An Interesting Blog to Follow

I know some of you track Conor Cunningham’s blog, which I highly recommend. The information on query optimizers is rather sparse out there – and it is a real privilege when people who know what they are talking about share their information freely on a blog. There are just not that many of them.

Here is something to think about in that context: Even if you are only interested in SQL Server, there are good things to be learned from studying other database engines – they are after all very similar. One of the good blogs for that purpose is the Oracle optimizer blog: http://blogs.oracle.com/optimizer/. It is delightfully free from marketing, and packed with good stuff. Don’t worry about the fact that they like textual query plans over there in Oracle. You might be used to viewing plans graphically, but I am sure you agree that such minor difference in display preferences can be set aside in the name of reading good material.

Small differences between SQL Server and PostgreSQL

In my copious amount of spare time , I am currently working with Gapminder to build a data warehouse. We are using PostgreSQL and Ruby Rails as the development platform.

As I learn PostgreSQL, I am running into some interesting differences. For the SQL Server/PostgreSQL people out there, I thought it might be interesting to describe some of them in case you are transitioning from one to the other.