Redgate has organized a contest for DBA's with a spectacular prize: A space trip!

The winner will be the first DBA to go into space. A very original initiative. If you want to apply, visit the page www.dbainspace.com

If you take part, count with my vote 

This is the promotional video of DBA in space: 

Good luck!

MySQL has some special features when making a connection from a remote client that if we do not know can complicate access to a MySQL database from a different machine that hosts the database.

With other databases such as Oracle or SQL Server, once that no firewall or anything like that prevents us from the client machine access to the server, using normally data acces from a database user we can 'enter'.

With MySQL, although access to the port, usually 3306, is open, the database can be configured to shut out external connections, and the result is the same as if the port was closed by a firewall..

I found very interesting the initiative of the European Central Bank, to provide a statistical service on-line in the so-called Statistical Data Warehouse (SDW).

This Data Warehouse is aimed at a broad spectrum of users (financial analysts, journalists, businesses, economists, researchers, etc. ..). Provides macroeconomic data on-line in the euro zone: inflation, exchange rates, labor costs, unemployment, productivity, public deficit, public debt, payments balance, international investment position, sociodemographic data, tax information, etc...

The emergence of twitter, facebook, Groupon, amazon, etc ... is becoming increasingly popular new forms of large data storage and fast access to them. The terms NoSQL , Big Data , Hadoop ... are rapidly becoming popular.

Not long ago we talked about it:

- Comparison of NoSQL Databases ( Cassandra , MongoDB , CouchDB , Redis , Riak and HBase ) 
- Infographics, the potential for big data . 
- Pentaho also is accelerating much its integration with Big Data.

Today we give you some more detailed presentations, where we can research:  

Sometimes we need to check the existence of a table in a script or scheduled task to record error logs, first executions etc ... 

Let us take an example, a package of integration services that normally distribute or run there where we go and that leaves traces in a custom table that is not the default for loading logs. We could always include a performance task or sql script, run right or wrong, as the first to run on the package and then continue. Being purists this just is not quite careful

In mid March of this year, Oracle announced that will stop developing products for Itanium processor platforms. Noted that other manufacturers were already doing it (Red Hat and Microsoft), and referenced conversations with Intel to justify its decision..

With 9.7 DB2 LUW version, IBM makes a nod to all Oracle DBAs, much more numerous in the DB2 market.

For this reason, 9.7 version has introduced Oracle compatibility modes that let you perform tasks in DB2 with the ease and knowledge that all Oracle DBAs have. However, it is important to know the terminology's translation between Oracle and DB2 if you intend to get into the DB2 world.

In this first article, I relate a number of items from which this introduction is simple and can be read DB2 documentation easily, including general terminology, updates, utilities, and views.

Since the release 1 of Oracle 11g, Oracle provides the ability to encrypt tablespaces in full, to protect sensitive data inside and accessible from the OS. That is, the objective of this new functionality is not to protect sensitive data of users of the database, but to protect the information of the tablespace datafiles.

To explain the usefulness of this feature, it is best to explain situations in which our data without this functionality would be vulnerable. For example, in the case file of a physical backup of a database tablespace were to wrong hands, could see some data "clear" without problems. For example, a single edition of tablespace (or a simple "cat") containing the Employees table, we show clear varchar2 fields can extract sensitive data (you do not believe, try it!).

Anyone who usually look at AWR performance reports to analyze Oracle performance problems, often have their own reading process and approach to all data that shows this report, but I always missed a tool that make easier reading all data.

At the Web Congress in Barcelona, ​​I attended a workshop on Open Data in wich Martín Alvarez Espinar, W3C Spanish Office's head, and Jordi Graells i Costa, coordinator of content and innovation of the Generalitat de Catalunya, explained what is the international initiative Open Data, and how it is developed in concrete projects in some communities of Spain, as Asturias and Catalonia.