Repeating the meme from Kees:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

My result:

“Now, while doing this, draw the number six (6) in the air with your right hand.” - Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, Andy Hunt.

I was really lucky on this one - I have so many boring books, this one happened to be on the top of the pile next to me.

Recently, some tests were conducted at Sun that show that MySQL with ZFS can scale on our servers with Cool Threads technology.  These tests show that MySQL can scale on these systems with  little tuning expertise.  The tests used database sharding and application partitioning to obtain the optimal configuration.  Some details of the tests can be found here. 

Sun systems with CoolThreads technology deliver breakthrough performance, scalability and reliability with dramatic space, power, and cost efficiency on Sun's proven open source chip multithreading (CMT) architecture. In addition, you get open source Solaris 10 OS and virtualization technology at no extra cost.  Take the Sun savings challenge …

Thought I would throw this out here so I remember it, and it maybe useful for someone else.  During a session here at Sun’s CEC conference one of the presenter was talking about setting CPU affinity for hardware interrupts.  This made me think of our hack ( workaround ) for innodb scalability on a 16 core machine ( set the mysqld affinity to cpu’s 0-7 or 8-15 ).   In order to get the top performance out of a 16 core machine we probably want to ensure everything else goes to the cpu’s not set to be servicing mysql.   So a quick google search came up with this article on setting the affinity for IRQ’s in the linux kernel.   So with a 16 core box, I could set the affinity for Mysqld to cpu’s 8-15, while setting the affinity of the interrupts to something in the 0-7 range.

Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems, has clarified the company's business model for open-source software, including its MySQL database, suggesting that Sun's revenue hinges on delivering, "for a fee, the means to create value between deploy and scale, for those who need it."

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I took a 1-hour long session (was supposed to be 2 hours, but my planned agenda was exhausted) for students of engineering colleges across Karnataka studying in colleges under VTU. The session was delivered via EDUSAT under the Sun Microsystems- VTU EDUSAT e-learning programme.

It was fun. However, the fact that there was no interaction with the students felt a little dumb. (I was speaking on the camera which was beamed live)

These are my slides:

• http://blogs.sun.com/amitsaha/resource/MySQL/MySQL-Intro-features-benefits.pdf

I also put together a short Quiz for them:

• …

I took a 1-hour long session (was supposed to be 2 hours, but my planned agenda was exhausted) for students of engineering colleges across Karnataka studying in colleges under VTU. The session was delivered via EDUSAT under the Sun Microsystems- VTU EDUSAT e-learning programme.

It was fun. However, the fact that there was no interaction with the students felt a little dumb. (I was speaking on the camera which was beamed live)

These are my slides:

• http://blogs.sun.com/amitsaha/resource/MySQL/MySQL-Intro-features-benefits.pdf

I also put together a short Quiz for them:

• …

Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

A new era

In the past few years, I published many articles using Oracle as a database server. As a former Sybase system administrator and former Informix employee, it was obviously not a matter of personal choice. It was just because the large majority of Sun's customers running databases were also Oracle customers.

This summer, in our 26 Sun Solution Centers worldwide, I observed a shift. Yes, we were still seeing older solutions based on DB2, Oracle, Sybase or Informix being evaluated on new Sun hardware. But every customer project manager, every partner, every software engineer working on a new information system design asked us : Can we architect this solution with MySQL ?

In many cases, if you dared to reply YES to this question, the next interrogation would be about the scalability of the MySQL engine.

This is why I …