On June 21 2008 the third edition of PHP Vikinger will be held in Skien, Norway.

PHP Vikinger is an unconference directed towards everyone who wants to learn more about PHP and likes to discuss and meet with new people. Unlike normal conferences, the talks at an unconference are determined by the attendees, and not by a committee.

Just like in 2006 and 2007, …

Seeing the recent stock market disaster, I wonder if it makes sense to hire capable managers, when your company is hostage of the stockholders mob.
The news delivered by Sun did not seem that bad, except for the USA salesforce. Sun is growing everywhere else in the world, and a slow US economy has punished the whole company out of proportion. The reaction from the crowd is really unbelievable.
On a related matter, Sun has announced the layoff of 2500 people. What does it mean? Sun's strategy is based on growth, or so they say. How can they grow if they start firing people?
Bah!

During my university days when I was working towards a dual degree in Accounting and CIS, I co-founded a small managed hosting company which I ran for four years along with two other co-founders. Then I started a consulting company and eventually moved into online publishing. Things changed and after nearly nine years of being self employed, I took over the very challenging responsibility of single handedly managing and scaling databases of a top 50 site (in 2006). It was definitely not an easy journey and I feel ecstatic to have helped my employer handle 6x growth and rise to being a top 13 site (using same Alexa algorithm).

While I enjoy working with MySQL, Solaris and technology a lot, I really missed being part of business side. Those of you who know me outside my database role, know how much I crave problem solving related to day to day business operations especially strategic decisions, financial, product architecture, …

Sun missed its earnings and sales estimates and as a result it lost approximately 23% of its market capital. Even more disturbing news is the announcement that Sun will be cutting 1500 to 2500 jobs. Eric Day raised his concerns as to whether this job cut will affect MySQL hiring to which Marten replied and pointed to several open positions within MySQL.

Sun has an array of very interesting and useful technologies under its hood. The amount of care Sun takes for its customers is truly impressive and I hope MySQL will follow in Sun's foot steps. Yesterday, I met with a Sun engagement architect and the amount of interest he showed in the technical challenges my team faces was …

I am very confused.

I subscribe to several email lists including MySQL and Ruby on Rails lists. Generally, I keep my mailbox clean except for a folder in which I was archiving messages Ruby on Rails.

A few days ago I noticed that my Ruby on Rails folder reached 65535 messages. Today, I was looking to reply to an email from Keith Murphy (to which I had previously replied as well) and was surprised to find that the particular message didn't show up in my search. This particular message was sent on April 30 so I started scanning all my emails received on that day.

Surprisingly, I didn't find it even after a careful visual scan. Not only that, I noticed several of emails I received in the last 2 weeks missing. My initial reply to Keith was still sitting in my Sent mail folder. My trash folder also had several emails that I had deleted but not the ones that were missing.

For the life of me I …

Right now there is a discussion on Planet MySQL regarding MySQL / Linux swap problem. Peter Zaitsev originally brought the problem of MySQL swapping to light. Recently, Dathan Pattishall also wrote about it in his post Linux 64-bit, MySQL, Swap and Memory. Don McAskill followed up with his post, MySQL and the Linux Swap problem, and an interesting way to get around the issue: "make swap partitions out of RAM disks." Don also points to another article by Kevin regarding …

Zack Urlocker says MySQL 5.1 has zero bugs. He may have been misquoted, or quoted out of context, but there it is. I’ll quote enough of it that you can’t take it out of context twice:

Mickos also said MySQL 5.1 has upgraded its reliability and ease of use over 2005’s v5.0.

“Now we can admit it, but this version is much improved over 5.0, which we weren’t totally happy with,” Mickos confided.

He reported that more than 1,300 bugs (997 in 2007, 386 so far in 2008) have been fixed in v5.1, and that, according to standard DBT2 benchmarks, the performance of v5.1 is 10 to 15 percent better than the previous version.

“This version now has zero bugs,” Urlocker told eWEEK.

You can check for yourself at the MySQL bug …

information_schema.global_variables and information_schema.global_status are two useful tables for getting information on the MySQL® server configuration and status. They have been introduced in MySQL® version 5.1.

You know that some status variables are ‘raw’ and they need a little manipulation to bring a kind of useful information. For example, let’s consider the variable BYTES_RECEIVED (i.e. the number of bytes received from all clients).

If you just select that variable you don’t have a useful information, but if you calculate the ratio ‘Bytes Received per Second’

(`BYTES_RECEIVED`) / (`UPTIME`)

you have a more interesting value and you can see how this value is changing over time.

I’ve created a SQL Script that can help you calculate many interesting Hit Ratios and Derived Performance Metrics and I am posting it here so that you can have and idea on what ratios you can calculate to …

I’m going to be at beCamp 2008, the followup to the first beCamp, which I sadly missed.

beCamp is a BarCamp un-conference. Tonight was about meeting, greeting, and throwing ideas at the wall to see which ones stick. Literally. We stuck pieces of paper on the wall with our ideas — things we can either talk about or want to hear about — and then scratched our votes on them to see which are popular.

I live and breathe MySQL for a decent part of the day, so I hesitated, but then stuck “MySQL Performance” on the wall. It got quite a few votes, so I assume will be giving a talk on MySQL performance basics at some point during the conference. (The exact schedule is probably being determined right now, in my absence, but I’m so tired right now that I’ll just take my chances on it not being at 8:00 AM tomorrow.) [edit: I just checked the website and there won’t be …

Welcome to the 95th edition of the Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs! The number 95 seems to be a popular number, as it's also the outside temperature here near San Diego, so grab something refreshing to drink, edition 95 is taking off.


In the MySQL 'sphere...

Discussions from the MySQL Conference continue. Arjen Lentz starts an email list for community organized conferences named OurSQL-conference. As open source projects go, the discussion turned to source code and to keep the discussion alive, OurSQL-sources was created. Thanks to Sheeri K. Cabral for the OurSQL name. If you …