Savio just posted on MySQL's Quality Contribution Program. This is the first I've heard of it, and what a great idea.

I'm on a plane right now, and so can't follow the link, but apparently the program rewards community members who contribute code, bug reports, etc. with credits that can translate into a one-year subscription to MySQL Enterprise.

I agree with Savio that this "rocks! It’s a great way to build and maintain community."

(The one thing I'd disagree with is Savio's contention that JBoss' community was stacked with JBoss developers. Savio has a vested interest in trying to undermine JBoss, but I think he knows that one of the primary reasons JBoss' community would come to have jboss.org email addresses is that JBoss tended to …

BusinessWeek has a great cover story this week on customer service, and lists the top-25 "Customer Service Elite." USAA (insurance company for military personnel), Four Seasons Hotels, Cadillac, and Nordstrom top the list. I've been fortunate to experience two of these top-four (USAA, because my dad funded his medical school training through the US Navy) and Nordstrom, and I agree that there is a profound difference in how they treat their customers than most other companies.

They certainly didn't get there by focusing on their competitors, as Oracle apparently did in its Hyperion acquisition. (It's astonishing to me how much they trumpeted the move as anti-SAP, rather than as pro-customer.). The "Elite" got there by devoting …

Thanks to Google we have a few tech talks about MySQL. One talk about NDB and another about MySQL performance tuning.

I know this stuff and even I learned a few things.

I spent some time talking with Steven Grandchamp, CEO of OpenLogic, today, and am very glad I did. I've been operating under a two-years old understanding of OpenLogic's business, and it's time for an upgrade.

OpenLogic is not a "stack provider." Rather, it provides a gateway to a high-quality library of open source projects, certified to work together, with the ability to apply and enforce policies around adoption and deployment of those projects.

Interestingly, OpenLogic's technology isn't solely applicable to open source. It actually allows enterprises to extend the OpenLogic library with open source or proprietary modules (applications/databases/whatever) that they prefer. Enterprises, for example, may be an Oracle shop, and …

MySQL and JasperSoft today announced a new OEM relationship. In fact, I think it's the first OEM deal that MySQL has done (InnoDB excepted). Is this a new trend for MySQL? For JasperSoft?

Here's the deal:

[The two companies announced the] availability of Jasper for MySQL: OEM Edition, a suite of operational reporting products that includes a high-performance interactive report server, a graphical report creation tool, and a pixel-perfect reporting system with dashboards, tables, crosstabs and charts.

The two companies have signed a joint reseller agreement that allows MySQL to offer the new product to its commercial ISV and OEM customers. JasperSoft will also have the right to resell MySQL's database solutions as part of the JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite.

With Jasper …

Oh, the silly things incumbent vendors like to say about open source. One oft-repeated line from Oracle is that MySQL is "lightweight" or in some way inferior. If "inferior" means "routinely handles mission critical, backbreaking workloads that Oracle cannot muster or that no sane person would apply Oracle to," then, yes, I suppose it is lightweight.

As Zack just posted over on his blog, Pingdom did a survey of "massive" web sites (Meebo, YouSendIt, Alexaholic, TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockPhoto and Vimeo) to see what they're running. Six out of seven run LAMP, with MySQL being the "M."

So, again, if you've got a lot of money to spend, want to waste it on licenses, and don't need a best-in-class database, Oracle or DB2 might be for …

Today Alfresco announced that it has gone 100% GPL. As you might imagine, I'm ecstatic about the move (and have been working toward this since I joined Alfresco in 2005). Actually, I think it would be fair to say that everyone in the company is ecstatic about the move. It makes things easier for marketing, for engineering, and for sales. (Gasp! Did he really say "GPL" and "sales" in the same paragraph? :-)

As CNET has covered, this move is in part designed to help expand our already healthy community. But it's also about driving a stake into the heart of our outdated, expensive, proprietary competitors, as John Powell, Alfresco's CEO …

OK lazy web…. You have to help me out!

I try to monitor every performance metric I can within my cluster. Memcached efficiency, MySQL key buffer efficiency, etc.

One thing I can’t benchmark is the efficiency of the Linux filesystem buffer (buffer cache).

From all the research I have done there’s no way to to see the number of hits or total reads done by the file system cache.

Has anyone solved this problem?

I did some comparison of ZFS vs XFS last week to review the current state of the art in filesystems.

Long story short. XFS is still the reigning champion (at least on Linux). XFS beats out most filesystem benchmarks across the board. Reiser does well on directories with lots of small files but not enough to justify not using XFS.

Reiser FS is out of the picture honestly. First, it just doesn’t perform very well. Second, Hans Reiser is probably going to prison for murdering his wife and is selling the company to pay off his legal costs.

ZFS would have a shot on …

Some of the common conceptions of data storage seem to have been blown out of the water.

Two things I found interesting:

In their study they found that there was no correlation between disk failure rates and utilization, environmental conditions such as temperature, or age. This means that high disk utilization or age of the disk have no significant impact on the probability that it will fail.

…

They observed that older disks had a much lower failure rates then newer disks, where the newer disks in general were less expensive.

Which makes me think that buying used HDDs off Craigslist might not be a bad idea.

One could buy cheap 15k RPM low latency disks from a few years ago and forget about the storage capacity in exchange for FAST seek time.

Of course it depends on how …