MySQL

Let's say you get this message while Linux is booting :

   Starting MySQL database server mysqld     [fail]

One possible cause may be a network setting in /etc/mysql/my.cnf. Look for the following :

    # Instead of skip-networking the default is now to listen only on
    # localhost which is more compatible and is not less secure.
    bind-address    = 127.0.0.1

Change the bind address to your static IP address if necessary.

Start MySQL with

    $ sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

I had a recent discussion with someone who believed that Oracle's default locking behavior on inserts was table-level locking.

From a practical perspective, the notion that an OLTP database like Oracle would use table-level locks for inserts would lead to such inconceivably bad performance for enterprise applications that I had to research this a bit. From what I can see, default Oracle behavior is ROW-LEVEL locking for inserts.