We’re planning our publishing calendar for 2011. Happy to announce that we’ll have a few guest hosts in the New Year. Don’t forget if you’d like to host or edit a future edition of Log Buffer on your own blog, send a note to the Log Buffer coordinator.

We’ve had several contributions of favorite reads from the team this week. Enjoy this issue, Log Buffer #208.

Gwen Shapira’s picks:

Iggy Fernandez uses GraphViz to visualize his explain plans – he thinks it makes them easier to read, but Gwen’s not sure she agrees. In the comments, Tim Hall and Charles Hooper give a lot of information on how to read explain plans correctly and are worth reading.

Jonathan Lewis, on Oracle Scratchpad, blogs about optimizer issues with collection types and suggests a work-around.

Asif Momen updates that Oracle released a nifty little tool for looking up DBA views and background processes.

Jared Stills ran into interesting date format issues while working on his latest book.

Pythian’s Alex, Christo and Dan were blogging live from UKOUG 2010. It looked like they were having so much fun, I’m not sure why they call it work! Welcome home, Paul and team – you made it, despite the snow.

Vadim Tkachenko blogs about a very scary InnoDB bug that can corrupt your data and crash your database. It can even allow your users to do it to you! Read and take steps to protect yourself.

In DB2 news, Fahd Mirza suggests:

Henrik Loeser expounding as how to build a full text index on PDF documents in DB2.

Raul F. Chong gives the chance to experience the next version of DB2 today!

Willie Favero appreciates the security offered by the DB2 10.

Edwin Sarmiento writes his second post in a series on HADR, further building on his point that a good HADR strategy is more than just the underlying technology.

Guiseppe Maxia, the Data Charmer, starts a lively discussion on MySQL forks, and points out 5 arguments in favor of them.

Hard to believe it’s December already.

It’s past Sunday midnight and I’m stuck in my room in the last couple hours finishing my slides for my masterclass tomorrow. Turns out that I’m presenting the very first session of the conference at 9am. I wish there is a keynote instead so that I could grab one more hour of sleep (it’s going to be deep into the night back home in Canada). Strange that the keynote was moved to Wednesday — I hope UKOUG has really good reason for that!

My two hours masterclass will start at the same time as Tom Kyte’s a-la keynote session — what a competition. On the other hand, there is no other sessions in server technology so I expect that folks without interest of database development will automatically end up in my session. I’m in Hall 5 – quite large room. Is it the second biggest room after the Hall 1?

I will need to work hard to keep the audience… maybe I shouldn’t plan for any breaks to make sure I don’t let folks slip out to the next sessions like James Morles’ Sane SAN 2010 or Jeremy Schneider’s Large Scale ASM.

My masterclass is based on the slides that I presented at the Oracle OpenWorld few months ago which, in turn is reworked session on Oracle Clusterware internals that I’ve done number of times as long session with demos. I thought updating this material to 11gR2 would be easy… Boy was I wrong!

11gR2 Grid Infrastructure has changes so much that it took me much much longer to get something sensible ready. I also had to limit the scope a bit as Grid Infrastructure has become so much more complex than older pre-11gR2 Clusterware. (stop complaining Alex!)

Anyway, everything is ready now and demos look reasonable. It will be a bit rough doing it first time – I’m sure I’ll stumble few times but fingers crossed we get to the end timely. I actually hope to finish early and allocate a bit more time for Q&A and potential ad-hoc demos at the end. But enough about me…

Who from Pythian are at the UKOUG conference this year? In additional to myself, it’s Christo Kutrovsky, Daniel Fink, Paul Vallee and Andrew Poodle. Christo, Dan and myself are presenting, Andrew is helping organization of MySQL track as a MySQL SIG Chair and Paul… well, I’d say Paul is a slacker so he is covering the beer tap to pay up! :)

It’s close to 2am – gotta get some sleep before tomorrow. Few words against Jurys Inn Hotel this year. It’s the first year I’m having so much troubles here including no early check-ins, not working phones, no internet in two rooms (I had to switch twice!), and somewhat unfriendly stuff this year. Has hotel management change since last year or what? Will consider another hotel next time I think.

Oh… and it’s indeed bloody cold here! So cold that it seems to impact the amount of girls-who-forgot-their-skirts-at home at the Broad Street. This unusually cold weather does impact travel plans of other conference speakers and attendees. Doug Burn seems to have been delayed for like a day and barely made it to have a pint at Tap&Spile – I wish I could accompany the crowd there until late but thanks to the awesome schedule (and unfinished state of my presentation, to be fair) I had to miss some of the fun.

PS: I have another session on Tuesday — Analysis of Oracle ASM Failability (should be Fallibility I guess but I’ll keep it misspelled simply because I can!). If anybody wants to catch up for any reason (like buying me a beer) — text me at +1 613 219 7031. iPhone doesn’t work with data-plans here for unknown reason so no twitter/email on the go.

