I’m back at my favorite spot at the Orlando airport:

This week has gone bye so fast it’s kinda scary.  I got dragged into one meeting after another design session after another knowledge transfer opportunity for 5 days in a row.  After our long working days, the discussions and talks just continued over dinner and beers.

It was great to meet everyone and as always we had a good time around the office and at the Ale House.  I even managed to stay sober this time around.  Well at least most of the time.

As always, the thing that struck me the most was how fast Pentaho changes.  It’s almost like visiting a different company every time I drop in.  Since I don’t see the day-to-day changes around the office, the difference between the first time I visited (15 people) and now (70+) is striking.  The office space occupied more than doubled for example.

Well, let me tell you, …

Revision: 8 - Last Update: September 03 2008

This is the first part of a series of short articles with a how-to approach about MySQL® Performance Monitoring, Tuning & Auditing. We will see the question from a GUI prospective. In particular we will describe which monitoring-oriented features HoneyMonitor, a GUI for MySQL® currently in alpha development, implements.

I will explain how HoneyMonitor let you

1. install an audit database on your server, without the need of using 3th Party Agents nor using remote repository databases
2. enable the auditing and start monitoring your server
3. tuning your server changing a few suggested list of variables to get better performance.

We will use only the 5.1.x series of the Server as we use some Scheduled Events and the Event Scheduler has been added only in the 5.1 branch. In particular we will use MySQL® 5.1.24-rc. We will also do some tests …

I have seen on many engagements the column data type is defined as INT(1).

People have the misconception that this numeric integer data type is of the length of one digit, or one byte. (One digit is 0-9 an one byte is 0-255)

This is incorrect.

Integer

For integer numeric data types in MySQL, that is TINYINT, SMALLINT, MEDIUMINT, INT, BIGINT the (n) has no bearing on the size of data stored within the specific data type. The (n) is simply for display formatting.

In the MySQL Manual 10.2. Numeric Types you read This optional display width is used to display integer values having a width less than the width specified for the column by left-padding them with spaces. The display width does not constrain the range of values that can be stored in the column, nor the number of digits that are displayed for values …

As of late yesterday, I once again look like the photo on the Open Sources blog masthead. (That's me on the right hand side with the glasses.) For those who may not have noticed, I was growing my hair for the past two years. As I explained to my boss Marten Mickos (and to the MySQL board), late last year, it wasn't a mid-life crisis. Rather, I was growing my hair to donate it to Locks of Love, a public non-profit organization that provides hairpieces to children in the US and Canada suffering from long term medical hair loss, often... READ MORE

Recently I was asked to provide guidelines for testing fail over of a MySQL configuration that was provided by a hosting provider.

The first observation was the client didn’t have any technical details from the hosting provider of what the moving parts were, and also didn’t have any confirmation other then I think a verbal confirmation that it had been testing.

The first rule in using hosting, never assume. Too many times I’ve seen details from a client stating for example H/W configuration, only to audit and find out otherwise. RAID is a big one, and is generally far more complex to determine. Even for companies with internal systems I’ve seen the most simple question go unanswered. Q: How do you know your RAID is fully operational? A: Somebody will tell us? It’s really amazing to investigate on site with the client to find that RAID system is running in a degraded mode due to a disk failure and nobody knew.

It …

Cost savings drive adoption in new web-based apps READ MORE

Greetings from Wisconsin! Welcome to the 106th edition of the Log Buffer. Mr. Edwards is on a brief holiday and kindly asked me to fill in for him. So join me as we take a tour of some of this week’s database blogging activity.

I’d like to start by sharing the story of MySQL engineer Andrii Nikitin’s young son, Ivan. The short story is that Ivan is in need of a bone marrow transplant and that would also require travelling outside of their native Ukraine for the procedure. The family is asking for donations to cover the cost of the operation and trip, so please consider donating via the previous link.

Now, moving on to the database topics, we begin with my own area of (relative) expertise, Oracle. The big news this week is the July 2008 CPU, …

The VAR Guy has the scoop on some upcoming Ubuntu news: Ubuntu and Openbravo are teaming up to help push Ubuntu into the enterprise.

Now, Canonical is seeking killer server applications for Ubuntu. MySQL, the open-source database now owned by Sun, has backed Ubuntu quite a bit. And now Openbravo is joining the party...Smart move by Canonical and Openbravo. CIOs, midmarket IT managers, and solutions providers don't care much about server operating systems. It's all about the applications.

I agree, and so do Red Hat and Novell, which built their formidable server businesses by focusing on applications.

It's interesting, however, where Canonical/Ubuntu is focused. It started with some select, …

Earlier this week I posted how OpenJDK was knock, knock, knockin' on Lenny's door.  At that time I also mentioned how it was already in Ubuntu and Fedora.

What I failed to mention, however, and was right under my very nose was that fact that OpenJDK had already made it into OpenSUSE 11.  Thanks to MySQL Euro-community manager and former SUSE employee Lenz Grimmer, I was …

Tag1 Consulting is focused on improving Drupal's performance and scalability. We also believe that when information is freely shared, everyone wins. Toward these ends, we are working on an online book titled, "Drupal Performance and Scalability". The book is divided into five main sections, Drupal Performance, Front End Performance, Improved Caching and Searching, Optimizing the Database Layer, and Drupal In The Cloud. The book is primarily aimed toward users running …