SQL Server
Over at Less Than Dot Ted Krueger brings up the question of the good, the bad and the ugly of database design where he says “In my career I have seen the ugly and then the really ugly but I found on this particular implementation it could get even uglier.”

Over at Carpe Datum the question is if wizards are evil or not where we are encouraged to fix the wizards.

Ever wondered about how much space is available in tempdb? The friendly people over at the Customer Advisory Team monitor free space in tempdb where they remind us that “Usually, unused transaction log space is reclaimed in tempdb is when the transaction log runs 70% full or if a user initiated CHECKPOINT command is run.”

Oracle
Now, let’s jump right ahead and take a look at what has been going on in the Oracle world this week. Starting off with Kerry Osborne’s Oracle Blog where we get a post on how to track changes to database parameters although it hits some limits with diskspace, as Kerry states “So that’s 174G for AWR data for 7 years with 3 nodes and one hour snapshots!”

Sticking to AWR, Doug’s Oracle Blog explains how you should never underestimate AWR, and what his favourite oracle blog this year was. This ties up nicely together with the previous post by Kerry.

Ever questioned just how good you are? How would you become an expert? Ever won DBA of the year awards? Husnu Sensoy has a post which he titled How to become an Oracle expert?, in which he explains the love behind his job and how to find – and become – a master yourself.

Let’s take a look at queries, specifically how to change an outerjoin query to one without as Gerwin explains in his blog Home of General Approach Performance Profiling

Over at DBA Kevlar Kellyn gives us a overview of the problems encountered by ORA-14097: column type of size mismatch. That’s one more bullet that the Kevlar managed to survive.

MySQL
Now let’s take a look at the MySQL world. There’s really been two big things going on this week, one concerning Oracle/Sun and the EC (Including how that affects MySQL and all forks) and the other being that MySQL 5.5 is now released. Let’s dive right into it, shall we?

First of all, there will be a MySQL Conference in April as usual, although not co-arranged with Sun.

Giuseppe provides a nice tutorial on getting started with MySQL 5.5 on his blog, The Data Charmer, basically it boils down to the fact that the new release model is now in full swing.

Now, since 5.5 was released Roland Bouman gives us a quick look at the SIGNAL syntax in his blogpost on how to validate mysql data entry. SIGNAL was introduced with the latest 5.5 milestone release (m2), and is an ANSI/ISO standard.

Innodb_io_capacity might be very tempting to tune, but take a look at what Jay says about in a post where he reveals his results of testing the parameter.

Over at the indian wind along the telegraph lines Kurt is trying to explain and set some facts straight on the response after Monty issued his call for action. Both of these posts has stirred up quite a lot of comments and emotions across the community.

Sheeri over at The Pythian Group has voiced her opinion on Oracle buying Sun. She also goes on saying “When others spread the fear, uncertainty and doubt that Oracle will somehow kill MySQL, I consider the source.”. And this is something that I personally agree with and share the same idea as Sheeri does.

That is all for this week folks, and I wish you a Merry Christmas in advance, and have a safe holiday!