Sorry for not updating this blog regularly. My wife's due date is soon so I've busy.

Anyway, I wanted to share this very funny interview with Jonathan Schwartz (puppet):

Simon Phipps yesterday blogged about the emerging Sun Model for Open Source business:

As time has gone by, a clear “Sun Model” for open source business has been emerging, at least to my eyes. The summary of it is:

1. remove barriers to software adoption between download and deploy;
2. encourage a large and cohesive community of software deployers;
3. deliver, for a fee, the means to create value between deploy and scale, for those who need it.

Each software team at Sun interprets this model in a slightly different way, but the model holds pretty much everywhere and works regardless of the license for the code. As a business model, it …

This week gives me a chance to get back into something I love to do—write. For those who don’t know, my name is Keith Murphy and I am a MySQL DBA at the Pythian Group. In addition, I have the privilege of being the editor of the MySQL Magazine, a quarterly  magazine for those who use MySQL on a daily basis, either as a DBA or a developer. The sixth issue was just released last week and is available for download now. But enough about me! Let’s see what you all had to say this week.

Beginning with the world of MySQL.

Monty Taylor kicks things off, bringing us news of the …

Data stored in a database is often also useful for statistical purposes. If you own a web-shop you want to be able to create a report about turnover. You can get statistical information by using GROUP BY, eg.

SELECT DATE_FORMAT(invoice.date, '%M') AS `month`, COUNT(*) AS `invoice_count`, SUM(`invoice`.`amount`) AS `turnover`
FROM `invoice`
WHERE `date` BETWEEN '2008-01-01' AND '2008-12-31'
GROUP BY MONTH(`invoice`.`date`)

month     invoice_count  turnover
January   84             9532.26
February  141            20857.61
March     91             10922.71
April     112            15044.48
May       101            9676.60 
June      137            12860.88
July      281            34291.20
August    191            26377.66
September 103            16324.78
October   99             12873.23

If you are selling a wide variety of products, you might like to see the turnover for each product category. You could do this with a simple GROUP BY …

As part of our partnership with Dolphin Interconnect Solutions, we are presenting two webinars on DRBD for Dolphin Express on Nov. 5 (European business hours) and Nov. 12 (American business hours).

Both DRBD and Dolphin Express already being a fixture in the MySQL universe, this webinar should be particularly interesting to those of you who want to minimize database write latency while maintaining fully redundant and transaction-safe high availability. However, it’s also a must see for virtualization and mail service DRBD users, who also typically have a need for low latency.

This …

This is a fun question I've been wanting to test for some time.  How much overhead does a trivial WHERE clause add to a MySQL query?  To find out, I set my InnoDB buffer pool to 256MB and created a table that's large enough to test, but small enough to fit wholly in memory:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. CREATE TABLE `t` (
2. `a` date NOT NULL
3. ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
4.  
5. INSERT INTO t(a) VALUES(current_date);
6. INSERT INTO t SELECT * FROM t;

I repeated the last statement until it got slow enough that I thought I could do a reasonable test; at this point there were 8388608 rows. I then optimized the table and restarted MySQL. The table ended up at 237MB.

Now let's see how long a table scan with no WHERE clause …

Sun and Sourcefire report Q3 results. SpringSource elected to JCP executive committee. Alfresco launches Enterprise 3.0. How to go from 0 to 700 customers in one year. Open sourcing Jonathan Schwartz’s ponytail. And more.

Press releases
Sun Microsystems Reports Final Results for the First Quarter Fiscal Year 2009 Sun Microsystems

Sourcefire Announces 2008 Third Quarter Results Sourcefire

Sourcefire Adopts Stockholder Rights Plan Sourcefire

…

Happy Halloween everyone, it's the night of ghouls and ghosts, trick and treating. My friends and I are dressing up as our characters on the game Rockband. Yes, there is nothing scarier than geeks dressed up. Here's three MySQL Monster Movies that I dreamed up to celebrate this special day, I'll try to write the "trailer" in movie speak, imagine the "guy" who does the movie trailer voice overs reading them.

#3 It Came From Outer Select

This Friday when they thought all was quiet, Jack and Jill decided to have a night out. If only they had stayed home. A screaming fills the night, the monitor rings the pager. Jill's MySQL server has load average spiked and is about to blow up. This Friday only Jill can save the server from near death from a query without an index, a query that has left the server hanging in "copy to tmp table on disk" mode. Will she be able to make it to a console in time?

#2 …

I probably ranted a bit too much on the marketing push that Sun has been trying to make into the Open Source community.
The economical situation isn't really perfect so Sun does deserve some credit too.

Yesterday Techcrunch published an exclusive interview with Jonathan Schwartz on the future of Sun and how Sun will be rescued .

[YouTube Movie Embedded]

More details are here

One of the most interesting people I met during my trip to South Africa earlier this week was Aslam Raffee. He keynoted the Sun event, sharing his view of the South African government’s stance on Open Source.

Aslam has two roles: He is the Chief Information Officer at the South African Department of Science and Technology. He is also the chairperson of the OSS Workgroup in the South African Government IT Officers Council.

From Aslam’s presentation, it is clear that South Africa is ahead of the game when it comes to finding out ways to mandate the use of Open Source in Government. I had the privilege to talk to Aslam over lunch, and he described the …