A million kernels, a million I tell you!

This article describes how scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore were able to run a million linux kernels on a single system as virtual machines.

That’s a whole mess of VMs. Given the enormous amount of growth the computing world has gone through in the last few decades, you have to wonder whether one day we will be able to duplicate the internet as we know it today onto one single machine hosting millions (or billions) of VMs. It’s an interesting concept, at the least!

Perhaps Oracle will find a niche in the million-VM-system world. Oracle 15N – The Neuronetworked Database.

I just wanted to pop in and plug something that is absolutely incredible: a 3D holographic display with multitouch capabilities.

Don’t you love it when sci-fi comes to life? Imagine setting up your system architecture using technology like this!

I was speaking at a small User Group meeting yesterday. A crowd of about 20 was sitting at tables in a “U” configuration. About 70% of the way through the presentation, I asked the fateful question.

Me: “How many of you are DBAs?”

To my surprise, the right side of the room raised their hands. Roughly 10 people, without a single gap in the line.

Me: “How many of you are Developers?”

And the left side raised their hands, roughly 10 people, no gaps, all developers.

How the hell did the DBAs and Developers sit apart like that without any planning? They didn’t ALL know each other, they just happened to sit in such a way that they were 1) apart from each other, and 2) facing each other with the battlefield in between.

We all had a good laugh about it, but it still made me think. Is there some fundamental subconscious difference, some sort of projected vibe, between DBAs and Developers? We fight so often, but that could be easily attributed to the fact that we rely on each other to do a good job. I even did a humorous presentation/discussion on it once, an epic fairy tale explaining the peril DBAs and Developers put a company in with their bickering. You can download it here if you like.

But if it’s just the fact we work so closely yet compete, like siblings, how the heck did they all manage to sit part like that? It reminds me of the “group mind” concept from various science fiction and fantasy books (like the Borg). We are the IT Conglomerate, Developers to the left, DBAs to the right, no further communication is required, thank you.

Hey, maybe it’s pheromones.

Welcome to the 26th edition of Log Buffer, a Carnival of the Vanities Blog for DBAs.

In addition, welcome to a new year! 2007 is shaping up to be a very interesting year for the database world, and some of the recent posts in the blogosphere should help you see why.

Many database professionals are wondering what they can look forward to in 2007 from their database vendor of choice. Some bloggers have gone beyond idle speculation and have published their opinions, predictions, and ideas regarding the New Year’s impact on their job.

Ronald posted his predictions for the MySQL database for the year in the ARABX blog. One of his predictions has already come true regarding the Falcon storage engine, which we will see later. I find his idea on government use of open source technology both intriguing and plausible as well.

Mark Rittman has a very lengthy and in depth article on his views of 2006 and upcoming technologies for 2007 in his Oracle BI Blog. It is definitely worth a read!

Even more Oracle plans for 2007 have been posted in an article by Don Burleson. Don makes several references to Oracle’s most recent acquisitions and marketing schemes, as well as the push for multiple database support within Oracle products. Another article by Don lists new features that will be in Oracle 11g and is updated frequently.

Speaking of Oracle’s competition, Kevin Closson has a great post referencing a recent article by Time Magazine that pits “Truly Dedicated” unpaid workers against “Geeks in Cubicles.” Though the original Time Magazine article is about web browsers, Kevin (and commenters to the post) bring up several parallels in the database world.

Thomas O’Connell posts a similar message in Infoworld’s Database Underground column citing several shortcomings of MySQL, which is widely regarded as the most popular Open Source database available.

But hey, you use what you use, and as DBAs we have to make the best of whatever database we work with. Frank Mash has a post about slow deletes on MyISAM tables in MySQL. The most interesting part of the post is his update, where he mentions a horrible practice that was found to be in place in application code. Beware, it could happen to you!

Oracle Partitioning has been touted as a great way to speed up access to large tables. Jonathan Lewis answers a very common question in his blog regarding partitions: how many should you have? Jonathan also gives a comparison with Oracle 8i for those that remember some of the old partitioning pitfalls.

Speaking of partitioning, David Aldridge posted a recent article regarding the need for partition key statistics. He also finds an interesting and somewhat disturbing decrease in performance related to his test case when using check constraints. David knows his partitioning; while nosing through his site I found an older post detailing his ultimate performance conquest, a 180,000x performance improvement using partition pruning.

Peter Zaitsev goes over some major enhancements for MySQL databases utilizing InnoDB including several bug fixes. His benchmark results from a variety of tests are also posted.

