Lets start at the point where you have just installed OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 and have logged in using your primary userid on the system.

First thing to do is install the packages for PostgreSQL and MySQL on OpenSolaris OS 2008.05. Right click on the desktop and select "Open Terminal" to start a terminal session. Use "su" to assume the root userid. (The primary user already has root role however some programs still explicitly check for userid of root and hence needed to avoid unexpected surprises.)

Verify pkg is able to communicate with the IPS repository.

# pkg search -r postgres …

Savio Rodrigues of InfoWorld tries to parse what makes open-source buyers tick, and how to generate more of them. In so doing, he suggests that the real battleground is over those enterprises with both money and expertise to go it alone with open-source software (so-called "Category B" customers).

Why should they bother buying support when they can self-support?

For me, this isn't the right question. Using his MySQL-derived customer classification system, the real question is, "Can proprietary software serve Category A (companies with more time than money) at all?" and "Can open source more efficiently serve Categories B and C too?"

Implicit in Rodrigues' reasoning is, I think, a belief that if the software is proprietary, A, B, and C companies will all eventually just say, "Aw, shucks. I've got …

Open Query develops its own training materials, rigorously kept up to date, and thus always printed "on demand", i.e. just before an actual training course takes place. They're neatly bound with colour cover and green back board, just looks nice and clean. They also have a special layout that makes note-taking easier.

I'm teaching a custom MySQL training day tomorrow, so I had the stuff ready last week and took it to a friendly local shop for the usual treatment. All seemed perfect. I happened to be out of town on Saturday, so I was just going to pick things up today (Monday). Easy enough, I know the local shop and trust them now to always do a good job and deliver whatever they promise.

Except... today is a public holiday in Queensland: Labour Day. Many years ago I worked for an employer (no longer in business) in the Netherlands who reckoned that labour day was really …

If you've passed your CMA, CMDBA, CMDEV or the Cluster certification, be sure to signup for the MySQL Certified Professionals LinkedIn group. This group is for certified MySQL professionals, recruiters, human resource managers and other technical hiring managers.

This group is not affiliated with Sun or MySQL AB in any way.MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

If you've passed your CMA, CMDBA, CMDEV or the Cluster certification, be sure to signup for the MySQL Certified Professionals LinkedIn group. This group is for certified MySQL professionals, recruiters, human resource managers and other technical hiring managers.

This group is not affiliated with Sun or MySQL AB in any way.MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

Just two weeks after having returned from the MySQL Conference, I just arrived safely in San Francisco again. This time to attend the CommunityOne on Monday and the JavaOne conference from Tuesday till Friday, which should keep me occupied for the rest of the week. I look forward to meeting my fellow MySQL team members (Colin, Giuseppe and Jay will be here, too), as well as many new colleagues from Sun! Shoot me an email, if you would like to meet.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced two new offerings that will significantly expand customer choice by providing users with access to Sun's innovative open source software running on the Amazon Web Services platform. Sun has added premium technical support for its MySQL™ database running on Linux and on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to its global support and services offerings.

Just two observations as I was browsing along today... see https://glassfish.dev.java.net/ (the GlassFish site).

What is GlassFish, you may ask? Well you may indeed ask that, it's not unreasonable to do so ;-), but the site (or at least the front page) won't tell you. This is just a funny observation that actually holds true for many if not most geek-focused software products. A site will rave on about the latest version and news, but nowhere will you see described what it actually is. CLEARLY, if you are looking at the site, you already know, right? WRONG ;-)

Then, and this is just seriously funny IMHO, look at the pool of logos on the right, all except the NetBeans one are in these shades of orange and blue. Most of them come from Sun/Java, and there's of course the MySQL logo. They really do neatly blend together. What a charming coincidence! (the current …

MySQL 6.x Roadmap in Development
By Peter Gulutzan

MySQL’s marketing folks know what goes on, but they emphasize the marketable. I’ll re-spin what they say about MySQL Version 6 and 7, emphasizing what we’re developing now.

The slide show from the April 2008 User Conference lists the coming features thus:
”
[ MySQL 6.0 ]
Falcon Engine (Transactional engine)
New Backup (version 1.0) (Cross engine, non blocking)
Online add column (Cluster only)
Replication conflict detection (Cluster only)
Optimizer enhancements (Faster subqueries)
Better performance info (Diagnostics and more)
Alpha available now (with Falcon beta)
GA scheduled for Q4/2008
[ MySQL 6.x ]
Foreign keys (all storage engines)
Better prepared statements (prepare any SQL statement)
Better server-side cursors (Faster/less memory)
Replication …

We announced the results of our third fiscal quarter (Q3) on Thursday last week, and the results weren't what I, or any of us, wanted.

As you can read in the press release, we delivered $3.267 billion in revenue for Q3, roughly flat with a year ago. On that revenue, we delivered a GAAP loss of 4 cents (equal to the charge associated with the acquisition of MySQL, which closed within the quarter) - on that revenue, we generated around $320m in cash.

The low light of the quarter was revenue in the US - which declined year over year by nearly 10%, a big step down for a geography that typically contributes 40% of our total revenue. The highlight of the quarter was our India performance, up 30% year over year - and our chip multi-threading Niagara systems, which grew (billings) 110%.

We had growth in 12 of 16 geographies …