Happy Halloween! – well by the time you read this it will be more – Remember, remember the 5th of November!. So what’s been happening?

Well I spent the last month getting to grips with DB2 – why I hear you ask?.
You shouldn’t keep all your eggs in one basket, and there were rumors that DB2 might become Open Source at some point (or not). Anyway even if that never happens there is a lot to learn from the original DBMS and with DB2 Express-C available for free there’s nothing to stop your Open Source app taking advantage of that fact. Besides competition is a good thing.

Anyway not forgetting my …

Recently, I read an interview that Jonathan Schwartz gave to Computerworld dated October, 13 2008.  The following question was posed: "Do you really expect customers in the near term — with the economic downturn— to, say, swap out an Oracle database and replace it with MySQL?"  Jonathan's answer: "Unquestionably.  Now that doesn't mean they are leaving Oracle ... But there is no longer one-size-fits-all in the enterprise database marketplace.".  With 80-90% of the functionality of expensive proprietary databases at 10-15% of the cost, it's no wonder that MySQL has gained such large adoption and will continue to expand as customers look to reduce discretionary spending due to software license costs.

 Adding to this, I just got this email from …

ritu

The primary advantage of deploying the MySQL database in a Solaris Cluster environment is high availability. The Solaris Cluster environment provides fault monitoring and failover capabilities not only for the MySQL software, but also for the entire infrastructure including servers, storage, interconnects, and the operating system. If any component of the entire infrastructure fails, that failure is isolated and managed independently with no impact on availability.

MySQL Master-Slave configurations, deployed outside of a Solaris Cluster environment, provide limited availability: if the master fails, then the slave can manually be assigned master status and take over operation. However, this process is not automatic but requires manual intervention by a system administrator. Solaris Cluster removes this limitation, as it automatically fails over in the case of a master node failure. In addition, Solaris Cluster provides high …

For those of you who have been under a rock for the last several years, there is a buzz-phrase floating around—cloud computing. If you haven’t been paying attention, it is time to wake up.

While I could spend an entire blog post—if not several—on a definition of cloud computing, I will be talking only about cloud computing in the sense of companies moving servers from their building or network operations center to running virtual servers in this computing cloud.

While there are a number of companies providing virtual servers, the most visible is Amazon, with their Amazon Web Services (AWS). I will be talking about AWS in this post as it is the service with which I am most familiar. It seems like every month, AWS rolls out new options and services. Just recently Amazon announced that you can now run on AWS the Windows operating system along with SQL Server.

Amazon also announced a service level …

You are just getting started with MySQL on OpenSolaris. You've installed the OpenSolaris Community Edition and CoolStack MySQL. To explore this new environment you decide to run some tests using the sysbench benchmark. After running a number of tests you realize that for some reason the options you are setting in /etc/my.cnf are not getting used.

What is going on? Not to worry, you've just hit a problem common to new users of MySQL on OpenSolaris.

Run this command:

 # /opt/coolstack/mysql/bin/mysqladmin | more

page down until you see:

Default options are read from the following files in the given order:
/etc/my.cnf /etc/mysql/my.cnf /opt/coolstack/mysql/etc/my.cnf ~/.my.cnf

This shows …

You are just getting started with MySQL on OpenSolaris. You've installed the OpenSolaris Community Edition and CoolStack MySQL. To explore this new environment you decide to run some tests using the sysbench benchmark. After running a number of tests you realize that for some reason the options you are setting in /etc/my.cnf are not getting used.

What is going on? Not to worry, you've just hit a problem common to new users of MySQL on OpenSolaris.

Run this command:

 # /opt/coolstack/mysql/bin/mysqladmin | more

page down until you see:

Default options are read from the following files in the given order:
/etc/my.cnf /etc/mysql/my.cnf /opt/coolstack/mysql/etc/my.cnf ~/.my.cnf

This shows …

Open-Xchange raises Series B funding. The FSF enables Wikimedia’s potential move to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. The “Bilski” decision and software patents. Mindtouch reports revenue growth. And more.

Press releases
Open-Xchange Closes Series B Venture Funding of $9 Million Open-Xchange

OASIS Members Form Committee to Advance Interoperability and Conformance of OpenDocument Format (ODF) Applications OASIS

FSF Releases New Version of GNU Free Documentation License Free Software Foundation

Federal Court Issues “Bilski” Decision Software Freedom …

Consider me a tomato.

Savio posted a MySQL needs to reconsider closed source article yesterday. I’m sure anyone who knows me knows that I’m one of the ones who is likely to be very vocally outraged if they do. I agree that the mythical “point #3″ is the hard part of the general Open Source business plan … although I’d put forward that #3 is always the hard part, Open Source or no. However, before I rant uncontrollably about that, I was struck by this:

Can you think of a better testament to the power of the open-source business model than saving Sun Microsystems?

Short answer:

Yes

First let’s quibble over words again. If I answer the question the way it’s intended to be answered (semi-rhetorically), it would be glossing over the gross error …

ritu

The primary advantage of deploying the MySQL database in a Solaris Cluster environment is high availability. The Solaris Cluster environment provides fault monitoring and failover capabilities not only for the MySQL software, but also for the entire infrastructure including servers, storage, interconnects, and the operating system. If any component of the entire infrastructure fails, that failure is isolated and managed independently with no impact on availability.

MySQL Master-Slave configurations, deployed outside of a Solaris Cluster environment, provide limited availability: if the master fails, then the slave can manually be assigned master status and take over operation. However, this process is not automatic but requires manual intervention by a system administrator. Solaris Cluster removes this limitation, as it automatically fails over in the case of a master node failure. In addition, Solaris Cluster provides high …