It's no surprise that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is on the prowl to acquire more companies, as reported by CNET, given that it gives him a chance to go shopping on the cheap.

.If times are tough, there are other opportunities...including making acquisitions that cost less... (A)cquisitions that we've been looking at for some time are less expensive for us.

Is Red Hat one of them?

I hope not, but there are plenty of good reasons for Oracle to be looking at acquiring an open-source company like Red Hat, or to be contributing significantly to various open-source projects. Open-source companies like Pentaho, Digium, and others should be attractive buys and open-source projects should be compelling strategies right now, for a few different reasons:

1. …

This is part knowledge share, part appeal: fellow bloggers, I’d comment a lot more on your blogs (and I want to!) if I could. Please, make it easy for me to comment — don’t make me log in (I won’t do it) or moderate me. I’ve found a solution that works really well [...]

In short, it really doesn’t matter.  After watching a MySQL web conference by Jay Pipes, I was gutted when I found out that they are actually exactly the same.  I know im not alone in thinking that it affected the size of the data field.  An unsigned int has the max value of 4294967295 no matter if its INT(1) or int(10) and will use 4 bytes of data.

So, what does the number in the brackets mean?  It pretty much comes down to display, its called the display-width.  The display width is a number from 1 to 255. You can set the display width if you want all of your integer values to “appear”.  If you enable zerofill on the row, the field will have a default value of 0 for int(1) and 0000000000 for int(10).

There are 5 main numeric data types, and you should …

Here are few tips if you are going to install the MySQL Coolstack package on Sun Solaris.

First of all, let me say that, as usual, these tips are based on my personal experience and they may not be applicable to your sw version or environment. For this specific tip, I can't say if it is applicable for all versions of Solaris - 9, 10, OpenSolaris, X86, SPARC etc.

You can get the Coolstack from here - http://cooltools.sunsource.net/coolstack. Within Coolstack you will find CSKmysql, a specific 64 bit package prepared by Sun that provides some interesting performance improvements. Coolstack has been built with Sun Studio from the same source used to build the standard versions. Also, CSKmysql provides Dtrace probes - I am sure some will find this feature a great plus. The last available version, 1.3.1, is based on MySQL 5.1.25RC.

When …

Legacy of Blood is the fourth offering by Cinematic Titanic. For those not in the know, Cinematic Titanic is the new project by five cast members from Mystery Science 3000: Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, J. Elvis Weinstein and Mary Jo Pehl.

Cinematic Titanic follows the same concept as the original series, with the performers appearing in …

I guess many of you know us and so our company for MySQL related services. It is true this is majority of our business at this point but it is far from everything.

Our goal in reality is to help people to build and operate quality systems, typically web sites, which means we help customers with performance, scalability, high availability as the whole, not just MySQL related issues.

Indeed if you look at MySQL driven web site its properties will likely depend on a lot of factors - good web side configuration, which is about caching, proxying, using multiple data centers or CDN, serving static content reliably and efficiently. Then it comes to efficient web application architecture and code - being scalable, efficient, highly available, secure and fault tolerant. Caching in particular as memcache plays important role …

I've created a new community poll: Would you prefer InnoDB to be the default storage engine?, as I'm just curious how the community currently feels about this.

Of course, anyone can put --default-storage-engine=InnoDB (and --sql_mode=NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION) in their my.cnf to accomplish the same, but... as a friend of mine has been asking me for years, it would make MySQL "ACID compliant out of the box" (e.g., by default) with no silent ignoring of transactions or foreign key constraints.

You can always specify the desired engine explicitly with CREATE TABLE ... ENGINE=...

One could say that it's about usability and ease-of-use for new users who don't yet know much about MySQL or its configuration. Did you know that the config wizard on Windows actually already sets the …

Dear Lazyweb, quick question: once I’ve USE-ed a database in MySQL, how can I un-USE it so I have no default database? Is it even possible?

Pimp My Drive by Richard and Barb

There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not, so I did what any enterprising geek would do: Built a box, threw some data on it, and tossed it into production to see if it would sink or swim.

I’m a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMug’s datacenters (and our EC2 images) are built on Linux. But the current state of filesystems on Linux is awful, and …

Hi,
I just pushed a version of PBMS up onto launchPad that works with any storage engine. 
The new version provides a set of UDFs and API functions that allow you to set triggers on longblob columns so that the table can be used with the PBMS engine the same way a PBXT table would.  
The following has been added to the API:

/* Functions used for non PBMS enabled tables. */

/*

 * pbms_init_udfs() 

 * Declares the PBMS UDFs on the server if they do not already exist.

 *

 * Equivalent UFD: NONE

 */

pbms_bool pbms_init_udfs(MYSQL *mysql);

/*

 * pbms_enabled() 

 * Returns 'true' if the 'engine' is PBMS enabled i.e. provides direct support for PBMS. 

 * So far the PBXT engine is the only PBMS enabled engine out there. …