Log Buffer #127: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

The big story in MySQL this week was the continued drama over the MySQL 5.1 GA announcement. More power users came out hesitant about the new release. Baron Schwartz from Xarpb asked is MySQL 5.1 really better than 5.0?, and Peter Zaitsev from the MySQL Performance Blog wondered if moving MySQL 5.1 to GA was really a good move?

Several others tried to explain how things got the way they are; On Morgan Tocker's LiveJournal, Morgon Tocker reflected on friction between cultures at Sun and MySQL. Matthew Aslett of 451 CAOS Blog, cast the story as normal tension between enterprise and community needs. And Kevin Burton from Kevin Burton's NEW FeedBlog, well, he thought it might be part of a plan to destroy MySQL.

Others tried to put the 5.1 release into perspective, often reaching different conclusions. Peter Zaitsev of the MySQL Performance Blog explains why MySQL Quality will never be the same, though Ivan Zoratti from Ivan Zoratti's blog points out that 5.1's bug numbers compare well to previous releases.

For those of you tired of all the 5.1 hoopla, take comfort in Hakan Küçükyılmaz's blog posting; MySQL 6 has a new alpha release available.

Of course, some folks were more concerned this week about upgrading themselves rather than worrying about their database software. Jason Massie discussed getting familiar with multiple database systems on the StatisticsIO blog. Meanwhile over on the Oracle Scratchpad, Jonathan Lewis had a pointer on how to upgrade yourself from a DBA 1.0 to a DBA 2.0.

If tutorials are more your style, there were a couple of them posted in Postgres land this week; Joshua Drake posted on his Command Prompt blog discussing some subtlties of lossy index scans and how they show up in explain plans, and Greg Sabino Mullane posted on the Endpoint blog an article about understanding why function calls can often have very different performance results.

All of this talk of updating your skills must have inspired a couple of people, as we had two posts that might help your skills with the UPDATE command. On SQLblog, Alexander Kuznetsov gave some handy tips on dealing with different issues from the UPDATE command, while Mario H. Cornejo of Developeando blog praised Firebird 2.1's UPDATE OR INSERT syntax.

Well, that's about all for this week. I leave on a lighter note, taking you back to the StatisticsIO blog and Jason Massie's pointer to some DBA Shenanigans. I hope you've enjoyed this edition, and where applicable, hope you have a happy holiday season as well.