This is a public service announcement, and while databases should not have a problem as this Sunday we “spring ahead”, some people might be confused as to why systems were “dead” for an hour, and show no activity/sales/whatever.

This Sunday, March 9th, most locales in Canada and the US start to “save daylight” by “springing ahead” one hour. At 2 am local time (that would be “really late Saturday night” for the party-goers), the time jumps ahead one hour.

Databases such as MySQL should continue to work just fine, but your monitoring graphs will show a dead zone, your sales charts will log no sales, and similar phenomena will occur. Nothing to worry about, but since I haven’t seen the post made yet, I figured I would remind folks.

Have you ever heard the one about throwing hardware at a software problem? In one of my previous blog posts, I mentioned something along the lines of?well I’ll just cut and paste . . . In my experience, the solution to most problems (the ones the caller refers to as “it’s running slow”) are not rooted in [...]

Generally, when a company wants to open a new market it needs to spend months to years dumping money into it to stoke demand.

MySQL and other open-source companies do market development a little differently. They dump software to seed a market. Lots of software.

Sun executive and former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos discusses this in a recent article with Computer Business Review:

I would say the ratio [between raw downloads and installations] is between one in one hundred and one in one thousand. If you look at averages you get useless information, because we might get 10 million downloads in China and we know almost none of them will pay anything in the near future. In the web 2.0 space, most will pay. In countries with a high GDP, many will pay, and in those with a low economy absolutely nobody will pay today. …

Good database administrators have to plan for the worst. You make a script to backup your data, make sure the script runs properly under cron, store copies of the backups off site, test to make sure you can restore from an old backup, and you still are almost comfortable with the safety of your data. Something in recesses of your mind whispers an almost audible message that you forgot to check one thing. 'What could it be?' you ask yourself in the sleepless hours spent looking for your Achilles Heel.

A friend sent me an email this morning to tell me he wanted to pull back an old copy of a large database that he had backed up months before. The backup was in a file named DEPT072-may-06.sql. So he did the following:

Linux> mysqladmin create scratchdb
Linux> mysql scratchdb > DEPT072-may-06.sql

And then he walked away to get a fresh cup of coffee. When he returned, he was …

Some days a go I discovered a wonderful thing called computer columns when I stumbling on MS SQL server. There is a free MS SQL server 2005 express that you can download off a Microsoft site. Yes, I know, FREE and from microsoft.

(P.S. for those who didn’t read, Bill Gates is now the 3rd richest man in the world after 13 years of being number one.)

I also read a really good article that explains indexes on computed columns. The benefits of speeding up searches with them and adding business rules. Obviously, the business rules were particularly interesting to me.

Jay Pipes had a similar webinar …

I’m still kicking around the ideas suggested by Tim Bowden’s post, which suggested that the GPL is a better licensing choice than BSD for vendors establishing commercial dominance around an open source project.

If you were to draw up a list of the most successful commercial open source vendors, I believe they would all be based on either the L/GPL or the MPL. Certainly, taking Tim’s central point about M&A valuations for open source vendors as the yard stick, then the largest open source M&As have all involved copyleft licenses (although Ian Skerrett …

Doing performance analyzes today I wanted to count how many hits come to the pages which get more than couple of visits per day. We had SQL logs in the database so It was pretty simple query:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. SELECT sum(cnt) FROM (SELECT count(*) cnt FROM performance_log_080306 GROUP BY page HAVING cnt>2) pv;

Unfortunately this query ran for over half an hour badly overloaded server and I had to kill it in the end.

The reason for slowness was of course huge temporary table was required (there were about 5 million of distinct pages visited during that day) which resulted in on disk temporary table which as we know quite slow.

Of course it would be possible to allocate more memory to the temporary table or switch to filesort method and get result faster.

I however picked another road which is quite helpful in similar cases - I did not need exact result but …

Are you close to Munich? Are you available next Friday afternoon? Would you like to meet some MySQLers? And some Sun employees, whom we hope to lure from Sun’s German headquarters in Heimstetten?

Then, come to the Hilton where many of the Bundesliga football clubs stay when playing against FC Bayern München: Munich Hilton am Tucherpark, close to Englischer Garten.

I suggest you to be there at about 14:30. We theoretically start at 14, but two Sun execs and I are arriving late from Hamburg that same afternoon. We expect to be there by 14:45.

What will we discuss?

Well, the setup is the same as for many other meetups, between MySQLers, customers, community, and Sun employees. We’ll tell you that we’re continuing our support of all popular operating systems, and all popular development environments — just like we’ve stressed elsewhere. We’ll share our thinking on what will change and what will stay the …

In my previous post I briefly mentioned Database Appliance with Project Indiana. Now that Sun has acquired MySQL (or as some people say MySQL has acquired Sun) and with our existing work in progress with PostgreSQL, there are quite a bit of options available of using some combination  of Storage, System, Operating System, Database  along with some end user application and present it as either Database Appliance or use it as Embedded Database. 

I thought I will just discuss the audience, symptoms, merits, cons etc regarding the two approach and how they can be useful. 

 The first question is who likes database appliances and who wants embedded database? To answer that I would put the question back: What do you in hand? A hammer or a screw-driver? Because if you have a hammer, the whole world is a nail to you and …

Project 365, Day 64: The Sun Offer
Originally uploaded by FallenPegasus This is the stack of paperwork I had to swallow and sign if I wanted to follow MySQL into Sun Microsystems.