Sun Microsystems today announced the results of a regional survey that shows 44 percent of all large and medium-sized companies in the Nordic and Benelux countries are using open source software (OSS). The survey was conducted by the international market research company TNS Gallup, on behalf of Sun.

Why was Teradata able to become the leader of data warehousing at the super high-end (e.g. greater than 25 TB’s)?  Why was Netezza only the second pure-play data warehousing company to go public by focusing on the 10 – 25 TB range of opportunities?  Why did Oracle after so many years of denial finally announce a joint hardware / software product for data warehousing with HP, the Exadata data warehouse server?  Why did Microsoft acquire DATAllegro, one of the earlier data warehousing appliances? Why are there now dozens of data warehouse appliances available on the market today, and – more importantly – how should a customer choose which one to purchase? 

In all these cases, the vendors have listened to the market and concluded that the most optimal way to serve the customer is through a true data warehouse appliance.  Given that there are so many flavors of appliances, though, here are some things to …

OSCON moves this year from Portland to San Jose.

As one the community panel for Drizzle: Status, Principles, and Ecosystem I also have a speaker discount which you can combine with O’Reilly having also extended early bird registration until June 23.

Be sure to add the os09fos code for an additional 20% off, and be sure to shout me a drink there.

We’ve got two Yahoo! related news items today.

The first is that we’ve launched a Yahoo! 360 importer (listed in your admin screens under Tools → Import) to make migration from 360 to WordPress.com super easy. Just upload the Yahoo! 360 export ZIP file, and we’ll do the rest. Yahoo! will be shutting down their 360 service soon, so if you have any friends over there feel free to give them a little help and encouragement to head over to WordPress.com

Second is the release of our WordPress.com QuickPress Yahoo! Application. You can post posts and read and moderate your most recent comments straight from My Yahoo!. (Note to any self-hosted WordPress.org folks out there: the app currently only works on WordPress.com. We’re working on making it .com/.org universal.)

Thanks to Yahoo! for …

I’ve been a bit slack about writing my MySQL thoughts of late. This would be caused by the fact that, as I write this, I’m now one week into a 12 month leave of absence from MySQL.

Having given it much careful consideration, I’ve decided that the wisest way to survive the current economic problems is by blowing my savings on a year long holiday in Italy. Wait, did I say holiday? Not really. I’m still a Sun employee, and I’m still going to be active in the MySQL community. My dear support customers just won’t be seeing me around for a while.

I’m looking forward to having time to write more extensively about some of the cool things we’re doing, and what’s going on in the community at large. If there’s anything you’d like to hear about (either expanding on my previous posts, or a completely new topic), please let me know.

Another thing …

Lenz Grimmer recently wrote two blogs about password security on MySQL. Both are worth reading in detail. You’ll find them in Basic MySQL Security: Providing passwords on the command line and More on MySQL password security.

Although I wrote a comment on the latter one, there is one point I thought was worth its own blog.

GRANT … IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD…

You can work around having to specify the password in the open following these steps:

1. Use a local or non-public instance (for example using MySQL Sandbox) to define the user / password combination you need:

   CREATE USER 'name'@'host' IDENTIFIED BY 'secret';

2. Use SHOW GRANTS to …

This is the 149th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

MySQL

Let’s begin with the big-picture stuff. Jeremy Zawodny laid out his view of the state of MySQL in Linux Magazine’s blog, noting the rough transition between versions 5.0 and 5.1, the status of storage engines, and outside contributions.

Like Baron Schwartz’s Maatkit, for example. Baron announced this week that he is writing a book about Maatkit, and also …

I think 5.1 gets some bad press for not being a compelling upgrade. It's not the big features that make the difference, but the subtle ones. I wanted to highlight some of the these that may make your life easier when it's time to upgrade:

* Prepared statements can now use the query cache. BUG #735
* InnoDB auto_increment insertion is more scalable. Manual Page
* The long_query_time can be set to values less than 1 second. BUG #6238
* SHOW PROFILES is available for everyone, not just community users!
* Creating …

I think 5.1 gets some bad press for not being a compelling upgrade. It's not the big features that make the difference, but the subtle ones. I wanted to highlight some of the these that may make your life easier when it's time to upgrade:

* Prepared statements can now use the query cache. BUG #735
* InnoDB auto_increment insertion is more scalable. Manual Page
* The long_query_time can be set to values less than 1 second. BUG #6238
* SHOW PROFILES is available for everyone, not just community users!
* Creating …

I tweaked the mext script so it auto-detects the necessary column widths for each sample.

Get mext here.