The MySQL Runners Club meets whenever running MySQLers meet. Sun Microsystems GmbH here in Germany also has something similar — and a good week ago, a group of Sunnies teamed up for the 31. Münchner Stadtlauf half marathon. I decided to make myself an embedded reporter, combining Twitter, Flip Mino, YouTube and a bit of surplus electronics and Web 2.0 media.

What’s the result? 37 Tweets, an almost 10 minute YouTube video and, surprisingly, a new personal record (1:44:06).

You’ll see a bit more in the video. Sure, both voice and text are in German — but you’ll get …

I'm pleased to announce the release of Spider storage engine version 0.13.(beta)
http://spiderformysql.com/

The main changes in this version are following.
- Add table parameter "crd_bg_mode" and "sts_bg_mode".
- Add server parameter "spider_crd_bg_mode" and "spider_sts_bg_mode".
  MySQL needs table's analysis informations when select statement is executed. Spider storage engine gets this informations from remote table but this action often generates over-heads.
  This options remove generated over-heads by getting analysis informations at background but you must set this option to 0 if the table's analysis informations change frequently.
  * There are other options for the over-heads reduction of the analysis informations acquisition. I will introduce this at another time.

Please see …

Microsoft makes a patent promise. JBoss is certifiable. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Microsoft announced that it will be applying its Community Promise to the ECMA 334 (C#) and ECMA 335 (CLI) specifications, reducing patent concerns related to Mono.

# Red Hat achieved EAL 2+ security certification for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

# A European Commission white paper on standards stirred some controversy with regards to open source. …

It seems pretty common to find customers install DRBD for the wrong reasons. There are many pros/cons to compare DRBD to replication, but I've managed to cut down my spiel I give to customers to these two points:

• DRBD's aim (assuming replication mode C) is to provide 100% consistency, and then as much uptime as possible.
• MySQL Replication (with a manager such as MMM) aims to have 100% availability, at the potential loss of some data surrounding a failure.

So if you are installing DRBD with the aim of purely "availability", and are not worried about losing that last write on the crash to your master database that (hopefully) happens only once every few years, you may be using the wrong technology.

While the prized "1 minute failover" is possible in DRBD, it doesn't really explain the full picture. The typical crash …

The success of the "Your server for free this summer!" operation is such that we have decided to have another promotion, which will be an extension of the previous one.

The first 1,000 free servers were given out in less than one week! Given the number of requests that we have received, we have even opened 102 accounts in addition to what was planned. Only here is the problem: there are many of you on the waiting list and at Gandi, and we want to be able to please as many as possible

The new promotion will therefore begin today. We are once more offering 1,000 free servers though this time, for only one month. The promotion remains, of course, without any purchase necessary, and you are free to keep your server by adding hosting resources to your account, or to let them expire.

The promotion that allows you to benefit from 2 free months …

This is just a public service announcement (reminder?) that LenZ and Giuseppe are planning OpenSQL Camp 2009, this time in Europe, which is great. It'll be part of FrOSCon.

I wish I could say that I'll attend, but due to various unpredictabilities in my family, I can't plan that far ahead. I don't yet know whether anyone from Percona can attend, but I know a couple of our European consultants are looking at it and tossing around various proposals. (BTW, any lack of proposals / sessions from Percona is strictly our fault, in case there is concern about that. One person noticed and said something to me, so I thought it's worth mentioning.)

I'm thrilled that people thought the first OpenSQL Camp was valuable enough that they're carrying it …

There's a persistent perception that open source software is being ignored in the enterprise, that IT management fears it and it ends up being more costly to deploy than proprietary solutions. That's certainly the perception that some major software vendors would like you to have. But it's Jeffrey Hammond's job to dispel those perceptions, at least when they aren't accurate. As an analyst for Forrester Research, Hammond covers the world of software development as well as Web 2.0 and rich internet applications, so he sees how open source is being used on a daily basis. He'll be speaking at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, talking about the true cost of using open source, and he gave us a sample of what's going on in the enterprise at the moment.

James Turner: To begin, can you just talk about the areas you …

Today, I would like to introduce “skyload“, a small project that I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. In brief, skyload is a libdrizzle based load emulation tool that is capable of running concurrent load tests against database instances that can speak Drizzle (and/or) the MySQL protocol.

• http://code.google.com/p/skyload/

Something I’d like to emphasize here is that, skyload is not a replacement for mysqlslap or drizzleslap since it only provides a subset of what they can do. As I’ve stated on the project description, skyload is designed to do a good …

Video for the presentation at the 2009 MySQL Camp:
Chasing Bottlenecks
by Morgan Tocker

Description:
The best way to performance tune a system is to find out what your bottlenecks are, and attacking those first. In the first part of this session, I'll be looking at some of the issues faced with common database workloads. From there, I'll then be showing how you can get more information out of MySQL and your Operating System to find out about your workload. This session is designed for beginner to intermediate MySQL users.

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