Who Am I?
My name is Luca Olivari, I'm a technology enthusiast living in Italy. I was born in 1979 and I've created this blog having in mind a nice place to share thoughts about MySQL/Sun, Technology, Business Intelligence and other interestingness.

I'm currently working in Sun Microsystems as a Systems Engineer in MySQL Global Software practice and in my spare time I read, take pictures, travel, run and surf web2.0 sites. I'm interested in technology, science, marketing, communication, advertising, picture, classic books and many other things.

If you are in sync with my interests or you simply like to share something this is the right place.
Feel free to add comment to this post if you like to contribute in any other way to this blog.

I'm glad to meet you all!

If you want to look at some information about my personal interests let's have a look at …

Project: MySQL Forge RSS/Atom feeds

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

* Discussed the best approach to handle the feeds with Jay (my mentor) * Learned a lot about the way the code in Forge is organised and how the framework works * Decided what the feeds will look like in terms of different types of content * Searched some PHP feed writer classes to use * Switched to another (Launchpad.net hosted) repository which came along with some errors * Submitted my blog to PlanetMySQL
KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

None....

KEY CONCERNS

My university classes haven't finished yet (I've to go to university until the end of June).

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

* Writing the first working feed handlers

UPDATE: if anyone knows of a non-broken syntax highlighting plugin for wordpress that supports bash or some other shell syntax, let me know :-/

Apache logs, database backups, etc., on busy web sites, can get large. If you rotate logs or perform backups regularly, they can get large and numerous, and as we all know, large * numerous = expensive, or rapidly filling disk partitions, or both.

Amazon’s S3 service, along with a simple downloadable suite of tools, and a shell script or two can ease your life considerably. Here’s one way to do it:

1. Get an Amazon Web Services account by going to the AWS website.
2. Download the ‘aws’ command line tool from here and install it.
3. Write a couple of shell scripts, and schedule them using cron.

Once you have your Amazon account, …

For many MySQL implementations scalability is a crucial requirement. Scaling on various dimensions: Size, Performance, Cost and DBA-Stress-Level.

While several factors impact the scalability of the database, underlying storage probably has the highest impact. You need to make sure that the storage will fill up the buffers fast enough to keep queries happy, and acknowledge the writes fast enough to keep transactions happy. You need to make sure that you can keep growing the available storage as your database grows - MySQL databases are particularly prone to collect more and more data. You also need to make sure that maintenance tasks such as backup, cloning, and application testing will scale gracefully with the size of your database.

Storage systems from NetApp are a great choice when designing for MySQL scalability. Administrators can expand storage on the go …

I got a fair amount of response from my last blogging about including the MySQL Administrator tool as a useful utility in a hands on exam for DBAs. In general I do not like GUIs and prefer the old fashion way. The first thing I did after getting my Mac laptop was open up a terminal to get to the command line interpreter. But I never expected so many to be in favor of forgoing the Administrator tool and sticking with the CLI.

You can read the comments for yourself. I found myself agreeing with all of them. I did receive some private emails that generally distilled to the DBA exam being test of DBA skills and not how well one can manage the latest version of an add-on product.

One of the reasons I used to tell novices to use the vi editor was that it was a common denominator and would be there at three in the morning after your data center had go to heck and you needed to get your servers back on line.
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Would you like to be notified when a new MySQL product is being released? Check this out:



(find this in the left sidebar at dev.mysql.com)

... or you can click right here to subscribe to this new RSS feed.

I created and ran some simple tests on mysql and postgresql to figure out which one is faster. It is already known that postgresql is more stable and reliable than mysql. pgsql has a rich set of features. It is a complete RDBMS and also supports fulltext search.

All benchmarks were done on my laptop - Intel core 2 duo (2.0 GHz) with 4MB L2 cache & 2 GB ram. I have 64 Bit ubuntu system loaded

Nexaweb contributes code to open source Ajax effort. IBM releases v1.0 of Lotus Symphony. Zmanda teams with NetApp on MySQL backup. (and more)

Open Source Ajax Gains Enterprise Momentum With dojo.E Contribution From Nexaweb, Nexaweb Technologies (Press Release)

ODF Comes of Age: IBM Lotus Symphony Turns 1.0, IBM (Press Release)

Zmanda Teams with NetApp to Deliver Highly Optimized Backup Solution for MySQL, Zmanda / NetApp (Press Release)

Linux Framework Wars Down to Two Parties, ABI Research (Press Release)

…

We (the MySQL Web team) have now made it easier for you to keep track of upcoming MySQL Live Web Seminars as well as MySQL OnDemand Webinars - check out the new RSS Feeds:





Have you noticed the change on www.mysql.com?



BTW, did you see the RSS icon next to MySQL Training? This …

I was intrigued by this survey about MySQL today, and I took it.
Some of the questions made me think about the status of MySQL community. Unlike other free/open source projects, MySQL community people are not direct contributors to the project, but just users. Then there are the more advanced ones who keep an active role, and the majority who are just content to use it and don't even care to participate in blogs or forums.
Seen throrugh the articles in PlanetMySQL, the MySQL community has three components, with sub components:

• Sun/MySQL employees, who link between the noisy users and the company.
  • The ones who produce or advocate closed source
  • The ones who only deal with open source
  • The ones who tell interesting stories without taking sides.
  …