Ok - this has been stewing for some time now, and I think now is the right time to announce that I am working together with Jos van Dongen from Tholis Consulting to create a book for Wiley with the tentative title "Building Pentaho Solutions".

My personal aim is to make this book the primary point of reference for DBAs and Application Developers that are familiar with Open Source products like MySQL and PostgreSQL but have no prior BI skills, as well as BI professionals that are familiar with closed source BI products like Microsoft BI and Business Objects that want to learn how to get things done with Pentaho.

The book will cover all distinct components and sub-products that make up the …

Welcome to the 128th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Let’s begin with some PostgreSQL blogs. Jignesh Shah shares his recipe for making a PostgreSQL 8.3 appliance based on OpenSolaris using VirtualBox. While we’re on appliances, Dave Page shows off PostgreSQL management on the iPhone with an application he himself wrote. Stealth DBA for the bus-rise home.

On Database Soup, Josh …

The 127th edition of of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published by Robert Treat on zillablog.

As the web’s only technology-neutral compendium of database blogs, Log Buffer thrives on reader contributions, such as story suggestions, comments, and foremost, volunteer editors like Robert (who, by the way, today joins LB’s multiple-edition group). He knows that publishing an edition of Log Buffer on his blog is an excellent way (and a fun way) to present his perspective on database blogs in an established venue. I invite you to do the same— send me an email and I’ll get you started.

Here is Robert’s …

Welcome to the 126th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Just to be different, let’s start with PostgreSQL this time.

The Postgres OnLine Journal offers their PostgreSQL 8.3 PLPGSQL Cheatsheet.

The ever-reliable Hubert Lubaczewski of select * from depesz; has a couple posts this week. He has a howto for recovering from a lost PostgreSQL password. Thanks, Hubert. We’ve all been there. He also introduces …

The OpenSQLCamp started yesterday in Charlottesville, VA.
As expected, the gathering is impressive. There are many well known names from the open source database world. MySQL is probably overrepresented, but that's fair, considering its wide adoption.

Yesterday was an informal "meet anyone and let's see what we do tomorrow". The schedule, as you can see, is very dynamic.

Somehow I must have missed this  try and buy offer before.  Evaluate the Sun Fire X4600 with PostgreSQL, MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server 2005. The Sun Fire X4600 M2 Server included in the program is available in two configurations. First configuration is  4 x Quad-Core with 16GB RAM and second configuration is with 8x Quad-Core (yes 32 cores in all) with 64GB RAM. Of course it only comes with two disks in it which means also need to "Try and Buy" the Sun StorageTek 2540 Array or the Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage System with it.

Would love to see some real life deployment saturate 32-core Opteron system using only PostgreSQL or MySQL as the database system in …

The New Sun Microsystems  announced a new Glassfish/MySQL/OpenSolaris SPECjAppServer2004 result today. The  real highlight is that all software used in this benchmark is all Open Source Software. It is  a win for Open Source Software including Open Source Databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL. We need more of such benchmarks to highlight the exorbitant prices charged by Proprietary Database & other Software Vendors who charge and force customers to give them all their major dollars of their IT budget.

Tom Daly's blog entry highlight that in terms of Price/Performance, the proprietary database vendors who  conveniently also happen to be the …

For those of you who have been under a rock for the last several years, there is a buzz-phrase floating around—cloud computing. If you haven’t been paying attention, it is time to wake up.

While I could spend an entire blog post—if not several—on a definition of cloud computing, I will be talking only about cloud computing in the sense of companies moving servers from their building or network operations center to running virtual servers in this computing cloud.

While there are a number of companies providing virtual servers, the most visible is Amazon, with their Amazon Web Services (AWS). I will be talking about AWS in this post as it is the service with which I am most familiar. It seems like every month, AWS rolls out new options and services. Just recently Amazon announced that you can now run on AWS the Windows operating system along with SQL Server.

Amazon also announced a service level …

This week gives me a chance to get back into something I love to do—write. For those who don’t know, my name is Keith Murphy and I am a MySQL DBA at the Pythian Group. In addition, I have the privilege of being the editor of the MySQL Magazine, a quarterly  magazine for those who use MySQL on a daily basis, either as a DBA or a developer. The sixth issue was just released last week and is available for download now. But enough about me! Let’s see what you all had to say this week.

Beginning with the world of MySQL.

Monty Taylor kicks things off, bringing us news of the …

Last week I attended an incredibly intense conference in Lalandia, Denmark: Miracle Oracle Open World. According to Mogens Norgaard, the organizer, the conference devotes 80% of the time to intense discussions of Oracle databases and 80% of the time to drinking. During the festivities you get this dim mental image of what it would have been like if Vikings had access to 16-core machines and advanced database software. But I digress.

Anyway, Lalandia is located on just that kind of spare, beautiful coast that clears the mind to look for fundamental truths. And sure enough, a talk by Carel-Jan Engel, nailed one of them: simplicity is the key to availability.

At some level we all …