This article does not even contain the words database or MySQL. I still believe it is somewhat interesting.

Mail has, for some reason, always been playing a big role in my life. I have been running mail for two, my girlfriend and me, in 1988. I have been running mail for 20 and 200 people in 1992, setting up a citizens network. Later I designed and built mail systems for 2 000 and 20 000 person corporations, and planned mail server clusters for 200 000 and 2 million users. And just before I became a consultant at MySQL I was working for a shop that did mail for a living for 20 million users.

Mail is a very simple and well defined collection of services. You accept incoming messages to local users, you implement relaying for your local users with POP-before-SMTP and SMTP AUTH, you build POP, IMAP and webmail accesses, and you deploy spam filter systems and virus scanners for incoming and outgoing messages. This services …

Sun enhances multicore support for OpenSolaris. Oracle Enterprise Linux sets price performance benchmark record. Pentaho adds single sign on. (and more)

Sun Tunes Solaris Express Developer Edition for Enhanced Multicore Development, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Oracle Database Standard Edition One and Oracle Enterprise Linux on HP Set New World Record for Price Performance with TPC-C Benchmark, Oracle (Press Release)

Pentaho Enhances Enterprise Security for Open Source Business Intelligence, Pentaho (Press Release)

…

git clone http://consoleninja.net/code/dpm/dpm.git

Read the README, read the TODO. If you need a tarball, ask and I'll toss one up, or modify the post hook, or whatever.

What is this?

- A event based network daemon which implements the MySQL 5.0 client/server protocol. It implements the Lua scripting language. The scripting language is used for the meat of the functionality, while all of the common functions are done in C.

Why a preview and not a release?

- Proof that this thing exists, it works, and an example of its scripting API.
- An example to the community that some people do want this, or would find it useful.
- So people may start submitting feedback and patches. I'm fairly good at the theory, networking, blah, but so good at putting …

The admission I'm about to make will likely cause me to lose some friends/colleagues in the open source world, but I have to be honest: I like using Microsoft Windows. Except for Windows 3.0-3.1, I always have. Further, I personally much prefer managing databases on Windows than Unix and will also give Windows the nod over Linux in certain areas. See, I came from managing DB2 on the mainframe to running data warehouses with Teradata on their proprietary platform, and then did a long run with Oracle on UNIX (AIX and HPUX).

MySQL AB today announced that Alcatel-Lucent has successfully implemented its MySQL Cluster Carrier Edition database for its highly mission-critical XDMS application, which will help enable the next generation of converged telecom services.

MySQL 5.1, the next major version, has a bunch of juicy features that many people would like to use in production, if only it were already GA. Partitioning for example, is one of those features that all users want to get their hands on. It is about performance. Partitioning can reduce response times dramatically, if applied correctly. I don't need to convince you of this. You can read one of the several articles about the technicalities of partitions (there is one piece about the performance of partitioned archive tables in this very blog).

The only problem is that …

By Tim O'Reilly

I've been working with Nat and Allison to plan the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing on Open Source at OSCON. I thought I'd share the focus of the program, and ask you, our readers, for further input.

There are three big buckets we're focusing on:

1. What role does open source play in the emerging Web 2.0 economy? What role should it play?
2. The challenges and opportunities as open source goes from a counter-cultural phenomenon to the mainstream of the computer industry.
3. Open source beyond software, including open source content and open source hardware.

I'll post more on each of these topics over the next couple of days. But to whet your appetite, I'll say that speakers on the first topic include Brad …

The other day I criticized MySQL for using somewhat cheap marketing tactics on Planet MySQL.

Obviously I’m a MySQL fan so instead of just criticizing I figured I’d offer some constructive ideas (a patch basically) to fix the problem.

Instead of preaching to the community they should become a leader in the MySQL blogosphere.

MySQL does a great job here at the source code level but they’re using marketing 1.0 tactics which just won’t work with sophisticated customers anymore.

They just don’t really participate in the blogosphere much and I think it’s hurting them. For example, Marten Mickos doesn’t appear to have a blog. Nor is there an …

Lumen software decided to choose (or re-choose) PostgreSQL over MySQL. On any given day, this news would not have caused so much as a stir in my throat. There are definitely some great reasons to choose PostgreSQL over MySQL or, for that matter, any RDBMS over another. But, one thing that really bothers me is when a decision is made to chose one over another with few valid or factually correct reasons.

No piece of software fits every use case. Ask a guy who is 6 foot 6 inches tall whether "one size fits all" really does. It doesn't. And, likewise, database management systems will never fit all needs. And I don't think they ever should.

How Did I Hear About This?

Matt Asay wrote a quick entry about the Lumen blog and …

Just found this wonderful summary of articles by Jeremy and wanted to give some of my thoughts on the topic.

First lets speak about death of the RAID. I think this is far from the case especially if you consider Software RAID here.

For many workloads you would like to get RAID just for the sake of BBU. As Jeremy mentioned RAID is cheap these days if you buy right one and can offer substantial improvement for write intense workload by safe write buffering and write merging.

Performance is another story. RAID is usually easiest way to get extra performance from your IO subsystem. Spreading the database among say 10 commodity boxes is often expensive for existing applications, even for new applications it will affect development time and complexity and it is well possible it might be no guys inside the company skilled enough …