Reliable Internet access is a long-standing problem for road warriors visiting foreign countries.  Open source developers in particular have problems reconciling travel with addiction to high-bandwidth network access from laptop computers.  Wi-Fi hotspots are scarce, costly, often slow, and in some cases complicated by inconvenient local laws like Italy's Pisanu Decree.  International mobile network access plans are ridiculously expensive or like DROAM have download limits that make them useless for serious programming.

The best solution in many cases is to look for a local pre-paid mobile access plan in each country you visit.   Mobile networks are widely available and fast in developed regions, and there are cheap plans that limit the amount you pay while …

At this year's Open Source Bridge in Portland last month, Eric Redmond presented 'A Dozen Databases in 45 minutes'. It’s really about 20 minutes of theory and 25 minutes of the dozen databases, so for this first of a 2-part series, we present the theoretical side of things.

ACID - atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability
BASE- basically available, soft state, eventual consistency (there's also a good article by Lewis Cunningham that explains ACID vs. BASE in the context of cloud computing.

…

I found myself reading NoSQL is a Premature Optimization a few minutes ago and threw up in my mouth a little. That article is so far off base that I’m not even sure where to start, so I guess I’ll go in order.

In fact, I would argue that starting with NoSQL because you think you might someday have enough traffic and scale to warrant it is a premature optimization, and as such, should be avoided by smaller and even medium sized organizations.  You will have plenty of time to switch to NoSQL as and if it becomes helpful.  Until that time, NoSQL is an expensive distraction you don’t need.

Uhm… WHAT?!

I’ve spent more than a few years using MySQL and have been using some NoSQL systems for the last year or so in a fairly busy environment. And scaling is only one of the considerations that factor into …

A while ago Baron blogged about his utter dislike for MMM, a framework supposedly used as a MySQL high-availability solution. While I have no personal experience with this framework, reading the comments to that blog I'm indeed convinced that Baron is right. For one thing, it includes the creator of MMM agreeing.

Baron's post still suggests - and having spoken with him I know that's what he has in mind - that a better solution could be built, it's just MMM that has a poor design. I'm going to go further than that: Personally, I've come to think that this family of so called clustering suites is just categorically the wrong approach to database high-availability. I will now explain why they fail, and what the right way is instead.

read …

1. Monitis–Where You Can Monitor Exchange 2010 with PowerShell
We’ve recently published a list of posts showing a variety of ways to monitor any application using the Monitis API. Microsoft Exchange is no exception. Here we go over how to use Management Shell or Management Console to speak to the Monitis API and feed data into a custom monitor. You can then generate charts and alert settings on this data.

2. Monitoring files and directories with Monitis
Things can go horribly wrong …

It's my turn to apologize. Andrew and I apparently really angered people by being upset about something last week, and for that, as he already has, I apologize. I don't like making people angry or upset.

I believe Henrik made an excellent point, which is that for various different reasons, there are those of us who were upset when Oracle bought MySQL and yet felt complelled to not communicate this publically. To be honest, emotions related to a business transaction ARE a little weird, so I'm not sure it's completely odd that people don't know how to appropriate express them. But as Henrik rightly pointed out, the Oracle takeover has been the elephant in the room (sorry Postgres - it's not you) and we've all been spending a good amount of energy NOT talking about …

I have published "MySQL MHA" that fully automates MySQL master failover. You can also get commercial support from SkySQL. Let's try MHA today!


Today I'm happy to announce that I have released MySQL-MHA: MySQL Master High Availability manager and tools as an open source software (GPL v2 license). The below is a part of documentation of MHA. I'm glad if you are interested in MHA.

A primary objective of MHA is automating master failover and slave promotion within short (usually 10-30 seconds) downtime, without suffering from replication consistency problems, without spending money for lots of new servers, without …

About a week ago I appeared to have started an argument which has now spanned several blog post comments, 39 Google+ comments and two other blog posts.  So the first thing I want to do is apologise to the MySQL@Oracle staff (and Sheeri).  I was disagreeing on the use of 'The' whilst the real problem is my personal understanding the meaning of the word/name/trademark 'MySQL'.  You guys are right and I am wrong.  To correct this I'll refer to what I used to call the "MySQL Ecosystem" as the Open Database Community until someone has a cool name for it.

The arguments were so severe that last week I was even thinking about leaving the Open Database Community.  Apart from Drizzle, mydumper and a few other things I don't contribute as much useful content I used to now anyway.  I would need about another 20 hours in every day to do as much as I would like to do.  But for now I will just stay more in the …

About a week ago I appeared to have started an argument which has now spanned several blog post comments, 39 Google+ comments and two other blog posts.  So the first thing I want to do is apologise to the MySQL@Oracle staff (and Sheeri).  I was disagreeing on the use of ‘The’ whilst the real problem is my personal understanding the meaning of the word/name/trademark ‘MySQL’.  You guys are right and I am wrong.  To correct this I’ll refer to what I used to call the “MySQL Ecosystem” as the Open Database Community until someone has a cool name for it.

The arguments were so severe that last week I was even thinking about leaving the Open Database Community.  Apart from Drizzle, mydumper and a few other things I don’t contribute as much useful content I used to now anyway.  I would need about another 20 hours in every day to do as much as I would like to do.  But for now I will just stay more in …

Last week Monty Taylor wrote an interesting blog post Oracle do not, in fact, comprise the total set of MySQL Experts where he protested against the title of Oracle's new podcast series Meet The MySQL Experts. Now, when I say "interesting" I'm not really referring to the factual argument he is making...

What was interesting about this was to see Monty burst out like that and express some true human feelings. Through all the controversies we've seen around MySQL, the Drizzle team has made a point of staying out of such discussions and just working on cleaning up their code and adding cool new stuff (added as plugins, of course). And if anything, I would have expected it to be someone like Stewart to finally break and start ranting about something, if it were to happen...

Just to …