Linuxcon was a celebration of twenty years of Linux. I remember colleagues telling me to try the funny little operating system for PCs instead of a BSD variant, their excitement, and making distro ‘floppies’ for . The time has flown, Linux has become a core infrastructure for IT, and many technologies built upon upon Linux has flourished. But could it be better? At least for the database world, things could be better.

Databases are a ‘full body workout’ for Linux according to Josh Berkus. The CEO of PostgreSQL Experts had a session and a BOF at Linuxcon. The goals of these session was to make Linux developers aware of some of the special problems for databases and to get some hints of what database developers can do to better exploit Linux. Linux is the overwhelming OS choice for both the multi-process databases (PostgreSQL and Oracle) and the …

Engine Yard acquires Orchestra. Red Hat considers NoSQL move. And more.

# Engine Yard announced a definitive agreement to acquire Orchestra, bringing PHP expertise to the Engine Yard platform.

# Red Hat’s CEO indicated the company is interested in a NoSQL or Hadoop acquisition.

# Gluster announced Apache Hadoop compatibility in the next GlusterFS release.

# Microsoft signed an agreement with China Standard Software Co (CS2C) to …

InternetNews.com yesterday published an article based on an interview with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst asking the question “Is Red Hat Interested in the Database Market?”

In truth there was no real need to ask the question, as Whitehurst’s comments made it pretty clear that Red Hat is interested in the database market, and specifically the NoSQL database market.

“When I say I don’t want to be a database company, I’m saying that I don’t want to be a SQL database company,” Whitehurst said.

In case the implications of that statement were not entirely clear, he later added:

“But we would be very interested in a NoSQL type database or Hadoop type thing,” Whitehurst said. “Those are interesting as they represent net new.”

The article adds that Whitehurst would not …

As i have already discussed in my previous post zfs filesystem and MySQL about zfs overview and two most important command zpool and zfs. I am going to continue with usage of zfs snapshots. It includes create a pool, Create file system, Taking a snapshot, Renaming Snapshots, Listing all snapshots, restoring from snapshot and Moving the snapshot to other location.
A snapshot is a read-only copy of a file system or volume. Snapshots can be created almost instantly, and initially consume no additional disk space within the pool. However, as data within the active dataset changes, the snapshot consumes disk space by continuing to reference the old data and …

Why This Post
While testing Yoshinori Matsunobo's MHA agent I found that although the wiki has a very complete documentation, it was missing a some details. This article intends to close that gap and bring up some issues to keep in mind when you do your own installation. At the end of the article I added a Conclusions section, if you're not interested in the implementation details, but to read my take on the project, feel free to jump straight to the end from here.

My Test Case
Most of our production environments can be simplified to match the MHA's agent most simple use case: 1 master w/ 2 or more slaves and at least one more slave in an additional tier:

Master A --> …

Couchbase raises $14m. AppFog raises $8m. Much ado about Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. And more.

# Couchbase raised $14m in series C funding for its NoSQL database.

# AppFog raised $8m series B funding for its PHP-based platform-as-a-service.

# Percona announced its plans to host a Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo on April 10-12, effectively replacing the O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo.

# The announcement sparked some rumblings of discomfort around the MySQL community with Giuseppe Maxia and …

We’ve written about how a bad economy is indeed good for open source software. We’ve also recognized that with open source software’s maturity and place at the enterprise software table, a bad economy can be a double-edged sword for open source since the failure or fade of large enterprise customers, say big banks, hurts open source vendors right alongside traditional software providers.

What is interesting is that after a couple of years of economic rebuilding, we’ve seen recently how open source is being driven by innovation, particularly in cloud computing, …

Opscode appoints a new CEO. SugarCRM gains a new CFO. And more.

# Opscode named Mitch Hill as CEO, with Jesse Robbins becoming Chief Community Officer.

# SugarCRM claimed billings up 58% in Q2 and appointed a new CFO.

# Tasktop released Tasktop Dev 2.1 and announced Tasktop Sync 1.0.

# Pentaho delivered improved support for Hadoop …

Google and Microsoft trade patent claims. Actuate announces Q2 results. And more.

# Google accused Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies of organising a hostile patent campaign against Android. That prompted Microsoft executives to claim that Microsoft invited Google to be involved in the CPTN purchase of Novell’s patents. However, Google explained that joining CPTN might have decreased its ability to defend itself against potential patent claims.

# Actuate announced its Q2 …

An important part of benchmarking is to draw graphs. A graph can reveal results you wouldn't have spotted just by looking at raw numbers. By the way, the process of massaging the raw numbers into graphs will often reveal things too.

Sysbench output tends to be quite wordy, especially when you have a script that runs 1, 2, 4, 8... threads with the same test. To manually copy paste the numbers into a spreadsheet is tiresome. So I came up with this monster shell one-liner to condense the output into a csv file. I'm posting it here so I will find it the next time I need it:

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