Dba

http://pgexperts.com/document.html?id=49 Presentation by Josh Berkus (PostgeSQL developer) at MySQL User Conference 2011

http://pgexperts.com/document.html?id=49 Presentation by Josh Berkus (PostgeSQL developer) at MySQL User Conference 2011

http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2011/01/29/how-innodb-performs-a-checkpoint/

http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2011/01/29/how-innodb-performs-a-checkpoint/ An article about MySQL InnoDB checkpoint-ing mechanism written by Perconna folks. Read comments as well, several PostgreSQL core committers have participated in the discussion. “InnoDB’s checkpoint algorithm is not well documented. It is too complex to explain in even a long blog post, because to understand checkpoints, you need to understand a lot of other things that InnoDB does. I hope that explaining how InnoDB does checkpoints in high-level terms, with simplifications, will be helpful. A lot of the simplifications are because I do not want to explain the complexities of how the simple rules can be tweaked for optimization purposes, while not violating the ACID guarantees they enforce.” ...

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/02/03/how-innodb-handles-redo-logging/

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/02/03/how-innodb-handles-redo-logging/ How MySQL InnoDB implements transaction log, aka REDO (Oracle), aka WAL (PostgreSQL)

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=1108985 It appears to be an interesting bug in some versions of Oracle 10g, on Linux 2.6.x oracle process goes in loop doing times() system call if machine uptime < 199 days. Nice!!! / Oracle refs are bug 4612267 and 5867987 ) . The solution is to reboot.

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/04/04/innodb-flushing-theory-and-solutions/ blog posts that describes how MySQL InnoDB flushes data to disk (also see bgwriter, checkpoint_* parameters in PostgreSQL)

http://tech.valgog.com/2011/04/index-sizes-depending-on-type-of-field.html empirical data about difference in index sizes depending on the data type

http://sqlserverpedia.com/wiki/Understanding_the_StackOverflow_Database_Schema Notes about schema used by StackOverflow.com and related websites. It is very simple, only several tables used. (most likely because there are performance problems with joins)