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November, 2006
In
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What is the DUAL Table Costing You? by Jeffrey R. McCormick The DUAL table is one of the first things we learn as Oracle professionals. It is created by default as a single row table, understood by the optimizer and available to everyone for selection. We typically use this table to select the name of the current user, ping the database or to generate the next sequence number for a surrogate key. Chances are, few of us consider the impact of querying this table on our applications. This article will explore the cost of querying the DUAL table and offer some less expensive options to optimize application processing. Click here for the article.
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Express Lockdown When talking about Oracle Application Express, I find that the concept of authentication is easy to explain. Access control within applications, however, seems to be a bit more difficult to convey. With that in mind, I'd like to walk through the process of creating an application and then locking it down so that only privileged users can perform specific operations. In doing so, I'll take advantage of a feature newly added to Oracle Application Express in version 2.2: the Access Control Page wizard. Click here for the article.
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Stress Testing SQL Server Stress Testing your SQL Server environments is a practice that can yield great benefits. Stress Testing can be used for performance tuning, to uncover bottlenecks, and for capacity planning among other things. In this article we will use the terms 'Load Testing' and 'Stress Testing' interchangeably, even though by definition they are different. So for the sake of this article 'Load Testing' or 'Stress Testing' is simply running a large number of statements/transactions against a SQL Server database from various connections or threads - all to give the database server a good workout. Lastly, this article is not about HOW one physically throws a large number of statements at a server to stress test it, there are 3rd party tools on the market and available code on the web to help you do that. Instead we'll discuss what variables are needed and what questions need to be answered to ensure a successful and productive stress test environment. Click here for the article.
In A Nutshell
Interested in learning more tips and techniques for SQL Server? "In A Nutshell"
is what you are looking for. Kevin Kline,
author of O'Reilly's "SQL in a Nutshell" and "Transact-SQL Programming" and President of The Professional Association for SQL Server,
offers tips, techniques and much more. Updated numerous times a week,
there is always valuable material to be had!
Click
here
to see what Kevin is up to in the SQL Server world. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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A Practical Look at the MySQL Query Cache All robust relational database management systems utilize memory caching to help improve the overall responsiveness of their underlying engine. While certainly not free, accessing application data, query plans, or database metadata in RAM is normally much quicker than repetitively retrieving that same information from disk or building it from scratch. This paper compares the memory caching strategies used by a number of database vendors with MySQL, and then focuses on the MySQL query cache with a discussion of why its unique approach to memory caching can pay handsome performance dividends when correctly used by database administrators and performance analysts.
Click here to see the article. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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It is important that all project tams spend time defining and planning the project work before it begins. It should make sense that small projects need a shorter planning cycle and larger projects need a longer planning cycle. The effort required to plan the project depends on the amount of information and the level of detail that needs to be understood and documented. The duration required to define the work depends on the length of time necessary to discover and document the information, as well as the time required to gain agreement and approval from the client. At times, the project manager can get frustrated because of the difficulty in gaining agreement with the client on scope, timeline and cost. But that is exactly the reason this work is done ahead of time. Think of the problems you will encounter trying to gain agreement with the client on scope, schedule or cost when the work has started and the deliverables are actually being produced.
Click
here for more information on
defining and planning your work.
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Interactive Crossword
Puzzle: "Kangaroo Words"
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