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)
  
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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 …

Joining to global effort of keeping chain-letters alive I'll do my every best in answering Jay's meme.

What are the rules ?

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

The seven facts:

• I've been quiet on the public lighttpd side of my life, but I'm still there hanging out with the other team member that are driving the development now. The are doing very good work. Praise them.
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