I went through elementary school in the 1980s. As such, I was taught that there are winners and losers. My kids learn that "We are all SPECIAL!!!" but I quickly disabuse them of that notion at home. Kill or be killed. Eat that hamburger or your wily 15-month old sister will. The Asay house is quintessentially Hobbesian as we live out our nasty, brutish, and short lives. :-)

I'm kidding, but my 80s mentality has me wondering: with all the open source momentum (and it is real), who is losing? See, it's not possible for everyone to win together all the time. It's not exactly zero sum, but in a relatively finite market, my success may well correlate to your failure.

So who is losing?

Apparently not Oracle. Not yet, anyway. Jason Maynard of CSFB has ORCL at an "Outperform" rating, writing this morning:

For Q1, we are estimating $3.47B in total …

I'll be on holidays from the 25th of August till the 5th of September. Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to give an update on the current status of SQLbusRT.

Coding has almost finished. With almost finished, I mean it is almost ready for the first test runs. It is still a very simple implementation. It will give me some baseline figures when I execute my first performance tests, but it does not have all the planned functionality yet.

I'm not publishing the code yet. I want to have the code reviewed by some collegues first, and perhaps it's better to wait for the results of the first test runs to see whether the taken approach is a good one.

I've finished setting up a network of computers to run my tests on. All computers run linux, with the possibility of choosing a patched or an unpatched kernel on boot. The patched kernel offers preemption. This will be used to give real time priority to the …

I was just skimming over Santos' Post about SDO, and was saddened to see more anecdotes and less facts.

Here are two points that you should take note of:

• PDO is an "ultra fast direct layer to the database".

• The benchmarks I think you're referring to do not include the magic turbo switch I talk about here, that highlights performance problems when using prepared statements, which are on by default.

I'd love to see someone run some fair comparisons and publish the numbers.

No, it’s not a bedtime story, is a serious system’s design concept and I’m amazing that people don’t know about this.
As I mentioned in If you don?t know your data, you don?t know your application I was doing a Java Code Review, and I found a clear case of a much simplier solution. How simple you ask?

Well, without completing the task 100%, I achieved in less then 1 day (and lets say for the argument 1 more day of work), what is being worked on by somebody else for a week, with an estimate of 2 more weeks to complete. So let’s add 50% to my estimate, that’s a total of 3 days verses 15 days. You do the math. and yes that was last week and that task is still being worked on the same way, even with reference to my working code. Not to mention the code is a similiar magnitude of simplicity, and simplicity means cost savings in support, people so quickly forget …

This article explains how to tune a MySQL database for use with eZ publish. MySQL is a database engine used by eZ publish to store content. While other databases are supported by eZ publish (such as PostgreSQL and Oracle), for performance reasons we recommend MySQL.

This article has suggestions for optimizing for either read or write operations, and also discusses some other optimization techniques such as DNS and filesystem configuration.

One of the things I don't see much discussion on in distributed system research is the advantage that using batching and streaming can have on scalability.

Batching

Lets cover batching first. Say you have 1000 objects you need to fetch from the database. Now lets say this time is instantaneous on the database side (which is seldom the case). If you fetch all 1000 items one at a time this will end up killing your performance. Each operation will take about 1-2 ms which isn't very long for an individual fetch but it all adds up. If this was a page load on behalf of an HTTP client it would load in the 1-2 second range with is pathetic.

If you could somehow batch these up into one operation you'd see a 1000x performance boost. Not bad. This isn't a theoretical situation btw. Memcached has a getMulti method for just this reason. Unfortunately, there is no putMulti …

The art of data modelling is definitely lost on some [most] people, or they never found it, even though they think they did. Over dinner with good friend Morgan last night we were swapping present stories on the topic.

Morgan wrote recently about I want my 4 bytes back damn it., and interesting example storing an ISBN. Further reference can be found at Getting started with MySQL of a more impractical ISBN example.

Disk is cheap now, so the attitude and poor excuse can be, well a few extra bytes doesn’t matter. Well no! If your a social hacker and have a website with a maximium concurrent connections of 2 maybe, but much like some recent Java Code Reviewing I just performed, just because the system isn’t 24×7, …

Whenever I see benchmark results I try to understand if it is technical benchmark - made by people seeking the truth or it is done by Marketing department to wash your brains. Watch out. Whenever you treat marketing benchmarks as technical ones, you make make wrong decision. Take a look at MySQL 5.0 Benchmarks Whitepaper and guess which type is this ?

You can also compare it to my MySQL Performance 5.0 vs 4.1 presentation to have some fun.

What can we see ? Out of all MySQL 4.1 vs 5.0 benchmarks which were done only benchmarks which show MySQL 5.0 is faster were selected and bunch of other benchmarks which show 5.0 is actually slower than 4.1 were hidden under the table.

In general any benchmarks I see which …

I was on the practice webinar for this one yesterday, and it's pretty darn cool. Scott Dietzen, CTO at Zimbra, is giving a webinar on Web 2.0, Zimbra collaboration suite, and MySQL. He even goes into a live demo of the Zimbra Zimlets (AJAX/DHTML components) during the webinar. Pretty killer stuff! It's today at 1pm EDT/10am PDT, so come check it out. Sign up now. There's already over 500 people signed up, so get on the line early to chat with me and the other folks on the line if you want.

In Open source location redux Matt wonders if he should add more sales infrastructure in Europe or less.

(Having said that, Alfresco has realized an immediate gain from adding sales/business development people in Germany and France. Suddenly, many downloads that had been inclined toward a free beer discovered the value of paying for freedom. So maybe the real solution to the "problem" is to invest more sales infrastructure in Europe, rather than less? Not sure....)

I think the obvious answer is to in invest smarter

As an open source company , Alfresco luckily was one of the firsts to realise that the only way to conquer the European market is to be present there locally.

RedHat and MySQL learned this slowly, it took years before customers could match a face to RedHat and even longer to to feel local presence. A …