Who’s following who?
In the most recent edition of Database Trends and Applications (hardcopy), there’s an interview with Tom Kyte from Oracle with the focus being the new enhancements coming in Oracle11g. I’m a big fan of Mr. Kyte as he really knows his stuff and is not shy in admitting what Oracle doesn’t do well. Even though I’m no longer an in-the-trenches Oracle DBA, I still follow his columns because his advice can oftentimes apply to other DBMS’s in addition to Oracle.
I was intrigued to see the very first 11g enhancement he noted in his interview - Oracle will now sport a new memory cache that will cache the results (not just the raw data blocks) of SQL queries. Sound familiar? When I first came to MySQL, one thing that quickly caught my eye was the query cache. Now I know the query cache isn’t for everybody, but in the right situations, it can really be a godsend. Seems Oracle has now gotten the same message. And no wonder: for repetitively issued queries that don’t see lots of data changes, it’s far more efficient to cache the result set for coming identical queries than recompute that same result set over and over again (especially if you have to plow through millions of rows to do it). Of course, this is something MySQL has been doing for years.
Hey, imitation is the best form of flattery!