I was pretty excited when OpenLogic announced the Open Source Census. A key feature of the census was a tool that scanned respondents' servers to determine which open source products/packages were actually being used. Anonymous data from these individual scans was going to be shared with the public in order to revolutionize our understanding of OSS usage. This data-sharing would be very important for companies whose IT leaders don't know that they are using OSS. However, to date, only ~= about 1300 machines have been scanned. News from InfoWorld today that Microsoft has also sponsored the Open Source Census is... READ MORE

It’s been a while since the MySQL Management Plug-in 0.42 was released. Since then, I quietly updated it to version 1.0. The changes were very few; the biggest news was that the plug-in was certified by Oracle and added to OTN Oracle 10g Grid Control Extensions Exchange (see at the bottom).

I think the next version is due, as a few people have come back to me with some issues. The biggest was compatibility with Windows. Since I used the command line MySQL client, *nix and Windows shell incompatibilities were a major headache to solve, and I still couldn’t make it work reliably. I wanted to use DBI and DBD:MySQL, but it required installing and compiling Perl packages, which makes the deployment process very …

The event had an ominous start. Apparently, nobody among the geeks who organized it had paid any close attention to the date to see if it had any significance, and nobody noticed that it was one of the dates when Italian football team was playing a game in the European championship!
I was reminded of a similar case, during FrOSCon 2006, which was held during the World cup. Lenz gave a speech in front of 5 people, all friends and colleagues! So we were afraid that we could face a similar debacle.
Our fears were swept away when the event started, and the room was filled in to capacity by a very dedicated audience, welcomed by professor Giulio Concas, our generous host, who also introduced a project on software quality metrics.

Domenico Minchella, a passionate Solaris ambassador, made a convincing demonstration of ZFS crash recovery. He is never …

Most of the users who work with distributions such as: centos, fedora, redhat, etc use yum as a package update/installer. Most of them know how to do “yum update [packagename]” (to update all or [certain packages]) or they do “yum install packagename” to install certain package(s). But yum can do so much more. Here are some options you may find useful:

Following command will search for the string you specified. Generally this will give you all of the packages which has specified string in title or description. Most of the time you will have to look through a lot of output to find what you are looking for.

yum search string

Probably one of the most important options for yum is provides/whatprovides. If you know what command you need, you can find out what package you have to install in order to have that command available to you.

yum provides (or whatprovides) command

Folks, we're counting down the final hours of the survey! If you're a MySQL DBA or developer, we'd love for you to take our little survey. It doesn't take long to complete. Results will be published in the summer issue of MySQL Magazine.

Have you surveyed?MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

Folks, we're counting down the final hours of the survey! If you're a MySQL DBA or developer, we'd love for you to take our little survey. It doesn't take long to complete. Results will be published in the summer issue of MySQL Magazine.

Have you surveyed?MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

Mysql Connector/J (5.1.5, JDBC Driver) is delivered to the OpenSolaris source as part of the Webstack project, and should show up in build 92. The JDBC driver will be located at

/usr/mysql/connectors/jdbc/5.1

So check out OpenSolaris at build 92 ;)

Mysql Connector/J (5.1.5, JDBC Driver) is delivered to the OpenSolaris source as part of the Webstack project, and should show up in build 92. The JDBC driver will be located at

/usr/mysql/connectors/jdbc/5.1

So check out OpenSolaris at build 92 ;)

This blog presents a new toolkit to assist in Dimensioning of MySQL Cluster.
The toolkit consists of two parts:

1. ndb_record_size
2. a spreadsheet to assist in calculating the amount of storage needed etc.
   

The ndb_record_size and the spreadsheets can be downloaded here.

ndb_record_size is a program that calculates the amount of storage (IndexMemory, DataMemory, Disk space (for disk data table)) that is needed for a particular table in a database. The program takes into account the storage overhead needed when calculating the record size.

There are two versions of the spreadsheet, one for MySQL Cluster 6.2, and one for MySQL Cluster 6.3. The main difference is that the spreadsheet for MySQL Cluster 6.3 takes into account compression of LCP and Backups if you chose to …

In the global information age, you must get things right if you want to survive.
Mindless (mis)information.
My ISP, which has a near monopolistic position in my country, has a support phone line. I called it yesterday, because my DSL was down. The usual routine goes: dial #1 for phone, #2 for data problems. I dial #2, and I get a recorded voice "all operators are busy. You can get support at our web site, www.xxx.it". I just called you because I can't connect, you dumb!
Dumbest e-commerce ever
There is a huge movie theater nearby, which is convenient, but the queue at the ticket counter is uninspiring, especially during week-ends. So I check their online ticket sales. Can you believe this? They charge you an additional EUR 0.5 for online tickets. In my book, online services must be cheaper than manned ones, and this is why the airline and the books industries are moving their business online. Charging more for online tickets …