggested that if I wanted to blog about it she would find that appropriate, given what we’ve achieved here at Pythian.

First, I consider that a huge compliment. And then, a distant second, I told Sheeri – no I don’t think I’ll blog about it, that’s not my thing.

This is the IM conversation that came out of that email exchange when Sheeri and I connected about an hour later. You may or may not find it interesting, but ultimately I thought it was interesting enough to share.

tl;dr: Happy Ada Lovelace Day.

expanded version:

Paul Vallee:
hey sheeri!
Sheeri K. Cabral:
heya!
Paul Vallee:
so a couple quick notes about ada lovelace then i’ll drop it ok :)
i want to keep the blog as much as possible as a personal voice
that means you get to maintain your voice
and i, mine
i want to avoid overusing it as “corporate message speak”
Sheeri K. Cabral:
that’s fair, the day is to draw attention to the achievements of women in tech.
Paul Vallee:
we have the news release section of the site for that
Sheeri K. Cabral:
yeah, I don’t quite think this is news-release-worthy
Paul Vallee:
personally, it makes me intensely queasy to single out any group
the reason it’s comfortable here is because your sex DOESN’T matter
i don’t want to post on any [insert minority here] IT day
I’m done with all that
my contribution is to make a place where diversity and tolerance are cultural imperatives of the first order
Sheeri K. Cabral:
so then post that :)
because you have made that place at Pythian
Paul Vallee:
and the goal of that is to … make it appropriately irrelevant as a subject for discussion or highlighting
without listing how much of a % of the company is female, etc.
sheeri, it’s just not my subject, it’s not my voice, for my blog
i won’t be posting about it :)
i hope you’ll forgive me
Sheeri K. Cabral:
I’ll forgive you.
Paul Vallee:
the closest i’ve ever come was on carl sagan’s anniversary of his death
Sheeri K. Cabral:
I just hope that your kids and partner don’t feel the same about Father’s Day
because you don’t need Father’s Day
you’re a great father every day, and your kids and partner should appreciate you every day
Paul Vallee:
http://www.pythian.com/news/341/the-fine-art-of-baloney-detection-in-honour-of-dr-carl-sagan/
Sheeri K. Cabral:
but sometimes it’s nice to have a special day.
Paul Vallee:
sheeri :)
Sheeri K. Cabral:
like when someone brings in cookies because your mother gave birth to you.
Paul Vallee:
that’s not forgiving me heh
Sheeri K. Cabral:
I’m giving you my perspective
there’s nothing to forgive, because you aren’t doing anything wrong.
Paul Vallee:
i struggle with this, i do
but ultimately, i rely on this principle
when folks wanted you to go public with your opinion on the mysql merger
you decided to do it with no pressure from me to write or not either way
and i didn’t interfere with your opinion one way or another
and as a result, it came out as pure you, in your voice
that’s how the blog should be
for all of my failings, i can’t go there
Sheeri K. Cabral:
I understand. I made a suggestion and you said “nope, not my thing”
Sheeri K. Cabral:
that’s why there’s nothing to forgive
Paul Vallee:
but that’s not me
Sheeri K. Cabral:
look, I struggle with this because I’m a success regardless of my gender.
Paul Vallee:
EXACTLY
Sheeri K. Cabral:
and if I was bad at my job it would also be regardless of my gender.
Paul Vallee:
EXACTLY
so don’t you think this day is misguided, somehow?
Sheeri K. Cabral:
it’s like affirmative action.
well, almost like it
Paul Vallee:
i mean it’s not like secretary’s day
it’s about “men who are secretaries” day
that’s just … not going to help
Sheeri K. Cabral:
it’s giving a boost to a minority, because they come from a disadvantaged place.
Paul Vallee:
yeah that’s right, it’s not like father’s day at all is it
Sheeri K. Cabral:
well
here’s the thing
the day itself is to blog to draw attention to women in tech and science
so in that way, the actions you take are a celebration
Paul Vallee:
but don’t you see the condescension that i see?
Sheeri K. Cabral:
in the day itself? I see how one can read condescension there.
but you could do a great blog post that says “screw this gender crap. Women at Pythian get paid the same and treated the same as men. Period.”
Paul Vallee:
LOL
Sheeri K. Cabral:
Here’s the thing — the message is “women have a hard time in IT”
the very message of the day is that
and I hate people asking me what it’s like to be a woman in IT, because it’s a stupid question to me.
what’s it like being a man in IT?
I can type without my boobs getting in the way. That’s the only thing I can think of to say.
Paul Vallee:
LOL
ok
here’s my point of view
i think the question “what’s it like to be a woman in IT” is itself problematic
we can’t move on from this until we make it disappear
canadians and americans have a different approach to racism/sexism/etc. by the way
also to religion
here, it is socially unacceptable to voice a sexist or racist thought or comment, or to single people out specifically. there, it comes up a lot.
i’m not sure why that is, but it goes really deep
like, i know our prime minister is a religious man, it’s not a secret
but you’ll never, ever, ever hear him refer to his religion publically
these are things that are in the private sphere
we force them to disappear from our process specifically by not mentioning them. that is how we make everybody comfortable, for the most part.
if the PM were to mention his religion, he would by the very statement make others feel excluded or certain people singled out for special treatment or affection
Sheeri K. Cabral:
or it becomes the elephant in the room.
Paul Vallee:
yeah, maybe so, maybe so. who am i to say which approach is most successful.
Sheeri K. Cabral:
there’s a difference between “god wants me to rule this way” and saying “I went to church yesterday” though.
Paul Vallee:
India is trying something new politically directly related to this by the way. they are assigning a third of the seats in their congress (I think) to women.
Sheeri K. Cabral:
yeah, I saw that.
Paul Vallee:
I wonder why a third (it should be half for purely technical biological reasons)
I think if they made it half, I would be OK with it.
Sheeri K. Cabral:
and to be more of a tangent…..my question is also “how many women is equal”? Honestly, I don’t think women *in general* like to geek out as much. *in general* we’re not as competitive. we don’t care about a lot of the stuff that drives geeks (females and males) to success…again, in general. so one can argue that 10% isn’t “enough” but I don’t think the “right” gender balance is 50/50 anyway.
Paul Vallee:
Well, I think women and men have different thought processes, sure
but some of that would tilt the scales towards women as DBAs, you know
women rate better for recovering from sleep inertia for instance
Sheeri K. Cabral:
just the other day I realized that when playing games, especially video games, I like games you can actually win, not merely competitive stuff. ie, you don’t win or lose at Tetris, or Ms. Pac Man, you just keep going.
card games, for instance, you win or lose at.
Paul Vallee:
True – tie this back in for me?
Sheeri K. Cabral:
and indeed I wondered if there was a gender tie-in there.
so “geeking” out – -finding the fastest disk speed, what’s the best filesystem for an ssd drive, etc.
that is similar to “dick sizing” which is more of a guy thing. women (in general) are more apt to say “is it good enough?” not “is it the best!” because we don’t want to rathole forever.
(I guess my point is I think there are strengths and weaknesses each gender brings to the table.)
but overall
if that blog post isn’t your cup of tea
then that’s fine.
:)
Paul Vallee:
I’m thinking of posting this IM transcript :)

