Papers & Books
Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Upgrade
Recently, we (Pythian) were one of the prime technical Apps database experts on a rather interesting and challenging Apps R12 upgrade for one of our clients. This paper discusses some of the particularities and challenges of this upgrade and how we solved them, resulting in significant time savings.
MySQL Administrator's Bible by Sheeri K. Cabral
Published by Wiley, MySQL Administrator's Bible is a comprehensive guide to using and administering MySQL. Ideal for the beginner and the experienced administrator, the book's 22 chapters cover the fundamentals of MySQL database management (including MySQL's unique approach to basic database features and functions) as well as SQL queries, data and index types, stored procedure and functions, triggers and views, and events and transactions. It also discusses such topics as MySQL server tuning, administering storage engines, caching, backup and recovery, managing users, index tuning, database and performance monitoring, security, and more.
MySQL Administrator's Bible is sold through most bookstores, including Wiley.
Oracle RAC Workload Management Whitepaper by Alex Gorbachev
For those people who are less familiar with the technology, this paper provides a few new ideas for using Oracle Cluster Services and server-side callouts to successfully integrate legacy applications that don't normally play well with Oracle RAC. Others will be interested in the research of implementation internals — details that haven't been published before — including the differences between Oracle Database Releases from 9i to 11g.
8 Rules for Designing More Secure Applications with MySQL by Augusto Bott and Nick Westerlund
In this PowerPoint presentation, Augusto and Nick present eight simple rules to help DBAs focus on designing more secure applications. As noted within the presentation, they wrote this from the point-of-view of “paranoid architects”, not security experts. This presentation is suitable for application developers, software architects and DBAs.
Pythian in eWeek: The Backstory
Pythian founder Paul Vallée was happy to be invited by Brian Prince at eWeek to answer some questions he had posed to Pythian, NTirety, and industry analysts Noel Yuhanna of Forrester and Peter O’Kelley of the Burton Group.
What is Behind Pythian’s Growth and Market Success? By Paul Vallée
It's the essential truth of most sysadmin or DBA jobs: if you’re any good, you will soon be bored and under-appreciated.
That’s because the best way to be excited and appreciated in a production engineering role is to let things fail, then come in riding your white horse to fix things up when everyone notices. There’s only one problem — this is also distasteful to those among us who believe in doing a good job by ensuring things never fail.
The Seven Deadly Habits of a DBA ... and How to Cure Them by Paul Vallée
Calling widespread bad habits in database administration "deadly" may seem extreme. However, when you consider the critical nature of most data and just how damaging data loss or corruption can be to a corporation, "deadly" seems pretty dead-on.
Although these habits are distressingly common among DBAs, they are curable with some shrewd management intervention. What follows is a list of the seven habits we consider the deadliest, along with some ideas on how to eliminate them.
Oracle 10g Block Change Tracking Inside Out by Alex Gorbachev (pdf 325kb)
A deep look inside the implementation of Oracle 10g Block Change Tracking and Fast Incremental Backups. This paper should help you understand the potential limitation of the technology and understand how enabling block change tracking could affect your production environment.
Extending Oracle 10g Grid Control by Alex Gorbachev (pdf 164kb)
A presentation first given at the UK Oracle User Group 2006. You can also download samples including scripts, XML files and plug-in.
