Log Buffer #8: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Welcome to edition number 8 of Log Buffer, a Carnival of the Vanities for the DBA community. As usual, Log Buffer will help to expose the wild and wonderful world of database-related information available “out there” in the blogosphere.

Because I’m a long-time user of DB2 for z/OS, one of my favorite blogs is Willie Favero’s Getting the Most out of DB2 for z/OS and System z. I’ve known Willie for a long time, and most mainframe DB2 folks have at least heard of him. For those of you who haven’t, Willie works for IBM as a DB2 Specialist. And he has worked with DB2 since the early days of DB2. Willie is also a regular speaker at DB2 user groups and conferences and he is always engaging – and it is that “quirky” personality of his that makes his blog not only educational, but entertaining. This week Willie asks about DBA certification. Another recent educational posting on INSERT within SELECT is the fifth in a series highlighting what Willie calls  “Kewl DB2 for z/OS Version 8 Features”;  but be sure to check out other recent entries that cover Automated Space Management, SYSOPR in DB2 V8, rebinding in DB2 V8, and some general humor to get a true feel for Willie and his blog.

If you’re interested in mainframe performance, keep an eye on Martin Packer’s Mainframe Performance Topics blog. Martin is a member of IBM's global mainframe performance consulting team and he has contributed to IBM's performance analysis tools for z/OS and DB2. In a recent post he discusses several APARs you should be aware of that impact DB2 query performance.

Susan Visser’s Build your Skill on DB2 blog recently offered some advice on a great new SOA book,  a link to DB2 Magazine for information on business intelligence, and information on IBM’s big upcoming Information on Demand conference. I regularly pick up a lot of useful and educational DB2 news from Susan.

Moving on to the DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows front, I like to regularly check in with Chris Eaton and Grant Hutchison. Grant Hutchison covers the award-winning DB2 Express-C in a recent post on his Database Application Development Insights for DB2 and Cloudscape blog. And Chris Eaton, the senior product manager for DB2 at IBM, outlines Where to get DB2 Education (and more) in his blog, An Expert's Guide to DB2 Technology. Chris’s offering outlines the DB2 training options available on topics such as using SAP with DB2, database tuning, HADR, and workload management at the upcoming IBM Information on Demand conference. A little while back Chris posted some posted some very nice entries outlining the similarities and differences between DB2 on the z/OS and LUW platforms. Each is interesting and worth reading, so here are the links to those entries:

• DB2 on Linux, UNIX, Windows for a z/OS DBA

• Tablespaces z/OS vs. LUW

• Where are my Storage Groups?

• BSDS and Bufferpools

• The Rosetta Stone for DB2 Address Spaces

In other distributed DB2 news, Dan Scott on his Coffee Code blog shows where to find in-depth and official DB2 and PHP documentation. He provides "task-oriented" documentation from the perspective of a developer offering descriptions of how to accomplish specific tasks (like "Connecting to a DB2 database from PDO" or "Calling a stored procedure" or "Retrieving multiple result sets").

If you are working with multi-dimensional clustering in DB2 then you’ll want to check out Fred Sobotka’s DB2 News & Tips blog. In a recent post he points us to a free tool for estimating MDC table size in DB2. And hey, you can’t beat free! Speaking of "free" DB2 tools, I explain how to download a free statistics health checker for DB2 for z/OS over on my DB2portal blog.

If you’re an Informix user you’ll want to check out Guy Bowerman’s Informix Application Development blog. Guy is a senior software engineer with IBM who has worked with Informix since 1994. In a mid-August 2006 posting he points out a great tutorial for using PHP with Informix Dynamic Server.

Another entertaining blog that isn’t really about database technology, but touches on related topics, is Peter Armstrong’s Adopting a Service (Management) Mentality.  Peter is a curmudgeon from the UK who writes about the need for business and IT to work together. Novel idea, huh? A great example of Peter’s slightly askew view of the world can be found in Tolled You So!

