Matt asks (almost as an aside to a post on a related topic): My question: why not just buy Red Hat? Before Red Hat buys MySQL, and gives those database numbers a run for their money? Then, Larry Dingnan writes: A Credit Suisse analyst thinks BEA Systems is likely to go on the auction block in the next three to six months. And the potential buyer is two likely suspects: Private equity firms or Oracle, which indicated it has no plans to slow down its acquisition pace. I'll play Nostradamus and predict that Oracle will not buy Red Hat. Oracle... READ MORE

I wanted to write a quick shout-out to congratulate the PostgreSQL development team, the folks at Sun who work with Josh Berkus, and the folks at EnterpriseDB, all of whom contributed to the excellent benchmark results for this quarter's SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark suite. I'm looking forward to seeing Josh at OSCON in a couple weeks and meeting a few more of the PostgreSQL developers than I did last year.

I know that the PostgreSQL developer team has spent a considerable amount of time and effort improving performance bottlenecks and streamlining code for the PostgreSQL 8.2 release, and the benchmarks show the results of that hard work. It's great to see the pressure put on Oracle and the "big guys" from …

We've recently hired our first CIO at MySQL, and it's interesting to consider how the role of the CIO is different from what it used to be. MySQL has some particular challenges from an information management perspective because we have so many employees working from home around the world. Otherwise, I think the role of CIO at our company is not that different from most other young companies. But what's really changed is the nature of IT in the past six or seven years. Back in 1999 and 2000, a lot of IT effort was spent in scaling up. CEOs... READ MORE

To some, this will be a repost as I originally wrote it for an internal MySQL mailing list but I have had much positive replies to the posting, I thought I should share it with a wider audience.

One of these years I will finally get a talk accepted for OScon and actually be able to attend. I always hear good things about the conference and it seems like my company almost has its own track this year.

For those of you who are attending, be sure to attend some of the great talks being delivered by my friends and colleagues:

Improving Performance by Profiling PHP Applications
Next-Gen Interaction with Ajax, Comet, and PHP
Advanced Production Troubleshooting
Scalable Internet Architectures …

In a talk with Raph Levien today he said:

[basically] “… the metric for the success of an open source software project is whether the author now works at Google.”

… nearly everything I’ve ever written fails to pass this test.

Hopefully someone from Google’s M&A department can help me remedy this situation. (hint hint)

Over the weekend we migrated one of our tables from MyISAM to InnoDB. Generally speaking we’re pretty happy with most of our InnoDB migrations.

InnoDB generally uses 2-3x more data on disk but the write ahead log (WAL) buys us so much more added performance that it’s generally worth the switch.

This migration however was a bit more problematic. Importing the data from mysqldump as MyISAM into the new box only took about 2 hours. Converting the data to InnoDB has so far taken 24 hours and using 21G vs the original 6.1G for MyISAM.

I should also note that it’s not complete yet and it’s 3.5x larger than our original MyISAM install.

Clearly the performance will be worse in our situation for InnoDB because I don’t think the buffer pool efficiency will make the write ahead logging fast enough to beat MyISAM on the same hardware.

We’re not the only people who have …

Computerworld has Marten Mickos on the hot seat about the growth of MySQL and what happens next. As always, Marten is insightful and rational. I am jealous that I am not as clear-headed. I am very passionate about open source. And I do believe that it is a superior method. But at the same time, I must be pragmatic. So when they say being dogmatic is very important for the Free Software Foundation ? well, they should be. That?s what we respect them for. But running a business is not about dogma. We are not judgmental about our customers or... READ MORE

BusinessWeek asks: How much is MySQL worth? MySQL, a fast-growing maker of database software used by some of the Internet's most recognized brands, is preparing to file for an initial public offering, perhaps as soon as late 2007. The offering could value the company at between $600 million and $1 billion, according to sources, and inject some pep into a tech IPO market that's seen only a handful of successful offerings in the past year.... READ MORE

Version 1.2 of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL, a robust and intelligent solution for backup and recovery of MySQL databases is available at Zmanda downloads page.

Changes in this release:

• Code restructured into modules
• Snapshot plugin interface. LVM snapshots implemented as a plugin.
• ZRM should be run as user belonging to mysql group.
• Numerous bug fixes

Documentation is available at ZRM for MySQL wiki. Ask questions and provide feedback in Zmanda forums.