Altering a big table sucks, and to make it worse you have no idea what’s happening or how long it will take. I’d like a progress bar, or some status output, or something that gives me the feeling like my server didn’t die.

I am speaking at the Italian Free Software Conference, an event with the aim of considering the state of the art of Free Software in Italy.

The conference is held in Trento, Italy, sponsored by public institutions, the local university, and private industries.
My session is about MySQL as open database, which is a philosophical walkthrough of how MySQL has become successful, why Sun has bought it, what is in store for the future.

LewisC's An Expert's Guide To Oracle Technology

Do you know which open source feature is the most important? Do you know which open source database rocks and which one sucks? Is MySQL better than Postgres? Is Ingres worth considering? How does Firebird compare? Have you used, or have you considered using, an open source database?

Take a survey. It's only 15 questions so it takes just a few minutes.

I'll post a link where you can get the results once they have been compiled and prepared.

BTW, this isn't my survey. I'm just passing on the link.

LewisC

Readers of this blog care deeply, madly, passionately about open source. But if this blog's traffic data is any indication, readers of this blog care even more about Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In fact, most of the planet, as measured by Google Trends, cares more about what Apple is doing on a given day than what business model MySQL has adopted:

Search volume for Open Source, Google, Microsoft, and Apple

(Credit: Google Trends)

On this blog, MySQL and Ubuntu make an appearance in the top-25 most read stories, but Microsoft, Apple, and Google dominate the most-read stories, despite constituting a relatively small number of my total posts.

I note this data only to remind everyone, myself included, to take ourselves a little less …

There have been a number of requests for copies of the slides to the Tungsten Scale-Out Stack talk I gave at the MySQL Conference in April. Here they are courtesy of the nice folks at O'Reilly who organized the conference.

Tungsten is our codename for a set of technologies to raise database performance and availability using scale-out. In the database world scale-out is a term of art that means spreading data across servers on multiple systems. With data in multiple places you are less subject to failures--when one copy crashes you just use the others. Similarly, if your application runs a lot of queries, you can spread them over different machines, which makes for faster and more stable …

Dear LazyWeb,

Today is "green" day, and for "green" day I want to turn on and off some computers by remote. This means I want to be able to telnet/ssh into a power supply to bring them up and down.

Cheap, I want cheap. Web interface is "ok" assuming it works with links (aka text based browser).

No cards... something I plugin. I want a very simple setup.

I've got test servers I rarely use and I want them off most of the time (aka... MySQL, Memcached, Asterisk, Gearman, Drizzle... all the rest).

Thanks!
-Brian

Last week I learned that Sun has put its 3 database groups (Java DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL) under Marten Mickos. First off, who knew Sun had such a broad database portfolio???? Second, smart move putting them all under Marten. In speaking with Marten's Java DB team I gave them a small nugget of advice that has served us incredibly well with WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE). Simply put win with the strengths of the family, not individual products. I've written about customers wanting choice and flexibility and the challenges of trying to position any product, OSS or not, as... READ MORE

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Good old William had his reasons to say so, but then either he was not concerned about misspellings or he didn't care. (A recent book about the Bard actually points out that all Shakespeare's known signatures are differently spelled, and none of them is spelled Shakespeare!)
The problem with my name is that, for the majority of non-Italians, it does not sound familiar, and consequently it gets misspelled. As a frequent traveler, I have seen every sort of mischief done to my first name.
I don't really understand why, but most English speakers write "GUIseppe" instead of "GIUseppe." Sometimes I was called "Giuseppa" (which is a female name) or "Giuseppi" (which is a non existing plural of my name), or "Jooseppai" …

New features for the next release. As follows:

1. Status page now reports daily error code summarizations, connection failures to hosts
2. Talkback report page now reports on myback_talkback script version number
3. Talkback report page now tracks the my.cnf file during the backup process, and the cnf file contents for each host are stored as LONGTEXT in the monitor database
4. Multi-tier access levels, admins (rw) and general users (ro)
5. View tables for the status page summarizations speed up reporting
6. Daily summary email - similar to the status page, instead of singular emails for each backup success/fail notification

Look for 1.3 being released very soon! You’ll be able to find it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/monolith-mysql