Reaction to EC’s Oracle-Sun delay. OIN to acquire ex-Microsoft patents. And more.

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Reaction to EC’s Oracle-Sun delay
Despite widespread criticism of the European Commission’s decision to open a formal investigation into Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun, Glyn Moody maintained that the EC deserves credit for making open source a central part of its analysis. Meanwhile Monty Program (by way of Steven J Vaughan Nicholls) explained why the EU should block Oracle/Sun, Roberto Galoppini reported …

SSD disks seems to be the hot and cool new disk technology. And I have to admit I don't understand why this is so hot. I think it's useful alright, but really, putting an ancient block level interface that dates back to the 1970's or so, to access a persistent, random access and fast media just seems backwards to me. Why? Because by doing this, we retain compatability with that old block-level access of course, but we loose performance and we loose random access.Properly used, flash based memory should provide fast, persistent random-access memory, that is the promise of the technology, right? Any many seems copncered with what filesystem to use on SSD disks? Hey, com on, it's just like RAM! Slower, yes, by persistent. I don't need blcok level access, it doesn't help and the interfaces are inherently slow. And if the underlying media is random access, why, for heavens sake why?

Yes, I know there are a few issues to solve with Flash …

I don't know why or who was the first who introduced this legend, but if you review source code from time to time, you see one weird MYSQL SQL statement showing up regularly: SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID() FROM some table.

If you google for »SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID() FROM« you'll get 98,100 hits. And if you use Google Code you actually find all the public available sources using this phrase: 216 times in some PHP code, 120 times in Perl code, 102 times in Java code, 21 times in Python code, and finally 1 time in Ruby code.

But what's so bad about this statement? Let's go into the lab:

mysql> SELECT * FROM pages;
+----+---------+-----------------------------------------+
| id | name    | content                                 |
+----+---------+-----------------------------------------+ …

While not a MySQL topic, as most of my readers view my MySQL Blog, my WordPress blog has been hacked? Has yours?

Like many, I’m sure you may have read about it like at Wordpress blogs under attack from hack attack but I was surprised when my custom permlinks did not work.

Being surprised I looked at Administrator accounts, and I found that there was one more number then being displayed in the list. I had to dig into the database to find the problem.

mysql> select * from wp_users where ID in (select user_id from wp_usermeta where meta_key = 'wp_capabilities' and meta_value like '%admin%');
+-----+-------------+------------------------------------+---------------+------------------------------+---------------------------+---------------------+---------------------+-------------+--------------+
| ID  | user_login  | user_pass                          | user_nicename | …

I don't know why or who was the first who introduced this legend, but if you review source code from time to time, you see one weird MYSQL SQL statement showing up regularly: SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID() FROM some table.

If you google for »SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID() FROM« you'll get 98,100 hits. And if you use Google Code you actually find all the public available sources using this phrase: 216 times in some PHP code, 120 times in Perl code, 102 times in Java code, 21 times in Python code, and finally 1 time in Ruby code.

But what's so bad about this statement? Let's go into the lab:

mysql> SELECT \* FROM pages;
+----+---------+-----------------------------------------+
| id | name    | content                                 | …

I don't know why or who was the first who introduced this legend, but if you review source code from time to time, you see one weird MYSQL SQL statement showing up regularly: SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID() FROM some table.

If you google for »SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID() FROM« you'll get 98,100 hits. And if you use Google Code you actually find all the public available sources using this phrase: 216 times in some PHP code, 120 times in Perl code, 102 times in Java code, 21 times in Python code, and finally 1 time in Ruby code.

But what's so bad about this statement? Let's go into the lab:

mysql> SELECT \* FROM pages;
+----+---------+-----------------------------------------+
| id | name    | content                                 | …

We talked to Mark Matthews and Andy Bang, two core developers in the MySQL Enterprise Monitor team, to give us some insight into the new features in the latest MySQL Enterprise Release. You can find more about the MySQL Query Analyzer in our previous interview with Mark Matthews.

The summer break seems to be over and the event season is heating up again! There is a number of conferences and events coming up in the next months — here is a quick summary of the events that I plan to attend.

This Friday I will attend an event here in Hamburg: the "Silpion Sommerfest", organized by Silpion (a local IT solutions provider which is a partner of Sun Microsystems as well). I will be there to network and talk about MySQL.

This coming weekend (2009-09-12/2009-09-13), there will be the PHP Unconference here in Hamburg, Germany . It will consist of two days of Barcamp-style sessions about …

The Facebook patch for MySQL has more performance counters to understand the sources of disk IO from InnoDB. The data below is from a slave that is idle except for the replication workload.

----------------------
BUFFER POOL AND MEMORY
----------------------
Total memory allocated 53455038988; in additional pool allocated 20971520
Buffer pool size   2949120
Free buffers       0
Database pages     2937077
Modified db pages  214123
LRU old pages      1101382
Read ahead: 3278457 random, 3550809 sequential
Pages dirty: 7.26 percent
Pending reads 0
Pending writes: LRU 0, flush list 0, single page 0
Total writes: 129932 LRU, 3860863 flush list, 0 single page
Write sources: free margin 129932, bg dirty 61259, preflush 3742640
Neighbor pages flushed: 3013232 from list, 66315 from LRU
Pages read 11168431, created 115089, written 3990795

The server has read ~11M pages and ~6.8M have been for …

Matt Asay has written an interesting post speculating that Oracle might use the delay caused by the European Commission investigation into its acquisition of Sun to drive the price down. Sounds reasonable enough to me.

In it, Matt makes a couple of statements, one I agree with: “Oracle… likely will prove to be a better manager of this asset than Sun was”; and one that I have real doubts about: “MySQL’s… doing just fine, thank you”.

MySQL might well be doing fine. Unfortunately Sun’s financial results don’t actually provide any evidence either way.

Billings for the MySQL/Infrastructure were up 51% to $313m in FY09, according to information presented with Sun’s financial results, with revenue hitting $100m (up 10%) in …