Log Buffer #4

Welcome to the fourth edition of Log Buffer.

Maybe it's the summer holiday season and DBA-land is a little quiet, but navel-gazing seems popular this week. During a conference keynote speech by Ray Lane I attended earlier this year, he highlighted how much the software industry likes to talk about itself and DBAs are always keen participants. Our role is constantly evolving and sometimes it's useful to redefine it.

Brian Kelley writes Does your organization need a DBA? (Parts 1 and 2). I think his article is particularly interesting because his focus is SQL Server and I've worked at several companies who don't see the need for dedicated SQL Server DBAs and leave the database admin to the Windows Administrators or Oracle DBAs to do in their spare time.

Maybe the end result of having non-DBAs taking care of your databases could be the sort of nightmare that Frits Hoogland faced. His description of how he Re-animated a fool backup (spelling is correct!) makes interesting reading but I hope you'll find yourself thinking 'wouldn't it have been better to avoid this situation?'.

Then again, Beth Breidenbach makes an excellent point. Why is there such a rush for people to declare themselves a DBA in the first place? Where are the development and design Masters of Oracle? Tom Kyte is a stand-out example but I've seen him have to fend off accusations that he's a DBA more than once

After all, Peter Scott reminds us that it's all about the data.

Don't think for a minute that developers aren't working on some smart technical stuff, though. I stumbled upon Marcos M. Campos' Data Mining blog this week which contains some cool entries on the use of Analytic functions in Oracle. Now I just need to work my way through the examples!

Online evidence usually suggests that one of the banes of DBA life is inadequate vendor support so it's encouraging to read a more positive example in MySQL Response to Bugs. Bug fixes in an hour and a half are pretty impressive!

In fact, I've started to work just a little with MySQL and so far I'm impressed. I need to learn more about the software itself, but the community looks diverse and is maturing, as indicated by Peter Zaitev leaving MySQL to launch a consulting and managed services outfit. Peter also discusses the MySQL version of a subject dear to more than a few Oracle hearts - bind variables, using prepared statements. It looks like the implementation's a little different, though.

Will the likes of Oracle or Microsoft try to crush MySQL and Postgres and would they be successful? I'm not so sure and Greg Sabino Mullane suggests that the very diversity of these communities offers protection, in his brief blog on Oracle's Open Source Strategy. Sean Hull hosts another interesting Open Source item - an interview with Ingres CTO, Dave Dargo.

Then again, who really knows what Oracle will get up to next? David Aldridge highlights an article where Larry Ellison mentions a possible bid for Business Objects.

In another sign of the ongoing breadth of the DBMS market, Fred R. Sobotka shares the news that IBM have officially released DB2 9.

Sadly, after seeing so many glowing examples of community power while trawling through the blogosphere this week, it's inevitable to encounter one of those scoundrels who don't understand the basics of social behaviour. Tim Hall suffered wholesale theft but it was encouraging to see him fight back successfully.

The UK Oracle User Group have started notifying speakers who have had their papers accepted for the annual conference in Birmingham in November. I've heard from a number of them and it looks like it's going to be a first class line-up. I think at the last count there were something like 28 Oak Table members alone, as well as a number of other UKOUG stalwarts. Definitely one for your diary if you're an Oracle geek.

If the various Open Source databases are more relevant to you, then opendbcon 2006 takes place in Frankfurt the previous week, as advertised in Lukas Smith's blog.

If you are still in any doubt on what it takes to be a DBA, Howard Rogers posted a reply to an email he received with his perspective on How to become a Master of Oracle. His comments aren't specific to DBAs (or to Oracle, for that matter) and are instinctive thoughts off the top of his head, but it's a wise head indeed. (This blog was almost lost in a dark hole of a misbehaving content management system, but fortunately it was saved.) In the same vein, Chris Foot explains why Good Documentation is Essential. From bitter experience, I'd rather work in a team of solid DBAs who think about their colleagues than a team of DBA wizards who never share information.

Every DBA who works for large organisations is going to have to tussle with SAN storage eventually (or maybe it's really the SAN admininistrators we tussle with!) and Mike Scott tries to Demystify EMC's Adaptive Copy mode for SRDF.

If we can't beat them, why not join them and become Unix System Administrators? Fortunately, Raj Thukral doesn't think so and has set some plans in motion for Doing something about the SysAdminDay DBA snub. (Although I'm not sure I'm capable of marching like Danish soldiers!)

The fight-back starts here!