Moving back to Oracle, Kent Crotty has performed a study using the PL/SQL FORALL operator to test loading speeds. In his tests, he found that FORALL loading performed roughly 30 times faster than vanilla SQL inserts. This method is also highly touted by Dr. Tim Hall, owner of the highly popular Oracle-Base site, Oracle ACE of the Year 2006, and author of “Oracle PL/SQL Tuning: Expert Secrets for High Performance Programming.”

Kevin Closson wrote an in-depth article on Oracle over NFS using EMC or NetApp products. Citing several papers on the subject, he provides a great level of detail for DBAs thinking of deploying their Oracle databases via NFS storage. Anyone who has read the works of Kevin Closson knows about his uncanny ability to read between the lines of any whitepaper (and inject commendable amounts of wittiness), and this article is no exception.

Don Burleson has written an article regarding a common debate: should tables and indexes really be segregated? Don inspects the reasoning behind both sides of the argument and gives some food for thought when planning your object layout.

Moving on to general tips, tools, and news, there is a lot of buzz in the MySQL world regarding the new Falcon storage engine. Pablo J notes some specific information gleaned from the new documentation surrounding the engine, which replaces choices such as InnoDB and BDB which are now owned by Oracle. He also mentions a performance concern regarding table and index segregation, just as we saw in the previous note.

Greg Sabino Mullane has developed and presents a tutorial on a Postgres type to find a row’s neighboring rows. While his implementation of the function was used to find (and hopefully repair!) a corrupt object (called relations in Postgres), it can be used for other purposes. The tutorial also shows the use of polymorphic functions, which can be highly beneficial for scalable coding.

I have always found dates and times to be a pain to work with in any database or language, and it appears Jeff Smith would agree when using SQL Server. He posts an excellent package of functions he calls the essential date and time functions that any SQL Server database should have. There are truly some excellent functions in here that no SQL Server DBA should go without.

Getting back to Oracle (hey, it’s my favorite), Andrew Clarke has Yet Another Null Article regarding the differences between NULL and empty, and what they mean to Oracle DBAs. It’s an important concept, especially for DBAs that must manage other database platforms that may behave differently. In fact, he notes a point made by Laurent Schneider (Oracle Certified Master and Oracle ACE) in his article that even Oracle treats zero-byte values differently depending on datatype!

Tom Kyte answers a question (surprise, surprise!) regarding how redo logs work in RAC environments. As a RAC instructor, I can say that I’ve heard the same question a time or two as well. Tom and Arup Nanda both provide great detail in response.

René Nyffenegger of ADP GmbH provides a great article on using flashback query to find changed values in a table. As the post mentions, one highly convenient use for this ability is to compare current data in a table against a previous data set.

Texas Memory Systems is continuing work on their free Statspack and AWR tool, StatspackAnalyzer. It’s actually quite good, an evolving example of an expert system for Oracle tuning. I have been invited to contribute new decision rules and refine alert thresholds, and TMS invites anyone to submit their own feedback to improve the tool.

Of course, don’t forget to check out the latest issue of Oracle Magazine (January/February), which has some great tips by Steve Feuerstein, Arup Nanda, and Tom Kyte. Of course I AM a bit biased, since I was interviewed for this issue’s Peer-to-Peer section.

Lastly, don’t forget to sign up for Rocky Mountain Oracle User Group’s (RMOUG) Training Days, February 14th and 15th in beautiful Denver, CO. The conference will feature several prominent speakers and promises to be an outstanding event. I will be presenting on three topics, so I hope to see you there!

I just found a link to a command line wrapper for SQL*Plus called GQLPlus. Supposedly this wrapper allows historical editing, table/column name completion, and more.

Even better, it’s just a precompiled drop-in with SQL Plus. Download and run; nothing else is required. From the website:

“gqlplus is a drop-in replacement for sqlplus, an Oracle SQL client, for UNIX and UNIX-like platforms. The difference between gqlplus and sqlplus is command-line editing and history, plus table-name and column-name completion. As you know if you have used sqlplus, it is notoriously difficult to correct typing errors and other mistakes in your SQL statements. sqlplus does give you ability to use external editor to edit a statement, but only the last statement you typed. gqlplus solves this problem by providing the familiar command-line editing and history as in tcsh or bash shells, and table/column-name completion, while otherwise retaining compatibility with sqlplus. Thus, no user training is needed – simply use gqlplus instead of sqlplus. In addition, configuration/installation is trivial: gqlplus is a single binary compiled executable (written in C), so all you need to do is download it and put it anywhere in your PATH. After that, you’ll be ready to use it.”

