These are my spoken notes from last week's earnings call - rather than recraft them, I figured I'd simply republish.

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And thank you all for joining us this afternoon. 

I'll start with some perspective on our Q2 results and the current climate, then follow-up with commentary on our products disclosure - slides 6 and 7 in the slide deck. Then I'll turn it over to Mike Lehman (Sun's CFO) for commentary on financial metrics, and an update on the restructuring plan we announced back in November.

Overall, results for Q2 were in line with what we expected, as macro worries factored into customer discussions across all geographies. These concerns resulted in decisions related to higher end system purchases being pushed out - so billings were down year over year for SPARC Enterprise …

It’s been a few months since we‘ve started actively using ActiveMQ queue server in our project. For some time we had pretty weird problems with it and even started thinking about switching to something else or even writing our own queue server which would comply with our requirements. The most annoying problem was the following: some time after activemq restart everything worked really well and then activemq started lagging, queue started growing and all producer processes were stalling on push() operations. We rewrote our producers from Ruby to JRuby, then to Java and still – after some time everything was in a bad shape until we restarted the queue server.

So, long story short, after a lots of docs and source code reading we’ve found really interesting thing. There is a “feature” added in the recent ActiveMQ release …

Open source projects have a great way of pulling in original ideas. Take encrypting replicated SQL: it's a big deal when you are are not sure about network security. This problem comes up very quickly when you transmit data over WAN links or in shared/cloud environments.

I have been procrastinating on implementation of encryption in the Tungsten Replicator because it felt as if we were going to have to do some surgery for it to work correctly. (Another hypothesis is that I'm lazy.) However, this morning I was talking via Skype to Mark Stenbäck, an engineer from Finland whom we met through a recent conference. Mark had a great idea. Why not just write an event filter? An excellent thought...Here's how it could work.

Filters …

Time-delayed replication is a useful feature that allows a slave to lag a fixed amount of time behind a master, thus providing a time window to recover from disasters like deleting a 10 million line table by accident. You just run over to the slave, turn off replication, and recover lost data, as the delayed updates mean it has yet to see your deadly mistake. It's a simple way to protect your administrative honor as well as your job.

Time-delayed replication has been on the MySQL to-do list since at least 2001. It's currently scheduled for release 6.0 and the fix is included in recent OurDelta builds. However, there's a very simple way to get the feature with Tungsten Replicator filters. This works for unadulterated MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 releases.

I wrote about filters in a previous post on the …

I spent the last month taking a break from Open Source, partly due to FreeBSD 7.1 failing to hit the FTP servers as scheduled (any excuse), but mostly due to Santa’s early delivery of Ableton Live. Not really Open Source I may add but extremely cool nonetheless and a much needed break from coding!.

I find that staring too much at code can hamper the creative process (hehe), and as you know Creativity and Innovation go hand in hand with Open Source Software!.

Speaking of which, while I have been busy playing with waveforms and elastic audio, the Open Source world has been all guns blazing with cool releases like MySQL 5.1 GA, …

A new database feature in NetBeans 6.5 is the ability to save and
reuse SQL statements that have been executed. A dialog listing SQL
statements along with the date executed can be opened from the SQL
Editor by right-clicking within the editor and choosing SQL History or
clicking an image button for SQL History in the SQL Editor toolbar.

To reuse previously executed SQL statements, in the SQL History
dialog, select an SQL statement then click the Insert button, or
double-click on the SQL History. SQL is inserted at the location of the
editor cursor.

In order to fit the SQL within the width allocated in the dialog,
SQL has been truncated. To see the entire SQL, mouse over the SQL and a
tooltip opens displaying the entire SQL statement.

Initially, the order of SQL displayed is descending by …

Hi all,

Today I'd like to continue a blog series in which I highlight Web application tutorials for NetBeans 6.5. A few changes have been made to tutorials, among which is the featuring of MySQL as the database of choice.

This third entry in the series will cover the tutorial, "Developing a Visual Web JSF Application".

In this tutorial, you use the NetBeans IDE and JSF 1.2 (Woodstock) components to create and run a simple web application, Hello Web. The example application asks you to input a name and then displays a message that uses that name. At first, you implement this page with an input field. Then you replace the input field with a drop-down list from which the user can choose a name. The drop-down list is populated with names from a database table.

MySQL is the database used in this version of the …

Download NetBeans IDE 6.5

NetBeans IDE 6.5 offers simplified and rapid development of web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications with PHP, JavaScript, Java, C/C++, Ruby, and Groovy.

New features include a robust IDE for PHP, JavaScript debugging for Firefox and IE, and support for Groovy and Grails. The release also delivers a number of enhancements for Java, Ruby on Rails, and C/C++ development. Java highlights include: built-in support for Hibernate, Eclipse project import, and compile on save. Combining excellent out of the box experience, compelling features, and a great plugin ecosystem, NetBeans IDE 6.5 is a must-download for all developers.

NetBeans IDE 6.5 is currently available in English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese. There are several community contributed localization efforts underway to support …

As consumer spending slows across the world, a variety of "brick and mortar" retailers are clearly feeling the impact. Foot traffic is slowing, and it's getting harder to balance debt laden real estate portfolios and fickle consumer trends.

For consumer product manufacturers, retail distribution is key - it's how you get in front of a customer. It's why the big PC manufacturers are all working hard to score deals with big retailers (or build their own retail outlets) around the world.

But making money on PC's is tough - for most PC makers, you're remarketing someone else's operating system and someone else's microprocessor - it's not for the faint of heart (or faint of balance sheet). For Sun, our retail distribution concerns don't surround consumer hardware (we don't make PC's) as much as consumer software - the popularity of which defines our market opportunity. …

Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

A new era

In the past few years, I published many articles using Oracle as a database server. As a former Sybase system administrator and former Informix employee, it was obviously not a matter of personal choice. It was just because the large majority of Sun's customers running databases were also Oracle customers.

This summer, in our 26 Sun Solution Centers worldwide, I observed a shift. Yes, we were still seeing older solutions based on DB2, Oracle, Sybase or Informix being evaluated on new Sun hardware. But every customer project manager, every partner, every software engineer working on a new information system design asked us : Can we architect this solution with MySQL ?

In many cases, if you dared to reply YES to this question, the next interrogation would be about the scalability of the MySQL engine.

This is why I …