So… all of you Oracle bloggers attending Oracle Open World 2010…
… you are invited to attend this Oracle Bloggers Meetup during OOW 2009 — a chance to meet your online buddies face-to-face in relaxed and informal atmosphere.

When: Wed, 22-Sep-2010, 5:30pm

Where: Lower Dining Room, Jillian’s Billiards @ Metreon, 101 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103.

View Larger Map

Street view:

View Larger Map

See the “Lower Dining Room” on the floor plan below and ask where is the “Bloggers Meetup” booked under my name — Alex Gorbachev. These are the keywords to find us easily.

The plan is to gather at 5:30pm on Wednesday after three (or for for those of us starting on Sunday) days of intense learning. This year, you won’t need to find where to kill few hours in between of the OOW sessions and customer appreciation event at the Treasure Island — the best place to be this year is our bloggers meetup — the place where all the “cool kids” are.

As usual, thanks to Oracle Technology Network and Pythian for sponsoring the venue and drinks. HP is planning to establish a prize again this year for something fun… yes, we will again do something fun.

Last year, we were collecting signatures on our Bloggers Meetup T-Shirts so feel free to wear them this year to show your seniority at the event. ;-) This year’s activity is a surprise but if you have something cool in mind — let me know privately {last_name} at pythian.com.

For those of you who don’t know the history… The Bloggers Meetups during the Oracle Open World were started by Mark Rittman and continued by Eddie Awad and then I picked up the flag. They have been great success so let’s keep them this way! To give you an idea, here are the photos from the OOW08 Bloggers Meetup (courtesy of Eddie Awad) and last year’s meetup blog post update from myself.

If you are planning to attend, please comment here with the phrase “COUNT ME IN”. This will help us make sure we have the attendance numbers right. I will maintain the list here. Make sure you provide your blog URL with your comment — it’s a Bloggers Meetup in the end! Make sure you comment here if you are attending so that we have enough room, food and (most important) drinks.

Of course, do not under any circumstances forget about to blog and tweet about this year’s bloggers meetup.

Looking forward to seeing all of you again this year!

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.

The software used is GoToWebinar (formerly GoToMeeting), so you will need to install that software. To register, use the links on the IOUG MySQL Upgrade Webinar Series page.

The complete list of webinars in the MySQL Upgrade Series is:
* MySQL 5.1: Why and How to Upgrade
Sheeri Cabral, The Pythian Group
Tuesday, July 27, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. CT (GMT-5)

* MySQL Upgrades With No Downtime
Sean Hull, Heavyweight Internet Group
Wednesday, July 28, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. CT (GMT-5)

* MySQL Upgrade Best Practices
Matt Yonkovit, Percona
Thursday, July 29, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. CT (GMT-5)

(note, I am not sure if it is free for everyone or just free for IOUG members; my apologies if it is the latter)

As someone who’s helped organize all the OpenSQLCamps, a few MySQL Camps, and the Boston MySQL User Group, I know that participation at an event such as this can be small. Despite planning the MySQL track at the last minute, we had top-notch speakers with appropriate content for the audience, which was mostly Oracle crossovers. We had several registrants who came solely for the MySQL content, with all but 2 of the 27 sessions having 10-25 audience members. According to a few different folks, this is the same amount as the SOA and BPM track receives, and that track was not planned at the last minute. The ODTUG conference committee and board were happy with the turnout as well. I can’t wait to see the results of the evaluations!

As someone who’s sat on not-for-profit boards in the past as well as organized events while being on the board, I know how crazy it can be to plan conferences, and I also know that there are some organizations and personalities that are difficult to work with. I am happy to report that ODTUG has been very welcoming, accommodating, and hands-off, letting us do what we need. When I spoke with Edward Roske, the conference chair for Kscope 2011, he said, “You know what the needs for MySQL much better than I do, so just run the MySQL track as if you’re an executive of a corporation.” I know we are all worried about content being controlled by marketing folks, and I am very happy to report that ODTUG’s Kaleidoscope conference is of, by and for the people. There is one slot for a vendor presentation, and it is clearly marked, and there was an expo hall with over 20 booths, so there are opportunities for marketing; but all in all this is a technical conference.

Slides from presentations:
From Ronald:
Increasing MySQL Productivity from Design to Implementation (3-hour presentation)

MySQL idiosyncrasies that bite

From Matt Yonkovit:
The Five Minute DBA

From me:
Importing and Exporting Data with MySQL
What do you mean, SQL syntax error? – a 90-minute look into how MySQL’s SQL extends and deviates from the ANSI/ISO SQL:2003 standard.

Stored
Procedures & Functions and
Triggers and Views.

I also gave Jay Pipes’ Join-fu: the Art of SQL part one and Join-fu: the Art of SQL part two as Jay was unable to attend at the last minute.

My huge thanks to all the speakers and all the attendees; the MySQL track at Kaleidoscope was a success! I am already imagining what we can do next year in Long Beach, CA at the end of June.