… and so, with the lightest of edits and with Sheeri’s permission, I have! Happy Ada Lovelace Day, everyone.

I regret to say, there is no Log Buffer this week, as we’ve all been busy preparing for the Big New Thing coming in a few days. The good news is, we have a Big New Thing coming in a few days. Stay tuned for that, you won’t want to miss it.

LB will be back in a week, with Gerry Narvaja at the helm. In the meantime, I invite you to leave a comment with your favourite DB blogs from this week — MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Postgres, Ingres, or other relational/NoSQL databases.

Welcome to the 160^th 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 Pythian Blog, Singer Wang unearthed a MySQL 5.1 and InnoDB hot backup gotcha.

Eric Bergen offers his InnoDB deadlock count patch, which he introduces thus: “[Deadlocks] usually aren’t a problem until they start happening too frequently.  . . .  [SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS] can be useful for debugging but it’s almost impossible to get the rate at which deadlocks are occurring. [This patch] adds a counter to show table status that tracks the number of deadlocks.”

Baron Schwartz, had a script snippet to relative-ize numbers embedded in text to share.

From Planet Geek! came a fix for a OSX Snow Leopard MySQL startup problem.

SQL Server

While we’re on the subject of flaws, let’s begin our look at SQL Server blogs with Musings on Database Security and its post on passwords leakage from MS SQL Server. “Turns out that SQL Server saves in memory in clear text user credentials (passwords) of users logging in using SQL Server native authentication.  . . .  We . . . were convinced that SQL Server administrators out there should be aware of the danger and also should have a way to mitigate it so we’ve decided to publicize it and release a free tool to remove the clear text passwords from memory.”

Anyone who reads code of any kind can tell you that unreadable code is a sometimes fatal flaw. With that is mind, Buck Woody of Carpe Datum collected some T-SQL prettifiers.

Jamie Thomson examined extracting insert, update, delete rowcounts from T-SQL MERGE. Jamie writes, “Just lately I’ve been using T-SQL’s MERGE statement . . . and one thing that I needed to do was extract rowcounts for each DML operation . . . conducted by a MERGE. I was surprised to find that while @@ROWCOUNT is supported for MERGE, it only returns the total number of affected rows and there are no built in functions for getting the counts for each DML operation . . . ” Jamie’s workaround code follows.

Pythian’s André Araujo shared his procedure making for easier SQL Server database restores.

Kalen Delaney wondered, What’s a SQL Server Education Worth?. It’s not just a rhetorical question, either. It’s addressed to you. Yes, YOU!

Maybe conferences such as the PASS Summit are worth it? But the cost! Here’s Jeremiah Peschka with his tips on getting to PASS on the cheap.

Oracle

11gR2 was released. Let’s see what Oracle bloggers had to say about it. Here’s Doug Burns’s take on the 11.2 release—two highlights: Parallel Query, and changes to ASH.

The Oracle Security Blog itemizes new security features Oracle 11g Release 2.

On the AMIS Technology Blog, Marco Gralike writes, “I noticed yesterday a new feature that could have the potential to be a small, by me unnoticed, gem called ‘Flash Cache’.

It was quiz night again at the Oracle Scratchpad. In this second one, Jonathan Lewis and his contestants submit their explanations for bundle of statements in the library cache using bind variables.

Kevin Closson related his experience using Linux /proc To identify ORACLE_HOME and instance trace directories. In the post, Kevin writes, “ . . . you’ll see how to find the ORACLE_HOME and trace directories for an instance by looking at /proc//fd and /proc//exe of the LGWR process.”

DB2

Rav Ahuja says, moving to DB2 is easy, sharing a video that he writes, “ . . . highlights some of the new features in DB2 9.7 that make it very easy to enable Oracle applications to DB2.”

Easy and fun, apparently. Willie Favero, for instance, knows how to have fun and learn about DB2 LUW. It involves tuning in to the new “DB2night Show” on September 24^th.

Over and out, for now. Please add your favourite DB blogs from this week in the comments, and we’ll meet again next week. Till then!