Normally, I try to avoid reading business books. I especially avoid those promoting the secret sauce to building great companies. I figure the folks who actually do the building often tend to be too busy working, or otherwise enjoying the fruits of their labors instead of writing books. Plus, there are no shortcuts into building enduring companies, regardless of what we might see occasionally in the tech sector.

A few months ago I found myself at a bookstore and ended up buying a book called Good to Great. It’s actually a decent book, particularly because it is based on actual research.

One of the central elements of the book deals with the task of making sure you have the right team in place (”Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus”). We’ve …

I am going to receive a job offer from Sun Canada 'in the next week or so'. I'll have about a week or two to decide if I am going to accept it. It's not an easy decision when your visa is attached to your job, so I wish I had more time.

I'll be honest - I am not sure what I am going to do. I have to weigh up if losing 2 weeks/year vacation is worth whatever added compensation Sun can provide in exchange. To Sun's credit they've managed to keep way more people than I expected, so maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

2 1/2 years at MySQL - it's been a good innings.

So, we have all heard that Billy Joel played a concert at Oracle’s OpenWorld in 2007.

What follows is an actual IRC conversation among Don Seiler, Dave Edwards, and myself:

(4:02:46 PM) don: ha @ Billy Joel at OOW
(4:03:38 PM) dave: “We didn’t fire the startup…”
(4:07:53 PM) don: “we didn’t start the backup”?
(4:12:53 PM) dave: “Don’t go changin’ . . . your slave and master”
(4:20:19 PM) ***sheeri shoots Dave
(4:20:49 PM) sheeri: “I don’t want clever replication, we never could have come this far”
(4:24:05 PM) sheeri: “And the server sounds like an aero-plane, and replication chugs along as it must…and the inserts go on, replication corrupts, and I say “Man, now I’m workin’ all night!”

(4:24:29 PM) dave: “I said ‘ls -u’ . . . …

In response to my previous post, Matt Aslett aptly asks: Does open source have a glass ceiling? In a word, yes. But it doesn't have to be this way. The "OSS business model" is a misnomer as there are many variations. But the business model that the majority of large and leading OSS vendors utilize has one common aspect. These vendors are all selling support and "other stuff" (indemnification, additional testing, better management, and so on) around a product that is indistinguishable from what a user can get freely from the related open source project. Giving away all the value... READ MORE

Today High Performance MySQL, Second Edition went to press. I’ve been working with the production team over the last couple of weeks, proofreading and checking the index and working with the artist who re-drew the illustrations.

I spoke to the production editor this morning and she told me the schedule is for the bound-book date to be the 16th of June. The official in-stock date is June 19th. I don’t know how many copies they’re printing for the first printing. But I think there have been a lot of pre-orders (rumors I’ve heard from my Amazon Affiliate account).

I cannot wait to hold my copy in my hands!

Publishing

After the release of version 1.4 yesterday I was getting a lot of emails with questions so I decided to setup a wiki site for the application. It details the install process, the application design, and some other sections. You can see it here: http://www.monolith-mysql.com

To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

Switzerland is co-hosting EURO 2008 along with Austria and will be kicking off the tournament with a game against the Czech Republic on Saturday. The country is of course famous for its neutrality but has shown itself to be less than neutral when it comes to open source (see what I did there) with the federal government having adopted an open source software strategy as long ago as February 2004.

Key policies:
The …

I've worked on DTrace probes for a while now. It's
a really interesting tool. I've worked on MySQL Cluster
code since 1996 but this is the most advanced tool
I've used to see exactly what's going on inside the
MySQL Server and the data nodes.

I'm still at an early stage of using these DTrace probes
and there is still some work before they are publishable
but one can see very well what's going on inside the
processes in real-time.

My first finding was that I quickly discovered that CPU
percentage that is reported at 1% in prstat in Solaris
actually means that it uses 64% of a CPU thread 1% is the
percentage of the total CPU resources, this is different
to what I'm used to from top.

The benchmark I'm analysing is the same DBT2 I've used in
a fairly long line of analysis on MySQL Cluster performance
over the last 2 years. This …

Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, is 100 editions (and almost two-years) old today! Lewis Cunningham has returned to LB to publish The Big 100th edition of LB on An Expert?s Guide to Oracle Technology.

No speech, but I would like to thank Log Buffer’s readers and especially all of Log Buffer’s editors for making LB a worthwhile and fun stop in the database “blogosphere”. It’s very easy to see why LB editors are successful in what they do — they are consistently enthusiastic, diligent, and adaptable. And I enjoy working with them.

Okay, okay — I can hear the orchestra starting to play me off, so …

According to the manual, FLUSH LOGS is supposed to:

Closes and reopens all log files. If binary logging is enabled, the sequence number of the binary log file is incremented by one relative to the previous file. On Unix, this is the same thing as sending a SIGHUP signal to the mysqld server (except on some Mac OS X 10.3 versions where mysqld ignores SIGHUP and SIGQUIT).

If the server is writing error output to a named file (for example, if it was started with the –log-error option), FLUSH LOGS causes it to rename the current error log file with a suffix of -old and create a new empty log file. No renaming occurs if the server is not writing to a named file (for example, if it is writing errors to the console).

There is a bug, however. In the case when the error log writes to a non-default path, FLUSH LOGS actually does not work as specified …