I haven’t used it yet, but it looks really cool. Anyone out there who has given it a shot?

If you get the chance, check out the Oracle Award-Winners from the November/December edition of Oracle Magazine. You can find them at this link:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-nov/o66eca.html

I got the chance to meet a few of these fine people while at OpenWorld, and have spoken to others before and afterward as a fellow blogger. If you haven’t checked out Eddie Awad’s new OraDot.com OraNA, I’d highly recommend it. It’s like the Digg an outstanding news aggregator for Oracle, and has tons of great articles.

Why the strikethroughs? Read Eddie’s comment below. Thanks Eddie!

Now that Oracle has officially made the OpenWorld 2006 presentations public, I figured I’d make mine available from my site. You can click the link below to download it in PDF format:

Putting the Express Back Into Oracle Application Express with AJAX

Enjoy! I am also working on getting the example I used in my presentation on a public site. Stay tuned!

I had made a post about the 80GB iPod, how much I loved it, and how great it was, and now suddenly it’s deleted. Ah well, c’est la vie, no?

Anyways, I don’t remember everything that was there, but suffice it to say that the iPod is amazing. You can store around 20,000 songs, over a hundred videos, TV shows, and the new iPods even have games in brilliant color.

Not only that, but the new 80GB iPod has a better battery life with up to 20 hours of music playback and 6.5 hours of video playback which is GREAT for plane rides without having to pull out the laptop. If you run out of battery, you can plug the iPod into your laptop via USB and leech battery power from it. Perfection!

The new iPod also has clarity enhancements. Videos can be larger and squeezed onto the iPod’s screen for great playback on a TV. The brightness has also been adjusted, which allows a beautiful retina-burning display of video.

Take a look at the old vs. new pics below:

While the actual video watching is not THAT bright, it is what my camera picked up, and this camera was using NO flash. A visual feast, the likes of which will make you want to stare at the sun to cool your eyes off after a movie.

The best part is that Apple lowered their prices at the same time. The new 80GB iPod is only $350.00, whereas the old 60GB one was $400. You can’t beat the price for this much space and such great features.

Yes, tomorrow is national SysAdmin day, which includes DBAs.  SysAdmin day is the day for all end users to get together and thank their SysAdmins and DBAs for all their hard work, long hours, requests, emails, and God knows what else.

For all you who fit into this category, congratulations on surviving another year as a system administrator!  The next promises to be filled with loads of fun.  But for now, enjoy yourself, because tomorrow is your day.

For anyone who is NOT a sysadmin, this is the day to get gifts for your overworked SysAdmins and DBAs!  Maybe this shirt?

PCMag has an article today on Microsoft’s new philosophies that take effect from Windows Vista and beyond. Please note, these philosophies are NOT retroactive! Primarily, it appears Microsoft has finally learned what Apple and Linux have been showing for years: people want flexibility and don’t want to be bullied.

The philosophies can be seen in more detail here, but I’ll give you a basic summary.

1. Microsoft will design Windows allowing easy non-Microsoft features
2. Computer manufacturers can add icons, shortcuts, and more to the OS prior to shipping
3. Manufacturers will be able to set non-Microsoft programs to be the default; for instance, Firefox by default out of the box
4. Exclusive promotion of non-Microsoft programs and services…meaning a manufacturer can make Google the default search engine out of the box
5. Microsoft will not retaliate against manufacturers supporting non-Microsoft software
6. Microsoft will provide developers with a broad range of APIs for application development
7. Microsoft will provide an internet service product called Windows Live (like .Mac for Apple enthusiasts) but it will be completely optional.
8. Windows will be designed to never block access to lawful web sites or fees for reaching non-Microsoft sites and services.
9. Microsoft will not require third parties to promote Windows or Microsoft software on an exclusive basis.
10. Microsoft will make its communications protocols available for commercial release
11. Microsoft will license patents on its operating system inventions
12. Microsoft is committed to supporting industry standards

Congratulations Microsoft! I think you have finally learned to play nice in the sandbox. Hopefully Vista sticks to these standards. As an OSX user, I truly wonder just how easy and user friendly Vista will be. Will windows users trade ease of use for performance? Get a Mac, where you can have both, AND Windows!