It's hard to take the question seriously, given that Google, Travelocity, etc. care deeply about their businesses, and entrust them to open-source databases. And yet the question still comes up, as it did at eWeek recently.

eWeek asked Kevin Closson, chief software architect for PolyServe-HP, who answered 'Yes,' open-source databases (like MySQL and Postgres) are serious alternatives to Oracle et al, but that it depends on the application:

...

I just got off the phone with Andres from Polytechnic and got the pricing for catering at the unviersity. It's actually quite reasonably priced, and I'm looking for sponsors to go in on food costs. Sheeri has set up a location that sponsors can donate money for the food in a tax-deductible manner through Technocation, the non-profit organization Sheeri established. Here's a breakdown of food costs:

• Coffee and Tea: $1.50/person - at ~150 people, that's $225
• Continental Breakfast: $3.50/person - at ~150 people, that's $525
• Lunch (a lot of food, apparently): $10.50/person - at ~150, that's $1575
• Dinner: $20.00/person - at ~150 people, that's $3000

I was initially planning on not worrying too much about catering the event, as there …

A lot of things have already been said about the Real Application Testing Option — from the price to the most interesting technical details — by Ken Jacobs, Arup Nanda, and even by me. Why add something? Because while Database Replay gets most people’s attention, Real Application Testing offers another interesting feature called SQL [...]

Pentaho Data Integration (aka Kettle) can be used for ETL but it can also be used in EII scenarios. For instance, you have a report that can be run from a customer service application that will allow the customer service agent to see the current issues/calls up to the minute (CRM database) but also give a strategic snapshot of the customer from the customer profitability and value data mart (data warehouse). You’d like to look a this on the same report that with data coming from two different systems with different Operating Systems and databases.

Kettle can make short work of this using the integration Pentaho provides and the ability to SLURP data from an ETL transform into a report without the need to persist to some temporary or staging table. The thing that Pentaho has NOT made short work of, is being able to use the visual report authoring tools (Report Designer and Report Design Wizard) to be able to use a Kettle transform as a …

We're now only one week away from MySQL Camp II and I for one am getting pretty darn excited, despite Brian's note today that he's been ill and might not be able to attend...

We've still got room left, although I expect that registrations will spike in the next few days just like they did for MySQL Camp I. Remember to email me your information to register (jay at mysql dot com).

Also, you will notice that the MySQLCamp.org website is starting to fill with content and proposed sessions. If you are registered but haven't created an account on the website yet, please do so and put in your desired and proposed sessions!

So at the moment I am interested in how fast I can make Innodb on a 8-way machine while it keeping durable (aka disk write cache is disabled). This setup is tuned to run without replication.

Here is my changes for the 8-way, sata disk system:

innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 16M
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 2G
innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10000M:autoextend
innodb_log_file_size=512M
innodb_log_buffer_size=8M
innodb_log_files_in_group = 2
innodb_checksums=0
innodb_support_xa=0
innodb_doublewrite=0
innodb_thread_concurrency=36
innodb_locks_unsafe_for_binlog=1innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 16M
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 2G
innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10000M:autoextend
innodb_log_file_size=512M
innodb_log_buffer_size=8M
innodb_log_files_in_group = 2
innodb_checksums=0
innodb_support_xa=0
…

Sheeri just posted a great post putting a different view on recent MySQL Community Announcements.

This however raises very interesting point what MySQL Community really needs ?

I think the problem is there are no single set of needs for Community which can be maintained within single version. I see at least two set of community with very different needs.

First is "Production Community" - these are the guys which want stable MySQL version, do not want to take risks want regular updates. Some of them would like to see certain community contributions in server but not at the expense of stability.
For this group actually Old Time MySQL would work best when user contributions were accepted rather quickly into the mainline and frequent MySQL releases were built.

Second is "Development Community" - these are the guys …

So you have created your standby database using the RMAN DUPLICATE command, you have set the minimum log switch individual using ARCHIVE_LAG_TARGET, and you have sorted out those nasty “datafile missing” errors using automatic file management. Management is now happy with the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR)… but not really. They review the documentation generated from [...]

Miha Nedok from http://www.izklop.com wrote us a few days ago about their mysqlnd test run:

I wish I had another production box to test. But what we and our users see now, actually the users notified our team that the site is suddenly “always loading fast”.. The only change… you guessed it mysqlnd installed. It wasn’t slow before, but people noticed performance degradation at times that the site is most visited when libmysql was used.

Hick-ups solved

After a little hick-up during the first days the server is now running stable with ext/mysql @ mysqlnd. Immediately after the installation of mysqlnd, Miha noticed that persistent connections got closed because of a low …

Miha Nedok from http://www.izklop.com wrote us a few days ago about their mysqlnd test run:

I wish I had another production box to test. But what we and our users see now, actually the users notified our team that the site is suddenly “always loading fast”.. The only change… you guessed it mysqlnd installed. It wasn’t slow before, but people noticed performance degradation at times that the site is most visited when libmysql was used.

Hick-ups solved

After a little hick-up during the first days the server is now running stable with ext/mysql @ mysqlnd. Immediately after the installation of mysqlnd, Miha noticed that persistent connections got closed because of a low …