Brian Kelley has published Log Buffer #22, the weekly review of database blogs, on SQLServerCentral.com blogs. In upcoming weeks, Log Buffer will be published by Sheeri Kritzer on The MySQL She-BA; and by Lenz Grimmer. Read the Log Buffer homepage for more detail and to see how you can get in on the act.

Continuent ships new uni/cluster for MySQL and uni/cluster for PostgreSQL solutions, Continuent (Press Release)

Open-Xchange Announces Partnership with MySQL AB, Open-Xchange (Press Release)

OpenReports Releases OpenReports 2.1, OpenReports (Press Release)

Survey Finds Red Hat Customers Willing To Stay With Company if it Cuts Prices, SeekingAlpha, Eric Savitz (Article)

Mission Accomplished: Do We Need the New OSDL?, Linux Magazine, Bryan Richard (Article)

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Daniel Nichter has released version 3.0 of mysqlreport, one of my favorite tools for quickly comprehending the overall state of a MySQL server. The new version prints out the most important information about InnoDB. It looks like this: $ perl mysqlreport --innodb-only MySQL 5.0.26-standard-l uptime 3 9:57:51 Fri Dec 8 17:29:07 2006 __ InnoDB Buffer Pool __________________________________________________ Usage 1.25G of 1.25G %Used: 100.00 Read ratio 0.002 Pages Free 1 %Total: 0.

Here are some common SQL problems, all of which have related solutions: how do I find the most recent log entry for each program? How do I find the most popular item from each category? How do I find the top score for each player? In general, these types of "select the extreme from each group" queries can be solved with the same techniques. I'll explain how to do that in this article, including the harder problem of selecting the top N entries, not just the top 1.

I had a lovely dinner the other night with Nick McGrath, the head of Microsoft's UK platform strategy. (I can say words like "lovely" because I'm in London this week. I'll therefore also throw in the words "bloke," "top of the morning, guv'nuh!", and "Arsenal.") For all the bile I spill over Microsoft (and there is very good reason for it), I continue to be impressed by the company, as reflected in its people. I've yet to meet anyone in Microsoft's Linux frontline (aka, the counterinsurgency :-) that I don't respect and genuinely like: Nick, Jason Matusow, Bill Hilf, Martin Taylor (before he left Microsoft), Steve Mutkoski, Gutierrez, etc. Great, capable people.

What I like most about Microsoft is the intelligence it brings to bear on its competition. While many enterprise software companies persist in cramming their heads …

Digital music sales seem to have peaked, as Nick Carr highlights on his blog, and as the WSJ recently reported. [Subscription required.] For this reason, EMI is beginning to experiment with non-DRM protected music files: MP3s.

For many in the music business, the sky is about to fall. Or so they think. "Why will anyone buy our wares if we don't force them to do so by preventing copying?!?"

What they don't realize is that the people who don't buy from them won't buy from them, DRM or no. The people that aren't thieves (and that's most of us) will, but convenience of purchase is key. I don't buy from iTunes because I can't get the files elsewhere. I buy from iTunes because it's a safe, super-convenient experience …

Kristian Köhntopp has a wonderful article about using oprofile to track down problems in running programs. I thought I'd add a few thoughts.

If you need to get a vmlinux kernel on redhat, apparently you just need to install kernel-debuginfo, which will provide a vmlinux image you can profile against.

If you are using debian, unfortunately there is no package I could find to allow you to get a vmlinux. so what I did was:
($kver isn't a real variable - it's your kernel version. tab completion probably comes in handy at some point)

1. Install linux-tree-$kver - which gets you the debian kernel sources
2. Unpack the tar.bz2 file that is now in /usr/src
3. Copy /boot/config-$kver to /usr/src/linux-$kver/.config
4. cd /usr/src/linux-$kver
5. make oldconfig
6. make prepare
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Open-Xchange Inc., the leading provider of open source collaboration software, announced today that it has signed a partnership and support agreement with MySQL AB, the developer of the world?s most popular open source database. This partnership enables Open-Xchange to embed the MySQL database into its leading open source collaboration server.

By Brady Forrest

Just a quick reminder, that tomorrow night is the first Ignite Seattle from O'Reilly Radar and Make. We have over 25 speakers planned, a popsicle-stick bridge-building contest and Werewolf. We have speakers lined up from Amazon, Ontela, UW, Microsoft, MySQL, some independents, and a slew of startups. Topics range from "Dorkbot" to "Info Tech in the Third World" to "Innovation" to "Corporate Culture Hacking" to "Home VOIP Hacks". All talks are 5 minutes long with just 20 slides each on auto-play for 15 seconds.
Check the site for details and if you are in Seattle please stop by. It is a free …