Our friendly Human Resources department started a new initiative this week: We have a Global Sports Day for all our >360 employees in >29 countries. That means that us MySQLers are to get off the keyboard, move our bodies, and document our activities for the rest of the company to see. We are reimbursed for expenses, and the most creative activity / picture / story will get an additional reward.

Lenz and I happened to have planned a Community meeting for today already quite a while ago, so we decided to combine this with the Sports Day. Our local version in Hamburg took us 5,43 km through Niendorfer Gehege in 0:31:35. For myself, this means that I have run a total of 161 km so far this year, for about 15 hours, at an average …

For the first time today I heard someone make this comment:

"When we called Redhat about a question their support hemmed and hawed over an answer."

"Now when we called Oracle they turned around the answer very quickly, and gave us a great response."

Customer support can be very hit or miss, but it did confirm to me that someone is both using and is happy with Oracle's approach to its distribution.

What else did I find interesting about this? The user in question wasn't an Oracle database user, they had for some reason just picked Oracle over Redhat.

Redhat is way a head of the game installations. Even with white box vendors and Oracle making its version available for download, the install base of RHEL is larger. Oracle's Linux is market validation for Redhat's approach to creating a Linux distribution (which is pretty important when you consider the encroachment that Ubuntu …

<p>MyEnv is an environment to run comfortably multiple MySQL instance on one server. You can run even multiple instances with the same binaries.</p> <p>The concept behind this is to separate binaries from databases itself.</p> <p>MyEnv bases on OFA which was adapted and improved by my former employer Trivadis. Their product is called Basenv. MyEnv is not so comfortable but it is free and open.</p>

MyEnv is an environment to run comfortably multiple MySQL instance on one server. You can run even multiple instances with the same binaries.

The concept behind this is to separate binaries from databases itself.

MyEnv bases on OFA which was adapted and improved by my former employer Trivadis. Their product is called TVD-BasEnv. MyEnv is not so comfortable yet but it is free and open.

Requirements

• Perl must be installed.
• A user where mysql runs on must exist.

How to install myenv

 root > su - mysql
 mysql> mkdir -p myenv data etc log product source tmp
 mysql> wget http://www.shinguz.ch/MySQL/myenv.tgz …

In one of my previous posts: MySQL backups, I talked about using a script for automating backups. I show that we can use gzip to compress backup file to compress and save. Since then, our backup file has been growing meg or two a day which is causing our backup files to get [...]

CyberTech, developer and supplier of voice recording solutions, has integrated the MySQL relational database in its MynaVoice software for the storage and analysis of telephone calls. Because the MySQL Server is based on open source and open standards, CyberTech found that it integrated simply, quickly and at very low cost with their own technology.

Waiter: "We have our vegetarian Pad Thai on the menu."

Me: "Can you ask the chef if he puts fish sauce in it?"

Waiter goes off and comes back.

Waiter: "Yes there is fish sauce in the Pad Thai."

Me: "Do you have anything which is vegetarian?"

Waiter: "Well I know people who say they are vegetarian who eat fish..."

Me: "Dude, your friends are not vegetarians."

The argument can go down hill from here. Its simple, if you eat meat, even only sometimes, you aren't a vegetarian.

Its popular in some circles to call yourself a vegetarian. Some people just want to cut down on their meat and find that its an easy way to not eat meat for a night. Some people believe it creates an aura around them.

They aren't vegetarians though.

Open Source software is similar. Weeks ago I saw …

MySQL Toolkit's Show Grants tool can now separate grants into individual statements, convert them into REVOKE statements, and help you remove users from a server, even if your server doesn't support DROP USER.

I've already wrote we do not generally do a lot of on-site onsite consulting, but as I'm anyway going to be speaking at MySQL Users Conference anyway it may be good time for some onsite jobs. In fact I have already scheduled visits on Friday, Monday and Tuesday following the conference but I can do couple of more till the end of that week. Just let me know soon before I bought plane tickets.

I also know I virtually know a lot of guys from Sillicon Valley and SF whom I'd love to meet in person. Drop me a note if you're interested I'll have number of evenings and post conference weekend available.

See here.