I just got informed that two of my session proposals for DrupalCon 2008 got accepted - I will be speaking about the following topics there:

• MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices
• High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo

The second talk will be held in cooperation with Jakub Suchy, who will take over the practical demo. Sun Microsystems is a Gold …

A year and a half ago I was playing around with data visualization toolkits. What I found is that they fell into two buckets: those good for making graphs, and those good for art projects. The ones being used by design and art students were much more interesting and seem to have more possibilities for those of us delivering data visualization rather than fixed graphs.

The problem is that the toolkits / libraries are generally not as usable in a commercial setting. The most interesting one I found is Processing and I'm happy to see that there are now books out on it. I had trouble digging through the original documentation and doing anything interesting. The thing I often find is that the most interesting work is being done well outside the BI market. Here's a nice example of a Processing visualization from Robert Hodgin
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First of all, thanks to everyone who commented on my previous OpenSolaris entry (which wasn’t really positive at all).

I recently tried again - this time starting with an ISO of build 93. I’d recommend completely ignoring the 2008.05 release and going straight for the build 93 image.

Installed easily in VirtualBox, adding the VirtualBox extensions was easy. Select “Devices -> Install Guest Additions” in the VirtualBox menu, then when logged into the OpenSolaris install, do the following:

su

pkgadd -d /media/VBOXADDITIONS_1.6.0_30421/VBoxSolarisAdditions.pkg

(you then say yes, i really do want to install it. rather obvious. I had to do this step again after the “pkg image-update” below though). Just logging out and then back in again gets you all the awesomeness you’d expect from running other guests (such as that system released by a large corporation in Redmond).

The “pkg …

While we were mostly excited to become part of Sun, there was at least one drawback too. MySQL had a worldwide policy of "Scandinavian style" 5 week vacations per year (4 Summer, 1 Winter week). Sun doesn't have such a worldwide policy, so most of us lost some vacation days there. But there is one group of employees that still enjoy this benefit... those of us that actually live in Scandinavia!

Those 4 weeks are however now gone for my part :-( So I thought I'll make a soft start to working by a) yesterday doing almost nothing and b) today blogging. A long long time ago before I left for my vacation Mark Callaghan requested more blog posts about MySQL Cluster, so I thought why not start with one right now. As previously noted there are many good MySQL Cluster bloggers out there, but admittedly some of their blog postings can be very …

... and thanks go to Harrison Fisk of the MySQL support organization who completed the port of the Ebay + Google patches advanced Memory engine for Drizzle.

This is one of the patches I have been hoping someone would get to quickly since it is a big win for databases.

For those playing at home this is the engine that runs some of Ebay and is a replacement for the memory engine distributed with MySQL. Google around and you can find articles on what makes this engine so spiffy.

Michael Widenius, commonly referred to as Monty, gave a very interesting talk on Maria at OSCON 2008. He not only had a talk in the main session, that was well attended, titled Architecture of Maria, the New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL (slides are available in ODP there), he also gave one at the Sun booth, where we were running our own little “unconference”.

For those reading this in a feed reader, there’s a 23 minute video of Monty telling us more about Maria, a bit about its motivations, architecture, and where the team is at now. If you’re interested in grabbing the code, check out the …

I came across another MySQL Monitoring product today, DBTuna. I’ve got a trial license of this commercial product so I’ll be looking into its installation, options and support and will be reporting back.

In a previous post, I talked about the method Skoll used to collect MySQL runtime information for non-default configurations. At the time, the runtime information was collected after all of the MySQL tests were executed, which means the runtime information was accumulated from all tests run. There was no way to decipher how each test contributed to this accumulated runtime information. A greater degree of granularity can provide better understanding of the MySQL runtime behavior.

To collect runtime information for each MySQL test, the Skoll client still compiles MySQL as described in the previous post. Instead of running the "mysql-test-run" script with no arguments (which runs all available tests in the source tree), Skoll client calls "mysql-test-run [TESTCASE]" to run one specific test. …

I did not usually go to “Elite” servers on Dell web site but looking at customers system today I went to check Dell Poweredge R900. This monster takes up to 4 Quad Core CPUs and has 32 memory slots, which allows to get 128GB of memory with 4GB of memory chips. This means upgrade to default configuration to 128GB of memory will cost you just $9600 (list price). I’ve been able to configure on a web the system with 8*2.5″ hard drives RAID and 2 CPUs (just as we usually configure PowerEdge 2950) with 128GB of RAM for about $16000. This means talking to Dell Sales rep it can purchases within $15000. This may sounds as a lot but if you’re memory constrained it is cheaper per GB than buying 32GB box for $6000

So am I scale-up advocate ? No. But it is quite frequently systems are designed to have “working set to fit in memory” to perform well and such systems can avoid good consolidation factor for such application, or would allow them …

We announced support for Oracle today. Specifically, Amanda Enterprise now protects:

• Oracle 11g on Windows
• Oracle 10g and 11g on Linux and Solaris
• Oracle Enterprise Linux

On Linux and Solaris, we took the approach of integrating Amanda with RMAN. Keeping with Amanda’s philosophy of using native tools as closely as possible, we allow Oracle DBAs to perform recovery right from within Oracle Enterprise Manager. Amanda takes care of restoring all files needed for a DBA to perform recovery specific to their need (e.g. table level recovery or point-in-time recovery).

For Windows, on recommendation from backup experts at Oracle, we integrated with their new VSS writer. This enables us to take quick snapshot …