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


…

Michael Tiemann's Cygnus Solutions held the open-source valuation record for nearly a decade at $674 million. A few weeks back, Sun broke that record by paying $1 billion for MySQL. So how long does Michael think MySQL will hold the record?

Not very long.

...I would not be surprised to see another $1B deal of some sort in the next 12-18 months. The reason is simple economics:

...

From Business Week:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_07/b4071000908736.htm

The quote that really brought my intention to the article was this:
Ballmer says: "Yahoo, the brand, will live."

What does this mean to me?

Microsoft is willing to dump $45 billion dollars into the market to take the second position. Technology? They do not care one bit about it. What Yahoo uses and develops is at odds with what Microsoft promotes.

Whether redirects to MS's front pages will last long term is an excellent question. I have some real doubts about that. It would also seem that Yahoo could take a number of directions to poison pill this.

Jabber Yahoo could move their IM to Jabber and open up the valves of the IM market. Effectively commoditizing the IM …

I have almost always found that the Hsieh alogrithm for hashing turns out to be the fast. So this morning while waiting for a compile I popped it into Memcached to see what the improvement would be:

With Hsieh:
Testing generate_pairs 2.396 [ ok ]
Testing generate_data 5.100 [ ok ]
Testing get_read 5.491 [ ok ]
Testing delete_generate 4.587 [ ok ]
Testing generate_buffer_data 1.361 [ ok ]
Testing delete_buffer 0.880 [ ok ]
Testing generate_data 4.984 [ ok ]
Testing mget_read 1.817 [ ok ]
Testing mget_read_result 1.743 [ ok ]
Testing mget_read_function 1.782 [ ok ]
Testing cleanup 0.046 [ ok ]
Testing generate_large_pairs 0.390 [ ok ]
Testing generate_data 39.899 [ ok ]
Testing generate_buffer_data 0.058 [ ok ]
Testing cleanup 0.001 [ ok ]

With default:
Testing generate_pairs 2.405 [ ok ]
Testing …

Welcome to the 83rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Little things can make big differences. Archimedes (no blogger, but a very smart guy) said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” and With CLUE as (Select * from Random_Thought ORDER BY Common_Sense DESC) proves him right with a story of leverage: “This story is how changing one character in a 300 line stored procedure removed 90% of the impact of the worst single query on the entire server.”

On Third Abnormal Form, Paul McMillan shows that in SQL Server 2005, …

Yesterday I starting testing PBXT using the DBT2 benchmark. Following the implementation of durability and SELECT FOR UPDATE for the engine I was more interested in the benchmark as a test for stability and concurrency than performance. I was not disappointed...

Which bug first?

Well I immediately ran into 3 bugs. Isn't it funny how bugs often come in batches, which leaves you thinking: "Oh sh.. where do I start?". Here's my advice: start with the bug that is most likely to disappear if you fix the others!

A simple example, you have 2 bugs: an unexpected exception is occurring, and you're loosing memory. First look for the memory loss, because it may disappear when you fix the exception (because you may be loosing memory in the error handler).

Take things one problem at time:

Another thing: once you have decided for one of the bugs, stick with it (no matter how hard it gets) …

In some ways, MySQL is a victim of its own success.  Because of the focus on reliability, performance, and ease-of-use, MySQL usage continues to grow at a heavy pace.  This being the case, the demand for skilled MySQL pro’s has quickly outstripped the current supply.  Go to monster and put in ‘mysql’ and you’ll get back thousands of hits. So if you’re wondering whether getting MySQL expertise as a DBA is a good investment, wonder no more.

Without a doubt, one great way to drink in lots of MySQL DBA knowledge is to attend the upcoming MySQL User’s Conference.  At this year’s conference, there are more tracks than ever designed to help the DBA get a handle on security, performance tuning, backup and recovery, high-performance schema design, and much more.  Plus, you’ll get to see some new tools we’ve been working on to …

After some delay we are proud to present MySQL Proxy 0.6.1.

This is a pure bug-fix release and fixes some assert()oins and the win32 support. It was branched off in December and it took a while to clean up the windows package until it passed the tests.

Download it from:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql-proxy/index.html

Changes:

• added new features to run-tests.lua (see README.TESTS)
• fixed error handling for socket functions on win32
• fixed sending fake server-greetings in connect_server()
• fixed assert()ions on write-errors

These three open-source databases, now in OpenSolaris SXDE 1/08, offer all the needed features for most of the applications out there.

"Three databases to run them all"...

... and of course, Sun offers solutions with commercial database vendors, like the Sun and Oracle's Enterprise Grid Solutions.