On January the 9th, 2009 I've presented at the 3rd Annual Gestionale Open Developer Conference. 

Gestionale Open is an open source ERP gathering interest in Italy, since it is compliant with local laws. This project has been started years ago by an entrepreneur with decades of experience in the field and now it's used by 100s of customers. They have concluded the porting to MySQL, which is now the default database for the product!

There were nearly 100 participants. Gestionale Open has catalyzed the interest of customers, distributors, software developers. It's nice to see complex business applications moving to open source.

The title of my presentation was: "Enterprise Innovation". I've chosen a banal title, but wishing to make an interesting dissertation on why MySQL is fuelling the innovation and who is using MySQL to seed projects and evolve from simple ideas to real business.

…

Here is a blog entry that was sitting in my Drafts folder for a long time (just because I didn't realize :). Anyway, it shows how to install Open Solaris 2008/11 on Virtual Box. The original install was done using Virtual Box 2.0.6. I installed Virtual Box 2.1 this morning and the image was easily recognized by the updated Virtual Box.

Here are the basic steps.


Create a new VM ...



As part of the previous step, create a new Virtual Disk mapping to the downloaded Open Solaris image ...

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A while back a Sun engineer posted an article claiming that the best way to scale MySQL is to shard your database in many instances on a single server, each of which runs in threads that individually have low performance. The Sun way has always been to get high throughput with high latency. [...]

I’ve been collecting a bunch of tabs, MySQL related, that I think people might have missed during the holiday period.

Contrarian Minds: Marten Mickos - this is a great interview with former CEO of MySQL, now SVP of the Database Group, at Sun Microsystems. Its got a bit of interesting history, and thoughts about the future. There’s also some interesting photography.

Facebook is now at 150 million users. They grew quite a bit recently, it was just 140 million about a month or two ago.

Flickr has seen traffic reaching ten terabytes. As you know, Flickr runs MySQL, …

Sun Microsystems - Employment

As usual, you can likely ignore the “Menlo Park, CA” part (I haven’t checked though… but am 99% sure).

Today, Dinesh pointed us out to the fact that MAMPU/OSCC saves RM40 million with open source. That’s about USD$12 million dollars!

I quote, from the report:

Savings on licensing fee alone by adopting OpenOffice.org have already exceeded RM12 million, which is based on the total installed seats of 12,760 at public sector agencies.

Also, from the same report:

The top three applications being considered by most Public Sector Agencies are:
1. OpenOffice.org – Office Suite
2. Firefox – Web Browser
3. MySQL – Database using Open Source Technology

That is impressive. OpenOffice.org and MySQL both come from Sun Microsystems Inc. Of course I’ve known this for a long time coming, but seeing it in B&W (ok, a colour report!) is of course, most useful. Go …

People keep asking me about components that make up large scale systems. Below is a dump of the systems I typically see/build. I am sure people draw pretty pictures, but to me it is more of a check off list :)


Asset Management

• 
  
• Relational
  
  This operation is typically split between two different
  groups. One group uses data for presentation layers and for
  the feeding of live requests. The other group does data
  analytics for traffic, etc. A third group will also exist in
  some cases to do work for "near time" responses. That data is
  used to handle DOS attacks and other security related
  features.
  
  
• Unstructured (Images, Sound, etc) Serving
  
• Geographical
  
• Fulltext
  
• Graph (Social Network information)
  
…

Mainly a maintenance release but some nice enhancements in it:
* Legacy MDI (Multi Document Interface) has been removed completely
* Use Ctrl+Tab and Shift+Ctrl+Tab for switching main tabs
* Added quick connect sessions via drop down menu of connect button
* Session background color
* Date time editing fixed
* Various bugfixes

Download your copy.

Note that if you use the original 4.0 RC1 release your auto update mechanism won't update to this new release as in that older release it was broken (caused by the "M" in "r1901M").

A while back a Sun engineer posted an article claiming that the best way to scale MySQL is to shard your database in many instances on a single server, each of which runs in threads that individually have low performance. The Sun way has always been to get high throughput with high latency. And that’s fine. Others have commented on the real-world applicability of this technique with MySQL, so I won’t.

A feature of the MySQL server that is used a lot, and yet is a source of much user confusion, code complexity, and multiprocessor lock contention, is logging. Query logging, slow query logging, and the new 5.1 feature, "log to table".

I've removed most all of that stuff from Drizzle (and removed two or three sets of now-no-longer-necessary mutex locks in the process), and replaced it with hooks into a logging plugin subsystem, and have implemented two plugins for it. One logs to a file, and the other logs to syslog.

The output looks almost completely unlike the current MySQL logging. There are no hash-prefixed pseudocomments, for one thing. And there is no distinction between the query log and the slow query log. Queries get logged, and the amount of time each query takes gets logged with it. This subsumes the "micro-slow patch" that is spreading around in the MySQL legacy world.

The current format is …