Sun Microsystems always seems to be forced to defend itself, whether it is the company’s ongoing strategy amid dimmed revenue and earnings or its participation in open source. As one who recently considered the fate of a somewhat weakened Sun, I’d also like to highlight a recent series of promising technologies and efforts — dominated by open source — from the venerable technology giant.

Despite continued doubts, Sun continues to focus its strategy on open source software, which is finding its way into the company’s Solaris OS, storage technology with ZFS file system and MySQL database and elsewhere. The company recently launched a new Web site where it is figuratively letting its open source ponytail down and more succinctly staking out its place and …

As part of the MySQL on Sun hardware launch, Allan Packer put together 3 short technical videos on MySQL. 

• Introduction to MySQL Architecture and Typical Deployments (approximately 8 minutes)
  

This video give an introduction to MySQL architecture including storage engines, a release status update, and typical deployment scenarios, which includes horizontal scaling via replication and shards.  It also gives some advice on how to deploy MySQL on Sun systems today.

• Tuning and Monitoring MySQL (approximately 10 minutes)

This video highlights how to tune MySQL for optimal performance and includes details on which binaries are the right …

So I was bored earlier and decided to add a headline section to RelationalNews.com - the news site I’ve been working on for relational database management news feeds. It updates automatically based on the number of times an article has been clicked, very simple statistics tracking, and it gets the job done. Also, I increased the number of front page articles to 50.  Enjoy: http://relationalnews.com

Alrighty, my mistake. In the setup of the mirror infrastructure, I stuffed up the server alias logic so that some yum and apt-get requests will be failing at the moment (specifically on the us mirrors). The uk mirror should be ok. Either temporarily override your config for the uk mirror, or wait a few hours as things gets sorted on those systems. Sorry!

Update: all fixed now - and it seems the mirror people are smarter than I anyway

We’ll get some testing and monitoring in place for this kind of thing, it’s obviously very tricky to spot such problems otherwise.

Guy Kawasaki led a panel at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 summit featuring nine companies started on the cheap and running open source software READ MORE

Just submitted a couple proposals for O’Reilly’s MySQL Conference in April 2009, Santa Clara, CA.  Fingers crossed! Proposer

Sean Hull (hullsean@gmail.com)

Speakers

Sean Hull (hullsean@gmail.com)

Description

MySQL Replication is powerful technology, but many things can trip you up. Sometimes the slaves get out of sync with the master, or dump errors into their logfiles. Sometimes replication just can’t keep up. In this presentation will explain how to verify with checksums, avoid traps in your code, monitor, and even help you improve the performance of your replication setup.

Abstract

There are a few big gotchas with MySQL’s statement based replication. Non-deterministic functions can cause the slave to get out of sync, mixing innodb and MyISAM tables, to name just a few. What you need to do …

This past Tuesday I was doing more than just voting.  I was giving a live webinar on using MySQL with the Entity Framework.  We had a terrific time (demo machine crash included!) and had a great turnout.  I have been informed that we set records for most number of registrations and attendees.  I’m truly honored and hope that at least some of you got something out of it.

I’ve had a lot of people ask me for the materials from the session so I’ve made them available from my personal server.  You can get the slides, sample projects, and db script here.  The webinar was also recorded and will appear on this page eventually.

Thanks again to all who attended.  I’m hoping to give an expanded version of this session at our users conference …

When you write a blog post and tag it with something you know will allow it to be aggregated into PlanetMySQL (or any other technical aggregation service), ask yourself one thing:

If I was a technical person interested in MySQL, would I want to read what I just wrote?

If you answered "No" to the above question, don't click the Publish button

Just submitted a couple proposals for O’Reilly’s MySQL Conference in April 2009, Santa Clara, CA.  Fingers crossed!

Proposal details Proposer

Sean Hull (hullsean@gmail.com)

Speakers

Sean Hull (hullsean@gmail.com)

Description

Drupal is an open-source CMS that has a huge user base and community. I recently managed the MySQL side of the equation for a Drupal-based website of a large television brand. There are some documents out there for high performance MySQL with Drupal, I found them lacking. So I did extensive benchmarking, and profiling of queries, to find the best overall setup.

Session type: 45 minute conference session

Topics: Business and Case Studies

Abstract

Drupal is the open-source CMS du-jour. It has become very popular very quickly, but performance isn’t …

Just submitted a couple proposals for O’Reilly’s MySQL Conference in April 2009, Santa Clara, CA.  Fingers crossed!

Proposal details Proposer

Sean Hull (hullsean@gmail.com)

Speakers

Sean Hull (hullsean@gmail.com)

Description

MySQL has a number of great features for managing archival data, and very large tables. We look at the MERGE storage engine first. Then we look at views which can hide many tables behind the scenes. And lastly we look at partitioned tables.

Session type: 45 minute conference session

Topics: Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence

Abstract

MySQL has some very powerful features for large databases now available in 5.1.

We’ll look at the MERGE storage engine first. Then we’ll take a look at views, and the strengths and weaknesses …