After five days of powder skiing and mountain climbing on ski, I’m back in business. This is how I looked out-of-business:

My son and I did not meet with Ötzi the Iceman, but we got a few blisters, a lot of Alpine sun, plenty of powder skiing and the experience of climbing more than 1000 height metres to K2 (in Tirol, not its namesake in Karakorum). And we conquered Austria’s second highest peak, the Wildspitze at 3772 metres above sea level.

The group consisted of our Austrian mountain guide, four ladies and four gentlemen, all of which were German …

Fabrizio makes a good point in his blog highlighting Openbravo's success but potentially also a shortcoming: The company is based in Barcelona, not Silicon Valley. For people in the Valley, the Valley Fetish is very strong. It is, after all, the source of all light and truth.

Fabrizio's point is unintentionally cynical: If you want to get bought for a "gazillion dollars," move your company to the Valley:

Why Silicon Valley for open source? Beside funding and partnering, think for a second about the open source companies that have been bought lately for gazillion of dollars: MySQL, Zimbra, Xensource, Trolltech. Where were they based? Utah? Barcelona? I do not thing so. They maybe started somewhere else, but they were headquartered in the Valley.

Where are the customers in that statement? The …

More interesting stuff here. I reran the XFS tests yesterday, same old story. The generic sysbench disk ( on mtron ssd ) tests show this:

EXT3:

Operations performed: 5001 Read, 4999 Write, 12800 Other = 22800 Total
Read 78.141Mb Written 78.109Mb Total transferred 156.25Mb (3.1325Mb/sec)
200.48 Requests/sec executed

XFS:

Operations performed: 5006 Read, 4994 Write, 12800 Other = 22800 Total
Read 78.219Mb Written 78.031Mb Total transferred 156.25Mb (1.7767Mb/sec)
113.71 Requests/sec executed

The dbt2 tests also reconfirm this. Simply putting the innodb log files on the XFS filesystem caused the loading of the database to go from 29 minutes 43 seconds to 56 minutes 23 seconds. The DBT2 test results dropped in one test from 21K New order TPM’s to 3.7K New Order TPM’s. I am going to rerun this test in Ubuntu to see if this is a Redhat/Centos package problem. I may also try …

MySQLConf.com uses a non-optimal temporary 302 redirect to the MySQL conference website.

This is very bad for mysqlconf.com domain name and equally bad for people who link to http://mysqlconf.com (instead of linking to en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/) as their links then DON'T BENEFIT the conference site and from Google's point of view they are linking to a page that engages in temporary redirect. The result is unless you link directly to an oreilly.com page for your conference links, your votes/links don't get passed on to the conference site.

A 302 redirect is considered bad from search engine's point of view due to its temporary nature.

So please folks, change the redirection to 301 or I will have to go back and change my links to be "rel='nofollow'" links.

Currently, the site gives:

wget …

This year MySQL Conference features some of the best talks on InnoDB and I couldn't be more excited. We'll be hearing from Heikki Tuuri, Ken Jacobs, Mark Callaghan, Vadim Tkachenko, Peter Zaitsev and me :)

Kudos to conference organizers have really done a great job in balancing the sessions this year.

MySQL conference is a great venue to get up to date with what's happening with your favorite database/storage engine. Early registrations end soon so save yourself some money and register now.

If you have known me for sometime or if you are a regular blog reader, please send me a note and I will send you a coupon code to save even more when you register at the conference. You can email me at …

Sun's acquisition of MySQL received an "early termination" of antitrust review by Federal antitrust regulators. As a result, Sun/MySQL acquisition has been given a green light.

I’m still working up some good tips and advice on MySQL on Solaris (particularly the T1000, the new x86 based servers like the X4150 and ZFS, amongst other things), but until then I found Getting Best out of MySQL on Solaris while doing some research.

With the latest OpenSolaris builds (b79, from memory) we now have MySQL built-in, and I worked with the folks on the OpenSolaris Database team to get some reasonable configurations and defaults into the system. MySQL 5.1 and 64-bit support is currently going through the process and will be a in future build.

I’ve also been working with the DTrace people to improve the DTrace support we have in MySQL (documentation will go live this week, I hope). MySQL 6.0.4 will have some basic DTrace probes built-in, but I’ve proposed a patch to extend and improve on …

I was reading comments on an article at BusinessWeek about Sun and Jonathan Schwartz, when I came across this gem:

Dude, my son’s college funds are tied up in your stock. He keeps getting older but the stock is still hanging. I have two years for that stock to rocket.

Aside from anything useful I might have to offer Sun… I would like to poke this guy in the eyeball. Why would you ever tie up the entirety of something as important as your son’s college fund in a single stock? That’s stupid. As if diversification weren’t a well-known concept already, I would have thought that maybe people would have learned from Enron. Perhaps this is a dedicated employee trusting in and investing in the company he works for. The really naive, since a tank in the …

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OK, Sometimes you stumble onto things that are just not right. On my own personal set of hardware (independent from the Server with the IBM Raid card) I am still running Tests with the Mtron flash drives. I noticed a huge regression in performance late this week from earlier in the week. In fact it was truely head scratching. DBT2 results that were in the 26K TPM range suddenly dropped to 4K TPM.I hate to admit a big screw up, but my tests towards the end of the week were tainted. While investigating the problem with the IBM Raid Card and XFS, I took one of the Mtron drives and rebuilt it with XFS. The benchmarks (sysbench) showed that on my hardware their was little performance difference. When I resumed my Mtron dbt2 benchmarks the mtron drive that housed the log files was indeed on this xfs drive.

Trying to figure out what was going on I noticed this (sde is the log drive, sdd is the data ):