You can download the PDF slides now.

For those that may be following along the presentation later today (4 pm Eastern time), here are some links that I may throw out during the session:

• SQL 2003 standard – actually it is “Information taken from the Final Committee Draft (FCD) of ISO/IEC 9075-2:2003″ but it’s extremely close to the actual standard. The actual standard is a document that costs a non-trivial amount of money to get, and cannot be republished.
  
• The MySQL Administrator’s Bible, from which this content was taken from.
  
• The MySQL Manual page for sql_mode values.
  
• Information about and examples of quoting in MySQL
  
• The MySQL Manual page for CREATE TABLE which contains all the special extensions MySQL has for tables.
  
• The MySQL Manual page for PROCEDURE ANALYSE().
  
• The MySQL Manual page for the SHOW extension
  
• PDF slides for an EXPLAIN presentation I have done, and the EXPLAIN Cheatsheet.
  

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 are users and developers, but others are encouraged to attend too. There will be both presentations and hackathons, with plenty of opportunities to learn, contribute, and collaborate!

I have updated the main Boston 2010 page at http://opensqlcamp.org/Events/Boston2010/ with travel and logistics information, including links to:

Register — it’s free and easy, and you can always change your mind later!

Maybe you have an idea for a session you would like to see, or a session you would like to give? If so, you can note it on the sessions page. This will give everyone a sense of what type of presentations will be there. I have started by putting 2 sessions I am willing to give and a third at the bottom for one I’d like to see, to give everyone an idea of both types of descriptions.

Probably the most important link right now is the way we keep OpenSQLCamp free for all attendees – sponsor or donate to the conference! Any donation amount is accepted, and all donations are tax-exempt to the fullest extent of the law. Businesses and organizations will be listed as sponsors if they make a donation of $250 or more, and individuals will be listed as sponsors if they make a donation of $100 or more. More information on sponsor benefits, including where to send a graphic to, at the link.

There is a preliminary schedule, up until the conference itself it will only show the agenda of the conference — how many rooms and what time the presentations are supposed to be. During and after the conference we will update this schedule page with the titles, presenters and links to any notes/videos/audio taken.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask on the mailing list or by posting a comment here.

At each presentation I will be giving away a copy of The MySQL Administrator’s Bible, so be sure to show up! All MySQL track sessions are in Maryland C, and all times are Eastern.

On Monday, June 28th from 4 pm – 5:30 pm I will be presenting “What do you mean, SQL Syntax Error?”, a presentation about how MySQL’s SQL syntax extends and deviates from the ANSI/ISO SQL:2003 standard. There is an 80-page PDF accompaniment that will be given out for free during this session.

On Tuesday, June 29th from 11 am to 12 noon I will be presenting Importing and Exporting Data with MySQL, about the many tools to load and bulk load data, and how to export data for regular and bulk loads. I will also be going over which storage engines are particularly well-suited for bulk loading, and the caveats to watch out for. This session is useful for those who know MySQL as well as those asking the question, “What’s the equivalent of Oracle’s SQL Loader for MySQL?”

On Wednesday, June 30th from 8:30 am to 9:30 am I will be presenting Navigating MySQL Stored Procedures & Functions, Views and Triggers, which covers all the ways stored procedures, stored functions, views and triggers can be used, including a highlight of Oracle differences.

I hope to see you there!

We have confirmed that there will be an entire MySQL track at Kaleidoscope! Because Kaleidoscope is less than 8 weeks away, we could not go through a standard call for papers. Ronald and I have been working to come up with appropriate topics and speakers for an audience that uses MySQL but is probably more familiar with Oracle. We contacted folks we thought would be interested, and who we thought could make it logistically, as the conference is in Washington, D.C.

We have (almost) finalized the list of speakers; the session abstracts will be finalized in the next few days. You can see the speakers at Kaleidoscope’s MySQL page, but I’ve also listed them below (alpha by last name):

Philip Antoniades, Sun/MySQL
Ronald Bradford, 42SQL
Sheeri K. Cabral, The Pythian Group
Laine Campbell, PalominoDB
Patrick Galbraith, Northscale
Sarah Novotny, Blue Gecko
Padraig O’Sullivan, Akiba Technologies Inc.
Jay Pipes, Rackspace Cloud
Dossy Shiobara, Panoptic.com
Matt Yonkovic, Percona

There are one or two more speakers we are waiting to hear back from. There will be 19 sessions, so some speakers will have more than one session.

I am very excited that MySQL has its own track at Kaleidoscope. In addition, Ronald and I will be able to attend our very first event as Oracle ACE Directors – the Sundown Sessions are a Birds-of-a-Feather-type discussion, with the Oracle ACE Directors being the panelists and the community asking questions. Immediately after the Sundown Sessions is a “Meet the Oracle ACE” event, the only part of the conference officially sponsored by Oracle.