A company has come up with a vendor-neutral database certification exam. Some are wondering how much use this will be, as it doesn’t go into vendor-specificities. Now, the specifics of how a query optimizer handles queries, how backups, restores and security are done and with MySQL specifically, how different storage engines act are [...]

There has been plenty of press this week regarding Microsoft making a bid for Yahoo. This week the Wall Street Journal Article From Uncertain Future To Leading Yahoo Bid has prompted me to the following observations. I quote several points:

The bid, he said on the call, is “the next major milestone in Microsoft’s companywide transformation” to incorporate online services.

as Microsoft pushes the bid and, if successful, tries to meld Yahoo with Microsoft.

Microsoft had been negotiating to buy online ad company DoubleClick Inc. but lost that deal to Google, which paid $3.1 billion. Microsoft in May countered, spending $6 billion on online ad company aQuantive Inc.

While Microsoft should continue investing in its own online services, it …

I read yesterday in The Wall Street Journal an interesting article in Personal Technology, “Solid-state drives challenge hard drives in speed, but not value”. While the title does sum up nothing new, the barrier to entry to embracing new technology is always cost, and early adopters may not have deeper pockets, but it’s also about being a alpha geek.

As the article states “Solid-state drives have some key advantages. Because that lack moving parts, they are faster, draw less power, and harder to damage and are quieter”. It also backed this up with some results.

What I did not realize, is the new MacBook Air has a 80GB HHD version at $1,799 and as 64G SSD version at $2,798. Testing showed that there was little difference in battery life between these models, however with the …

Fotolog is seeking a MySQL DBA. You'll be working with me in a fast-paced, small-team-running-a-very-large-scale environment.

About Fotolog.com:
? 14th most trafficked site (Alexa)
? 3rd most active social network (ComScore)
? Parent company: Hi-Media (France)


Duties
? Work with Director of Database Infrastructure to maintain/improve and support a high traffic, fine-tuned, scalable and reliable database environment on a day-to-day basis.
? Pro-active and reactive performance analysis, monitoring, troubleshooting and resolution of issues.
? Optimize and tune contentions within the database environment
? Create logging environment(s) to log usage statistics about the environment
? Regularly monitor and periodically conduct random tests of restoration from backups generated within the environment
? Participate in large storage engine migrations
? …

Yup, Yahoo! has finally decided to show balls and reject Microsoft's bid.

Thinking just from search point of view, a Microsoft-Yahoo merger is less evil for the search economy (and by extension online economy) than a Yahoo-Google deal. Of course, this is based on my biased view.

Update: I wonder how long before YHOO drop back to their pre-Microsoft-bid levels.

Update 2: …

The official MySQL Drink. How to make it:
Continue reading "Salmiakki - the official MySQL Drink"

thnx Christophe

Few months back we noticed the incompatibility change related to MyISAM that was introduced in 4.1.23 and recent 5.0 and 5.1 MySQL versions which breaks when one wants to upgrade to 4.1.23 or latest 5.0 or 5.1 when the MyISAM or Merga table is created with 4.0 or earlier 4.1 version.

I reported a bug to MySQL team way back; and looks like they now pushed a patch to 5.1.

This happens even with Merge tables and looks like merge tables are overlooked in that bug report and I am not 100% sure if the patch fixes the merge table issue. This bug is triggered only when the MyISAM table is created with a key column and Merge is associated with …

Found this quote from Michael Tiemann on Matt Asay's blog:
"I would not be surprised to see another $1B deal of some sort in the next 12-18 months. The reason is simple economics...."
Will this come true? Very unlikely, especially within that time frame. Statements like this make MySQL's billion dollar acquisition look like a walk in the park. The reality is that MySQL is a leader in creating an innovative model that brings them pretty decent revenue. It has taken a lot of work from the leadership at MySQL to get it where it is.

So why is it 'simple economics'?
open source beats proprietary software as a development platform and as a value-delivery platform, and given how many millions of dollars companies are seeing wasted on proprietary software, it's only a matter of time before the majority …

You want to know what query is slowing the database or want to check what's going on with a query you
just run, well in mysql just need to type 'show processlist;', but in postgres you must enable two variables
to check this and other stats.

Edit your postgres.conf which should be on /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf for *nix installations and add or change this:

stats_start_collector = true

This must be set to true for the statistics collector to be launched at all.

stats_command_string = true

This enables monitoring of the current command being executed by any server process. The statistics collector subprocess need not be running to enable this feature.


After restarting postgres the following query will show currently running queries

/etc/init.d/postgresql restart


…