Ever since Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL, the most common question  that I had to answer  was "Is PostgreSQL dead at Sun?".  This question was not only raised from just PostgreSQL contributors but also other Sun Employees and  potential customers who may not even know that Sun actually sells PostgreSQL support services. 

This question will be further fueled with Josh Berkus's departure. (Josh, we will miss you.)  I admit from the period between the announcement of MySQL acquisition till recently, I too had my own doubts. But as Sun enters it new Fiscal Year FY09, and the clear directions from Management has given the right positive goals to the Sun PostgreSQL Team which will lead to Positive Growth, Self Sustaining model and …

Sometimes you don't quite know what to think... last month MySQL (the company) had no courses in Australia listed in their schedule. They do a few courses a year, schedule them, and they disappear from the schedule when they're full - which, given one active MySQL salesperson since the start of the year, is happening.

Anyway, all of a sudden there were some new ones in the schedule (that's ok, must publish some time) but they're fairly short notice (about one month, rather than 2-3 months ahead), and one is on a similar topic as one of the Open Query courses, in a location that MySQL has not previously been to. And aside from the short notice, the state in question had its winter school holidays two weeks of the period between announcing and the course, so that makes the lead time even shorter.

Now we know, "never attribute to malice what can easily be …

I usually haven’t been posting much about PostgreSQL even after joining Sun, so if I do, it must be something special.

And it is. Josh Berkus is leaving Sun, and Peter Eisentraut is joining.

Josh says:

After two years as Sun’s PostgreSQL Lead, I’m leaving to pursue other opportunities. This does not mean that Sun is dropping PostgreSQL; far from it. Instead my fellow core team member Peter Eisentraut is taking over my role leading the PostgreSQL team at Sun. With Peter’s experience in Oracle migrations and location near major Sun PostgreSQL customers, as well as many years leading the international …

I just finished reading Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 (this title on Packt’s site). I’ve been working on a website powered by Drupal, and though it was obvious that Drupal is very flexible and capable, I was getting pretty lost in the website. So I wanted to read a book that would explain it to me.

Unfortunately, this book didn’t help …

“Funny how Amazon doesn't use S3 to store any assets for amazon.com”tweet by @gruber

Amazon's S3 suffered a major outage today knocking many websites offline. S3 outage started at approximately 12:00 PM EST and the last time I checked at 11:11PM EST, Smugmug, a popular photo hosting site that extensively uses S3, was still down.

- S3 down for more than 7 hours
- S3 outage, 7 hours and counting
- S3 down again
- Amazon failure downs …

Good idea: WhoCallsMe?. Tracks nuisance calls (globally), of course only if there's a CallerID. Check on the site if the number is already in the system, read the comments, add your own. Simple, but useful.

As you probably already seen in a post by Baron, Sphinx Release 0.9.8 is finally out, just in time for OSCON 2008. Even though it is "minor release" if you look at the number, it is major release in practice (and you can view snapshots as minor releases). The changes since 0.9.7 are dramatic with over 70 new features corresponding to over 15 months of work. With zero in front it still looks like "beta" release though it is very stable and widely used.

Myself I would have already named it 1.3.0 or something like it (with 3rd number used for minor releases) and use version 2.0.0 as a target for full live updates. Though it looks like Andrew has set his goal …

Currently, there are several great opportunities with exciting companies available in the New York area. If you're a rock star Java/PHP/Ruby developer or a pixel-obsessed designer, contact me at your earliest convenience.

Web Developer:

Give Real is a well-funded startup in the midst of an exciting period of growth and success. Our technology uses a patent pending platform that combines the ubiquity of credit card transactions and the power of social networks to create a new gifting experience.

Our primary platform is Rails, but there are programming challenges that range from SOAP APIs to Facebook application development. We are searching for full-time developers with expertise and broad experience in:

* Ruby on Rails (we also use rSpec, Starling, Memcache)
* MySQL
* xHTML & CSS, and comfort with Javascript
* Team development with tools like Git & Trac

…

my.cnf can take the open_files_limit=N option in the [mysqld_safe] block. This doesn't do anything to mysqld directly, instead the mysqld_safe script calls ulimit -n <N>

These days, we might want to limit mysqld to use a maximum of 4 cores (using taskset on Linux) so InnoDB performance doesn't degrade. Of course this is only relevant on machines with more than 4 cores (like boxes with 2 quadcore CPUs), but still, it's nice to not have to hack mysqld_safe for such changes, as it makes upgrades less fussy and keeps config info in the one place (my.cnf).

Peter and I were discussing this, and I suggested two new options for mysqld_safe, one for pre-mysqld and one for post-mysqld commands that need to be run. Calling ulimit would be a pre-mysqld task, but taskset is post.
The one thing is that taskset needs to be passed the PID, so we must provide a way to pass that through the config …

Arrived okay - long travel, but in one piece. Staying at the doubletree.