A potential customer asked my about porting her application from Oracle Database to MySQL.

I always try to start with the "why" (a dear friend bought me this book, recommended: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447).

She said "cloud!". I said "OK!".

I conducted a short research, found many things in many places all over the place, brought them to a nice email I sent her back and then thought I'll post it here and make it public as it might be useful for us all. If you feel that I missed something, add comments, send feedback.

These are the leading tools to do the actual migration of the data structure, data export/import, sprocs, triggers, etc.:

1. MySQL Workbench has a migration feature: http://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/migrate/
2. MySQLYog can be used to migrate: …

MySQL's architecture and features make the database a great fit for cloud based deployments. If you are interested in using MySQL to deliver web-based applications and scale out, read the white paper MySQL, An Ideal Choice in the Cloud.

As a first step to using the MySQL database, take the MySQL for Beginners course. In this 4-day course, you learn to use the MySQL Server and tools while developing a knowledge of relational databases. You can take this course through the following delivery methods:

• Training-on-Demand: Start training within 24 hours of registering and train at your own pace.
• Live-Virtual Event: Follow a live …

I have recently moved to HP's Advanced Technology Group which is a new group in HP and as part of that I will be blogging a lot more about the Open Source things I and others in HP work on day to day.  I thought I would kick this off by talking about work that a colleague of mine, Patrick Crews, worked on several months ago.

For those who don't know Patrick, he is a great Devops Engineer and QA.  He will find new automated ways of breaking things that will torture applications (and the Engineers who write them). I don't know if I am proud or ashamed to say he has found many bugs in code that I have written by doing the software equivalent of beating it with a sledgehammer.

Every Devops Engineer worth his salt knows that backups are important, but one thing that is regularly forgotten about is to check whether the backups are good.  A colleague of mine …

Benchmarking, and benchmarking the cloud, is incredibly error prone. I provided guidance though this minefield in the benchmarking chapter of my book (Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud); that chapter can be read online on the InformIT site. I also gave a lightning talk about benchmarking gone wrong at Surge last year. In this post, I’m going to cut to the chase and show you the tools I commonly use for basic cloud benchmarking.

As explained in the benchmarking chapter, I do not run these tools passively. I perform Active Benchmarking, where I use a …

Continuent is proud to sponsor The OpenStack Summit, November 5-8, at the AsiaWorld Expo in Hong Kong! Don't miss this presentation by Edward Archibald:

Deploying a Highly-Available Database-as-a-Service in OpenStack

In his talk, Edward Archibald, CTO at Continuent, will demonstrate the ease of deploying a multi-site, highly-available, scalable Database-as-a-Service across two OpenStack

Marketo provides the leading cloud-based marketing software platform for companies of all sizes to build and sustain engaging customer relationships. Marketo's SaaS platform runs on MySQL and has faced data management challenges common to all 24x7 SaaS businesses:

Keeping data available regardless of DBMS failures or planned maintenance Utilizing hardware optimized for multi-terabyte MySQL

“The most valuable thing I’ve learned in this role is that judicious use of a little bit of knowledge can go a long way. I’ve seen colleagues and other companies get caught up in the “Big Data” craze by spend hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling on a Hadoop cluster that sees a few megabytes [...]

Learn how Modernizing Medicine, an electronic medical records company, serves thousands of customers and leverages Continuent Tungsten to manage databases on Amazon AWS. Modernizing Medicine is as fast growing SaaS company, offering electronic medical records management solution for thousands of small and medium-sizes dermatology, ophthalmology, optometry, plastic surgery, cosmetic and

Join Continuent and our customers Modernizing Medicine and Marketo to learn how to run business-critical MySQL applications in the cloud or on-premises. Modernizing Medicine is a fast-growing SaaS company, offering electronic medical records management solution. Matthew Lang, Sr. Site Reliability Engineer at Modernizing Medicine, describes how Modernizing Medicine serves thousands of customers

What? Me? technophobic? I have the latest iPhone, my office is jam packed with USB gadgets and my car is a Prius, how much more techno friendly can one get?

That is all fine, but looking beyond fun technologies that we play with just for fun, or natural, but cool and useful, evolutions come to most of us easily. But can you honestly say (I can't) that you always look at the promise of a new technology and never have never looked at it not from the point of view of the obvious new advantages, when the technology has developed into something useful, and instead just looked at it and judged this new technology only from it's first, shaky, implementation?

When I was in my early teens (which occurred around the time just after Mayflower had arrived in New England) my family moved into our first own house. My parents were running a restaurant at the time (they ran one or the other all through my childhood) and …