Just in case you want to live vicariously through my reading choices, here are some of the things that I found interesting this week when I should have been doing my job. Data An Illustrated Guide to the PostgreSQL Buffer Cache – Just in case you were wondering how a buffer cache works in a database. Because, you know… it’s cool. For you SQL Server people out there, this is conceptually identical to how buffer pool scans work in SQL Server.

Every once in a while, I’ll be talking with a friend about presentations and they mention that they really like the visual flow or the artwork or something about the presentation. After I get over being flattered (trust me, it’s easy to do), we’ll start talking about how I came up with the material in the presentation. I’d love to say that the photographs are mine, but they aren’t. There are a few techniques I use to help me make presentations that work well.

This has nothing to do with turtles. Just in case you didn’t figure it out, I wanted to make that clear. However, I am really excited to announce that I’m joining Quest Software as a Database Expert. My official job title is still up in the air, but let’s talk a little bit about what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to stay involved in the community. That’s a big one right there.

Ever have someone leave the company only to find out that they own critical database processes… because that process failed? It hasn’t happened to me, yet, but a recent Active Directory outage this weekend got me thinking about it. The network admins made some upgrades to our Active Directory Servers over the weekend. After getting a few errors that jobs couldn’t run under a certain security context (my manager’s account) I put two and two together and realized that the SQL Server wouldn’t be able to authenticate against Active Directory if the server was down.

In the last two articles, we talked about creating your first PostgreSQL database, the syntax of createdb and psql, and creating tables in the database. Next up, we’re going to look at filling those tables with data.``` createdb -U jeremiah pagila psql -U jeremiah -f pagila-schema.sql pagila psql -U jeremiah -f pagila-insert-data.sql pagila ### Loading Data From A File We’re going to be looking at the `pagila-insert-data.sql` file. There is a separate file, `pagila-data.

Version 1.6 of MongoDB was released last week while I was at devLink. What makes this an important point release? Two things: sharding and replica sets. Sharding is a way of partitioning data. Data will be sharded by a key – this could be based on zip code, customer number, SKU, or any other aspect of the data. Sharding data in MongoDB occurs on a collection by collection basis. If you want related data to be on the same server you’ll need to pick a sharding key that is present in every collection.

This all came about when Aaron Nelson (blog | twitter) asked me a few questions about object-oriented concepts. I did the best that I could to answer his questions, but I decided that this needed a real answer that will, I’m hoping, help to bridge the language gap between DBAs and developers. Note to the reader: Please keep in mind that this is based on the .NET framework and specifically my experience with C#.

In the previous article you learned how to create a single table. One table does not make for a very interesting database. Since we looked at how theactor table was created, let’s take a look at the most logical follow up: thefilm table. The film table Without going into all of the details of the film table, we do know that the table looks something like this:CREATE TABLE public.film ( film_id int4 NOT NULL DEFAULT nextval('film_film_id_seq'::regclass), title varchar(255) NOT NULL, description text NULL, release_year year NULL, language_id int2 NOT NULL, original_language_id int2 NULL, rental_duration int2 NOT NULL DEFAULT 3, rental_rate numeric(4,2) NOT NULL DEFAULT 4.

Not so fast, there, buddy. CloudSleuth has released a new tool that allows users and customers to see how the different cloud providers stack up. As of 6:45 PM EST on August 1, Microsoft’s Azure services come out ahead by about 0.08 seconds. 0.08 seconds per what? Turns out that it was the time to request and receive the same files from each service provider. Is this a meaningful metric for gauging the speed of cloud service providers?

For those of you who aren’t as much into reading up on different types of database, there’s an interesting summer reading list going on right now over atA NoSQL Summer. Unfortunately, I’m not lucky enough to live in a town with a NoSQL Summer group (not that I know of, at least) and I’ve had too much on my plate to start one up. But I still wanted to read all of the papers.