As the years go by, data pages on disk have to get bigger. 16 KB pages were good for databases in the late 1990’s, but today’s data pages should probably be 64 KB. Page sizes go up over time because memory gets cheaper, and disks get much larger, but disks do not get very much faster.

In 1997, a Megabyte of memory cost $15, but today it costs 10 cents. A new SCSI drive held 4 GB then but 146 GB today. If cost is held constant, today’s machine has 150 times the memory and 36 times the storage of a machine from ten years ago, but the performance of disks is only about 3 times better. Disks are still about 3 inches across and turn at about 10K RPM; today’s best disk might deliver about 180 I/Os per second (IOPS), compared to 60 IOPS in 1997. And since the disk doesn’t move much faster, it makes sense — given the cheap storage both on disk and off — to transfer a bigger chunk of data back and forth with every disk access.

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Scientists are pondering an idea of adding lime to seawater to reduce CO2 levels. The open source collaboration model is being used to flesh out the idea. READ MORE

Concentric, the company I work for, is looking for a MySQL DBA! The position is in San Jose, CA, and here is a link to the official job posting. To apply, please email your resume and a cover letter to SELECT REVERSE(’moc.ox.ws@semuser’);. Include “MySQL DBA” in your subject line. Here is the description:

Concentric, an XO Communications Service, is looking to grow its Engineering team with a MySQL Database Administrator. The successful candidate will have great technical depth and breadth to span our applications, server and web service. We want to talk to people who can think out-of-the-box to help us find unique solutions in a fast moving environment.

Responsibilities

• Design and support the MySQL 5 databases for customer-facing and back-end systems used in a high volume internet services company using high …

In about 20 minutes I leave for the airport, arriving tonight in lovely Portland, OR to attend OSCON.  This will be my third appearance there and I look forward to listening, learning, being interviewed and podcasting.  In fact it was at last year's OSCON that I kicked off my foray into the wild and wacky world of podcasting.    A year later I've got over 70 under my belt and am looking to grab a few more.

What to look for 

As I mentioned previously, Dalibor will be giving a talk and as Ken points out, Sun will be having its "coach potato" booth as …

Andrii Nikitin, his wife and their kids arrived in Germany today. Fellow MySQL Support Engineer Axel Schwenke gave them a ride from the airport to Heidelberg, where Ivan had his first medical checkup at the University Hospital.

Georg Richter has organised an apartment for the first days - until they get some furniture for the final one.

From what can be seen, they all do fine. About Ivan - that remains to be seen.

Footnote from our request to donate to help Andrii Nikitin’s son Ivan:

Donations are requested to help Andrii Nikitin, a MySQL support engineer in Ukraine, provide for his son Ivan who requires a bone marrow transplant operation. …

One of the interesting things about conferences is the fact that there are usually parties associated with the conference. This usually means free food and drink. Sometimes, it usually means free t-shirts[1].

Anyway, its a great way to mingle and network, share and learn new things. So come to the OpenSolaris-MySQL-Zend OSCON Bash located at the DoubleTree Hotel (Lloyd Centre), on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 from 8pm-midnight.

Jesse Silver (excellent party planner - I found his skills amazing at the OpenSolaris Developer Summit earlier this year, in Santa Cruz, back in May), has assured us that it will be “carnivalesque”. Boxing, tricycle races, shooting galleries, pool, and an open bar :)

[1] - Good, since I’ve had to visit Target to buy some yesterday - thanks to United’s great efforts of …

Changes (as compared to version 7.0) include:

Bug fix:
* When SQLyog tried to reconnect while exporting a crash could occur. This bug was introduced in 7.0 with the speed optimization of the export dialogue.

Also SJA for Linux was updated with a fix for a (non-related) issue: Since version 6.5 SJA for Linux would not run on Pentium 3 processors (a ‘illegal instruction’ error was returned).  This is now fixed with this generic build.

Downloads: http://webyog.com/en/downloads.php
Purchase: http://webyog.com/en/buy.php

Arjen Lentz spotted an interesting comment on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog, which suggests that Oracle may have cause for concern in its competition with MySQL:

I work for a major Fortune company, and we're in the process of putting Oracle on a "sunset" list of restricted vendors. ...

Zak Greant is running a free event this year parallell to OSCON that should be very valuable to anyone who is trying to get a start in Open Source or looking to start an Open Source project:

The project is called FOSSCoach and it is the successor to OSCAMP (the
Barcamp-like event that OSCON hosted for the last few years.)

FOSSCoach is focused on teaching people the skills that they need to
participate in (or start) distributed online projects - like PHP or
Wikipedia. Participation is free and people don’t need to be signed up
for OSCON to get in.

The event is meant to provide a way for OSCON to better serve the broad
FOSS community in Portland and surrounding regions.

Details on the event live at in a wiki at:

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I got an early start. Too early. But I’m from the west coast, so my body thinks I slept in. I wandered around a bit, took a few pics which you can see at my Flickr OSCON set, and I discovered a couple of things that might be of interest:

• The starbucks in the conference center charges over $2 for a small cup of joe. There’s a starbucks right across the street (you can see it from the breakfast area - seriously, it’s 5 seconds away), and they charge less than $2 for a medium (grande). That’s less than I pay at home.
• The ATM outside the starbucks charges $3 for cash. I’ll report back when I find a cheaper one, but most places seem to take plastic here.
• Every computer involved in this conference, from registration to the video screens that dot the common areas, are running Windows XP. Just sayin’.
• The …