If you’re a DBA who likes to concern himself with storage matters, then let me refer you to Jon William Toigo’s DrunkenData.com blog. Toigo is an independent consultant who focuses primarily on issues impacting storage infrastructure and data assets. Check out his recent post on disaster recovery in the context of avian flu for some out-of-the-box thinking on the subject.

If you are one of those DBAs with the (un)enviable task of managing databases in conjunction with a packaged application, there are several blogs you should monitor. One is Rob Radziszewski’s aptly named blog, Rob's PeopleSoft Blog. Rob is a certified PeopleSoft technical consultant and an Oracle certified professional with 10 years of PeopleSoft development experience. His recent post Enabling and understanding SQL trace in PeopleSoft accomplishes what its title describes.

Another interesting application-centric blog is Richard Byrom’s OracleAppsBlog. It doesn’t have a lot of database stuff (at least not yet) in it, but it does offer all sorts of interesting information on working with Oracle’s apps.

How about open source? Well, Dave Dargo’s blog over at Ingres is usually quite interesting. Dave is currently the CTO of Ingres and was previously a senior manager over at Oracle. His recent post titled Catching Up focuses on Ingres’ issues competing with Oracle.

Over at the MySQL QA blog, Jonathon Miller shows us how to save some keystrokes when working with MySQL Cluster.

And if you need some help with your MySQL indexes Daniel Schneller offers a nice, downloadable MySQL Index Analyzer on his blog.

Over at the MySQL Performance Blog Peter Zaitsev pontificates on the performance of derived tabled and views. And his verdict favors views.

Still on the topic of MySQL, on the Xaprb blog we get 6 basic rules for building database transactions. These rules are generally applicable to transaction design for any database environment, not just MySQL, though.

Since data security and regulatory compliance are all-the-rage these days, we can always benefit from additional information on securing our data. And that can be found in a recent posting (What is Data Security?) on Peter McLarty’s About That Data blog.

While on the topic of security, Pete Finnigan’s Oracle security weblog always can be counted on to keep you updated on what is happening in terms of Oracle security issues. If you want to learn about rootkits and back doors that can spell trouble for your Oracle servers check out Pete’s recent posting on the topic. And in another posting, Pete points us to a good compilation of links to recent news and papers on Oracle security.

Next we have Lewis Cunningham’s always provocative Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology blog.  This week his educational blog covers Datatypes for SQL and PL/SQL, Boolean and Large Objects… and although Lewis mostly writes about Oracle, he sometimes strays away and posts about other DBMS products as he did in this post on EnterpriseDB winning the best database award at LinuxWorld.

This week in Doug’s Oracle Blog there is a very interesting discussion on the devaluation of training. How would you go about training fifteen or so people on the new features in Oracle9i and Oracle10g?

My favorite Oracle blogger though is Chris Foot, who writes the Oracle10g Blog. Chris is in the middle of a weekly, on-going series titled The Non-Technical Art of Being a Successful DBA. His basic premise is that DBAs need more than just technical expertise to be successful. Although he has addressed many useful issues in this series, the latest deals with application change management best practices...  I can’t wait to read what he comes up with next in this series…

And since every DBA should be concerned about customer satisfaction, I recommend that you look in on Gartner’s Customer Relationship Management blog. In this blog, Gartner’s CRM experts analyze the current and future state of CRM. Most Companies Like to Analyze Data is a particularly interesting post from Jim Davies in which he explores how analyzing only the operational customer data can lead to incorrect conclusions because it is only one of several dimensions.

And finally, I can’t finish up this summary without pointing everyone to my two blogs: Perspectives on Database Management here at dbazine.com and The DB2portal blog at DB2portal.com. Why two blogs? Well, I use the first one here at dbazine to review, analyze, and pontificate on data and database management issues. And to share random thoughts and issues that pop into my head on the topic. The one at DB2portal, though, focuses on only two subjects: (1) DB2 for z/OS and (2) mainframe issues. I hope you’ll regularly check in on both of them!