It's no secret that Sun just laid off 1,000 employees, and may lay off up to 2,500, but what is interesting is how Sun is offsetting the headcount loss with a more efficient way of finding leads.

It's called open source. As TechCrunch reports on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's Supernova talk:

His talk was about how Sun leverages open source by allowing its software (such as MySQL and ZFS) to float out and be downloaded for free, from where a small percentage of those users can be converted to customers. So through open source and free, Sun have the benefit of a free lead generation and marketing machine - especially with MySQL which is currently being downloaded over 70,000 times a day.

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It's no secret that Sun just laid off 1,000 employees, and may lay off up to 2,500, but what is interesting is how Sun is offsetting the headcount loss with a more efficient way of finding leads.

It's called open source. As TechCrunch reports on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's Supernova talk:

His talk was about how Sun leverages open source by allowing its software (such as MySQL and ZFS) to float out and be downloaded for free, from where a small percentage of those users can be converted to customers. So through open source and free, Sun have the benefit of a free lead generation and marketing machine - especially with MySQL which is currently being downloaded over 70,000 times a day.

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Over the last few weeks I have been doing some work on improving the concurrency performance of PBXT. The last Alpha version (1.0.03) has quite a few problems in this area.

Most of the problems have been with r/w lock and mutex contention but, I soon discovered that MySQL has some serious problems of it's own. In fact, I had to remove some of the bottlenecks in MySQL in order to continue the optimization of PBXT.

The result for simple SELECT performance is shown in the graph below.

Here you can see that the gain is over 60% for 32 or more concurrent threads. Both results show the performance with the newly optimized version of PBXT. The test is running on a 2.16 MHz dual core processor, so I expect an even greater improvement on 4 or 8 cores. The query I ran for this test is …

[HoneyMonitor is a MySQLTM GUI Tool for WindowsTM Systems. Server Administration, Database and Database Objects Administration, Code Development, Server Monitoring, Performance Monitoring, Performance Auditing. Read more on http://www.honeysoftware.com]

We are pleased to announce the availability of HoneyMonitor Pro and HoneyMonitor Audit Pro!

Press Release available at:
http://www.honeysoftware.com/news/pressreleases/20080714-honeymonitor-performance-tuning.php.

The …

Good news, MySQL 5.1.26-rc has been released. From the release notes: “MySQL 5.1.26-rc is slated to be the last release candidate before we declare MySQL 5.1 as “production ready” (GA).”

If I were you, I’d start testing it out in environments that you’re planning to run MySQL in, or upgrade to 5.1 in. Feedback and testing to iron out issues, is important, so if you find a bug that affects you, report it!

In other news, on the Sun Developer Network (SDN) site, there’s a couple of resources such as the Python Developer Center and the Ruby Developer Center. At MySQL, we’ve got the DevZone, focusing on languages such as …

Changes as compared to version 6.56 include:

Features:

* New GRID design (’zebra’ Office 2007 style) for easier navigation.
* Multiple selection in GRIDs with SHIFT+CLICK.
* Improved Data Synchronization. Now typically 2-8 times faster than before depending on data. Option to generate a SQL sync script was added.
*  Drastically improved the speed of exports.
* New more user friendly design for the Schema Synchronisation (renamed from Structure Synchonisation). Various filter (’hide and ignore’) options were added. Also a long-running Schema Sync compare task can now be stopped.
*  Added automatic and manual update check.

Bug fixes:

* A backup script backing up all databases could fail to restore VIEWs referencing another database than the one where the VIEW was.
* Around 50 other small (mostly GUI-related) …

On Thursday, July 17 there will be a web based seminar on MySQL Workbench. 

Seminar will be in Italian and anyone who is interested is invited to join us. You can find details here.

If you are a database architect and you usually work with data models this tool is going to make your life easier and you will learn some interesting features. In the meantime, to better understand the product, take have a look at http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/, where you can download a copy of the community version, read blogs, contribute, discuss and learn.

Happy data-modeling!

On Thursday, July 17 there will be a web based seminar on MySQL Workbench.

Seminar will be in Italian and anyone who is interested is invited to join us. You can find details here.

If you are a database architect and you usually work with data models this tool is going to make your life easier and you will learn some interesting features. In the meantime, to better understand the product, take have a look at http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/, where you can download a copy of the community version, read blogs, contribute, discuss and learn.

Happy data-modeling!

…

Please help save Ivan, son of Andrii Nikitin (MySQL Support Engineer), who needs a bone marrow transplant. Andrii’s message is below:

“My family got bad news - doctors said allogenic bone marrow transplantation is the only chance for my son Ivan.

“8 months of heavy and expensive immune suppression brought some positive results so we hoped that recovering is just question of time.

“Ivan is very brave boy - not every human meets so much suffering during whole life, like Ivan already met in his 2,5 years. But long road is still in front of us to get full recover - we are ready to come it through.

“Ukrainian clinics have no technical possibility to do such complex operation, so we need 150-250K EUR for Israel or European or US clinic. The final decision will be made considering amount we able to find. Perhaps my family is able to get …

SQL proxies have been very much in the news lately, especially for open source databases. MySQL Proxy and PG-Pool are just two examples. Here is another proxy you should look at: Myosotis.

Myosotis is a 'native-client' to JDBC proxy for MySQL and PostgreSQL clients. We originally developed it to allow clients to attach to our Java-based middleware clusters without using a JDBC driver. Myosotis parses the native wire protocol request from the client, issues a corresponding JDBC call, and returns the results back to the client. As you can probably infer, it's written in Java. "Myosotis" incidentally is the scientific name for "Forget-Me-Not," a humble but strikingly beautiful …