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MySQL is one of the world's most popular open source databases, and it is widely used and becoming the database-of-choice for many leading Web 2.0 sites. Like most database servers, the most common bottleneck in the enterprise environment encountered by MySQL is disk I/O. To maximize the performance of MySQL for disk I/O bound workloads on the Solaris operating system on CMT servers (e.g. the Sun Fire T2000 Server), configuration and tuning of MySQL server variables is critical and can make a big difference to performance,  as does the optimization of the Solaris filesystem for MySQL, and the configuration of storage arrays.

Configuration Issues

MySQL server's performance can be optimized using various configuration settings. The first step is to read the configuration and system variables by running the command:

mysql> show variables;

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Well, it’s better late than never! Frank Wiles has published the 65th edition of Log Buffer the weekly review of database blogs, on the Revolution Systems Blog. For the record Frank published it right on time on Friday - it’s just us that’s late. Sorry about that. Log Buffer #65.

MySQL AB today announced that NET-A-PORTER.COM, the world's premier luxury online fashion retailer, has standardised on MySQL Enterprise to support its continued growth, scalability and quality requirements.

Net-a-Porter will be showcasing their MySQL based architecture at MySQL's upcoming Northern Europe Customer Conference in London on 16th Oct at the Cavendish Conference Centre. Further information can be found at http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/events/emea-conference-2007/.

I read a lot about MySQL backups using LVM Snapshots on Linux, WAFL Snapshots on NetApp and more recently ZFS Snapshots. But did you know you can do the same under FreeBSD?

FreeBSD has had snapshot capability since around 2001 allowing administrators to take a frozen image of a filesystem at a given instant in time with minimal impact on the server / filesystem. So how does …

Steve Ballmer apparently likes open source. Well, so long as it drives Windows revenue. And doesn't replace any. Ever. In fact, as he said at an event in Microsoft last week in London that he hopes to see all open-source innovation going to Windows, rather than Linux (more below).

His Q&A session is fascinating (you can watch it here), if for no other reason than to watch him slap around a strawman open-source competitor. I hardly recognized the open-source strawman he constructed, but he delighted in swatting its anti-commercial tendencies. I guess he has neglected to consider Red Hat, MySQL, SugarCRM, etc. etc. etc.

Among many others, Ballmer stated one absolutely dubious thing: "Our battle is not business model to business model, but rather product to product." If this were true (and if he actually believed it, …

after eight releases, we have gone from over 150 open bugs to under 70 bugs.

one of the really old bugs we are still looking at is how identifiers that are reserved words (or have non-alphanumeric characters) are handled from ado. as far as we can tell, the driver is doing everything correctly, and it is ado that is failing to properly quote the identifiers, but we have gotten some developers at microsoft involved in tracking the problem from that end.

just today there was a new bug filed about using the driver with visual basic 6, which was itself released in 1998. i am going to have to build a vm image with that installed so i can do some testing.

the next release of the new 5.1 branch should be out later this week. we will probably …

A few weeks ago I edited this page in the Crash wiki: http://www.crashatmine.org/wiki/City_and_Country_Database

I'm still smiling thinking of the problems geocoding solves. To quote the page:

The country and city database as used in Couchsurfing.com et. al. uses a country and city database. There are some known problems with this:

• It doesn't always contain newer countries (Serbia for example), and requires maintenance
• It often only contains major cities (users in smaller cities are forced to choose the closest city)
• It only supports English for city names by default.
• Someone just has to be in a "city"; those closer to the city center are not differentiated.
• Users looking to stay in New York City should also look in neighbouring cities like Jersey City.

Last week I was in Tampere (Finland) attending the Openmind/Mindtrek event where I had the chance to meet quite a lot of open source people, from Finland and beyond. Surprisingly (or maybe not) I knew already quite a bunch of them. Henrik has a pretty good post about the event, the people and the beers with Stephe and Mikko (which together with the festivals of Pilar that started last Saturday are going to kill my liver ).
I must say that it has been one of the most interesting events I have been in the last year. The first day I ended somehow being invited to Novell’s diner for special guests and I was lucky enough to sit close to …

Matt Asay has some interesting news about a shareholder proposal that will be presented to Oracle’s forthcoming shareholder meeting asking the company to detail its commitment to open source and use its patent portfolio to protect open source.

Oracle isn’t keen on the idea, which is the tabloid headline. The interesting news, as Matt suggests, is the fact that this proposal has been made at all.

The proposal has been put forward by Lawrence Fahn of As You Sow, a corporate accountability group, and asks “that the Board issue, at reasonable expense, an Open Source Social Responsibility Report to shareholders by April 2008 that discusses the social and environmental impacts of Oracle?s existing and potential open source policies and practices.”