Background: SkySQL is a distributed company. Nearly all of us work from home. To be productive, we need to emulate the best aspects of collaborating as if we were working next to one another. Given that nearly all of us had worked under similar distributed conditions at MySQL AB, we knew what we were getting into when we were founded. Obviously, we wanted to learn from our past experiences when making our choices for tools and processes.
Oct
24
2012
Oct
16
2012
What a relief! A few simple configuration steps gives me new hope for coping with email.
It unlikely matters to you, but it does to me: My inbox is down to zero. That is, both my two inboxes are empty. I get work email to my @skysql.com address and private email to my @arno.fi, both of which have been suffering from bad email habits.
Inspired by years of discussions with Giuseppe Maxia, who is living proof that proper IT tools make geeks work smarter, faster and better, I bought the book "lifehacker". The first one out of over 100 hacks is labeled "Empty Your Inbox (and Keep It Empty"), so I judged that piece of advice to be worth following.
That was a few hours ago. No, in that short …
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Oct
03
2012
There's definitely more and more buzz on and around cloud computing and different solutions to support it nowadays!
This was evident while visiting LinuxCon/CloudOpen in San Diego a few weeks ago, where I spoke about high availability solutions for MySQL. Most cloud sessions were highly attended, and I could sense an excitement in the air with regards to the cloud. It was also evident, however, that there is only a small percentage of people today truly taking advantage of the cloud. It seems that despite all the excitement, there is a large portion of potential users who don't know how to use the cloud, or what the benefits and potential drawbacks are.
Sep
29
2012
Sitting at the Hilton in San Francisco, listening to
the MySQL Connect opening Keynotes, sparks
interesting thoughts. Thoughts about the future of MySQL, the
Oracle stewardship, the MariaDB alternative and the advantage of
the solutions provided by the MySQL Ecosystem.
But there is something missing. I know something is not part of
this picture, but I can't figure out what it is.
At the end of keynotes and pane,l I turn to the exhibitors area,
an approx 800 sq ft., 50% occupied by Oracle. At the bottom left
corner stands my answer.
The small yellow cubic hive of AWS was at the top of the rollup
that reminds of MySQL and RDS, admittedly the most used version
of MySQL in the cloud so far. And here is the missing
part.
New great features in 5.6 Release Candidate and in MySQL Cluster
7.3
The new features …
Sep
29
2012
Sitting at the Hilton in San Francisco, listening to the MySQL Connect opening Keynotes, sparks interesting
thoughts. Thoughts about the future of MySQL, the Oracle
stewardship, the MariaDB alternative and the advantage of the
solutions provided by the MySQL Ecosystem.
But there is something missing. I know something is not part of
this picture, but I can't figure out what it is.
At the end of keynotes and pane,l I turn to the exhibitors area,
an approx 800 sq ft., 50% occupied by Oracle. At the bottom left
corner stands my answer.
The small yellow cubic hive of AWS was at the top of the rollup
that reminds of MySQL and RDS, admittedly the most used version
of MySQL in the cloud so far. And here is the missing
part.
New great features in 5.6 Release Candidate and in MySQL Cluster
7.3
The new features packed into …
Sep
26
2012
When SkySQL opened its doors two years ago, we purposely set out with the goal to build trusted and value-for-money services for users of MySQL and MariaDB databases. We focused on offering a quality alternative for those deploying open source systems - and we feel that we have succeeded. Our plan was to build a service business and customer base that will create a strong platform on which to develop our own products in collaboration with key customers. Red Hat is the only other successful start-up that I am aware of having taken a similar approach of first building a successful services business before developing products.
Sep
26
2012
Look! You can see the heart beating!
In case you are wondering, no, nobody in the family is expecting
another baby…
I thought I had to start the post with this picture. Today I feel
a bit like the day I went to the hospital for a pregnancy scan.
As you may expect, seeing the baby moving was incredibly
emotional, and I can feel some similar emotions with this
announcement.
Many of you already know that today SkySQL has announced
and will release the very first version of our very first
product, the SkySQL Cloud Data Suite. Before I enter into more
details about the product, let me add a couple of points.
First of all, this is still a …
Aug
28
2012
On the 8/16 I conducted a webinar titled: "Scale Up vs. Scale
Out" (http://www.slideshare.net/ScaleBase/scalebase-webinar-816-scaleup-vs-scaleout):
ScaleBase Webinar 8.16: ScaleUp vs.
ScaleOut from ScaleBase
The webinar was successful, we had many attendees and
great participation in questions and
answers throughout the session and in the
end. Only after the webinar it only occurred to me
that one specific graphic was missing from the webinar deck. It
was occurred to me after answering
several audience questions about "the difference
between …
Aug
24
2012
MySQL data rules the cloud, but recent experience shows us that there's no substitute for maintaining copies of data, across availability zones, when it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) data resilience.
In this video (recording of our 8/23/12 webcast), we survey technologies for maintaining real-time copies of your data and the pros & cons of each. We conclude with a live demonstration of a
Jul
20
2012
A while ago I had a discussion with someone about the future of server infrastructure. Among other things, we were wondering whether companies will continue to run on dedicated servers or if eventually everyone just ends up in a Cloud environment. During the discussion I raised a point that in principle Cloud is a great idea that will keep attracting more and more people, but it is missing one important piece that stops many from using it – a high performance storage. Apparently, this has just changed.
Yesterday I received an e-mail announcing a new EC2 instance type – hi1.4xlarge. It features 16 logical CPUs (35 ECUs), 60GB of RAM, and… two 1TB SSD-based disk volumes! These are great specs that should work for nearly any database. Even assuming someone has a MySQL database larger than 2TB, not all tables will require fast storage, while more disk space can be easily added by attaching regular EBS volumes.
I decided …
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