It's by no means the most interesting thing that I write about, but Microsoft tops the list of topics read by Open Road readers. In fact, it accounts for four of the top 10 posts on this blog since its inception in July.

The only open-source vendors to crack the top 10 are OpenAds and MySQL. For an open-source blog, that's a wee bit depressing.

Here they are:

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Well, it seems to be the thing to do to talk about the things you submitted to MySQL Conference.  So, I figured I would share.  I submitted 3 topics.

From one server to a cluster

In the last 10 years, dealnews.com has grown from a single shared hosting account to an entire rack of equipment.  Luckily, we started using PHP and MySQL very early in the company’s history.

From the early days of growing a forum to surviving _Slashdotting_, _Digging_ and even a Yahoo! front page mention, we have had to adapt both our hardware and software many times to keep up with the growth.

I will discuss the traps, bottlenecks, and even some big wins we have encountered along the way using PHP and MySQL.  From the small scale to using replication and even some MySQL Cluster we have done many interesting things to give our readers (and our content team) a good experience when …

And to think I believed Mike Olson and his Sleepycat team had gone to sleep in the bowels of Oracle. Not so, as this press release from Oracle attests: Juniper Networks will be integrating Sleepycat's Berkeley DB into its JUNOS software, the network operating system that powers its routers.

Sounds like a really sweet deal to me. And likely a very big one. But why Berkeley DB?

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A while back I wrote a post expressing a longing for wait-interface tuning like we have for Oracle (and now SQL Server, I hear). Since then I have found out that the MySQL community server (since 5.0.37) has something starting along those lines: the query profiler.

Using the query profiler, you can get at wait times for a particular query, to help you tune it. There is the official documentation, and, even better, an article by Robin Schumacher that explains and gives examples.

From here it would probably be a “simple” matter to start collecting all this data system-wide, into a repository, to gather global information on wait-event times.   In the meantime, this is certainly a step in the right direction.

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GPL lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia dropped. Curl opens RIA offering. Covalent offers support for ActiveMQ. (and more)

BusyBox Developers and Monsoon Multimedia Agree to Dismiss GPL Lawsuit, Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) / Monsoon Multimedia (Press Release)

Curl Announces Open Source Strategy for Enterprise Rich Internet Application Platform, Curl (Press Release)

Covalent Technologies Announces Support for Apache ActiveMQ, Covalent Technologies (Press Release)

GigaSpaces Partners With GridGain Systems to Provide Robust Grid Computing Solution, GigaSpace …

A little while ago I offered to take time off work and improve MySQL Table Sync. I’ve gotten a very positive response to that, with several organizations offering to contribute to the bounty, so I’ll go ahead and commit to doing this. The conditions The bounty is $2500 USD. I’ll work on the following features and improvements. I have the grand plan in my head, so this list just kind of describes the plan; I’ll probably end up improving other things at the same time.

mysqlsla v1.7 is ready because v1.6 (and v1.5) had a bug: numbers greater than 999 were printed wrong; internally, though, they were still used correctly. Therefore: do not use v1.6.

Also, v1.7 has a –milliseconds option to make time values less than 1 second print as millisecond values. This option is necessary for slow logs from servers patched with the slow query log millisecond patch.

Looking at the Feedback I got for other Presentations Proposals I thought I indeed should submit general presentation focusing on Web Application performance tuning and explaining how you analyze performance and why do you do it this way, so here it is:

Performance Analysis of MySQL powered Web Applications
In this session we'll go beyond MySQL Performance Optimization and look at full stack performance tuning for Web Applications. It is practical session about Performance Tuning Methodology.

Several years ago I have heard the talks about Oracle Performance Optimization methodology by Cary Millsap and that was a great talk with a lot of techniques and concepts could (and should) be applied for any kind of applications, including Powered by MySQL.
Now we're using similar …

I plan to take a few advance SUN courses to refresh and advance my knowledge. I am particularly interested in checking out the DTrace and Solaris 10 Predictive Self-Healing courses. Has anyone taken them before? Are they any good?

BTW, a very good resource on Solaris 10 is Solaris 10 System Administration Collection.

Today I was working on one small consulting task and our client asked for an upgrade from MySQL 5.0 to 5.1. It was pretty easy and task was successfully finished and reported to the customer… But few hours after my report I’ve got an email from customer with something like “WTF? Where is my 5.1?!”. I was shocked when I saw happily running 5.0 on their server w/o anything related to my 5.1 installation…

After some short investigation I’ve found out, that it was cpanel (dumb software for dumb system administrators) - it noticed, that installed mysql version (5.1) is not the same as it thought it should be (5.0), so without any warnings or notices it removed all 5.1 rpms and installed “brand new” 5.0.

Here I’d like to say GREAT THANKS to mysql team for such a great software which did not screwed up user’s data in such situation. But what idiots in cpanel development team decided, that is it appropriate and …