University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University students now have what appears to be a <a href=http://www.sigmod.org/record/issues/0309/4.JHdbcourseS03.pdf>first rate course</a> on database internals. What I like about this course is not only is it very practical experience, but also, that it teaches internals. So much of how a database works has to do with how it’s built, and the syllabus shows that this course should turn out excellent talent ready to develop on any database platform. However, how many of these students will go on to become DBA’s? I hope many, but it’s not likely I am afraid. It’s too bad, because this is the kind of knowledge that makes excellent DBA’s.

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I recently created some utility functions to startup, mount and stop Oracle via cx_Oracle and thought I would share them. You will want to make sure you have password files setup correctly in order for this stuff to work.

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One of the prerequisites for <a href=http://slony.info>Slony</a> replication is to be sure that primary keys (or at least suitable columns) are defined for each table to be under replication. This is a simple example script for getting that data in postgresql. This assumes that the intention is to replicate all of the public schema.

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I needed to make an assessments of a linux server’s memory footprint consumed by postgresql, however, calculating the exact memory footprint of a postgresql database is not as straightforward as one might think. Since unix utilities like top, and ps tend to show some amount of shared memory usage in their tallies, they are next to useless for this purpose. The other problem is Linux caches filesystem buffers to fill up most free space on the box, so deciphering what is actually used by postgresql and what is really filesystem buffers is confusing as well. The calculation needed to be just a reasonable estimate of the memory usage, so this method is non-perfect, but should be good for most planning purposes.

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I decided to start futzing with Python and Oracle. I generally use perl for most everything, and sometimes php for web based things, but I wanted to try Python at the urging of colleagues. I downloaded the source from here and added in cx_Oracle from here. The installation on linux was about as smooth as possible. I installed the source @ ~oracle/python so I could keep a user space version of Python. This is similar to how I generally install perl. So I created my first application using Python, select * from dual;. No big deal, but wow, Python is a pretty straightforward language. Here are some resources for Oracle based code:

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I just updated the blog to WordPress in order to get a few (ok, a lot) more features, and use the general editing environment.  I imported some of the popular posts from my old blog as well.

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