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How does Peter do it? Peter Yared, CEO of ActiveGrid (great company), already has his own infomercial, courtesy of Steve Hamm, in BusinessWeek. The gist? That Java is dead and LAMP is manna from heaven.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a LAMP fan and flogged that horse for years at Novell, and continue to do so at Alfresco. We're Java-based, but have an interface that makes it easy to extend Alfresco with scripting languages like the uber-trendy Ruby and P-languages (Perl, Python, PHP). So, I'm fine with wherever the market wants to go. And I think the world of Peter and ActiveGrid.

The problem with Steve's analysis, however, …

O'Reilly Network has a nice article by Robert Daeley on managing MySQL on OS X. Robert starts with getting MySQL running on OS X and then does a brief overview of several tools for OS X. These include MySQL Administrator, YourSQL, phpMyAdmin and the mysql> command-line client. A good introduction to the tools available to folks using MySQL on their Mac.

I had dinner with Dan Woods, CEO of EvolvedMedia Network and author of "Open Source for the Enterprise" along with a few other folks from the Eclipse foundation and Stephen Walli from Optaros at the Gartner Open Source conference in Orlando last week.  Dan gave the closing keynote presentation at the conference.  Not only was Dan the best dressed presenter (admittedly, not hard to do at an IT …

In the “Australian Technology and Business Magazine” - December 2005 edition there was an article on comparing database products. Here are my comments, which I also plan to forward to the editor.

BTW: I’ve since also found this articles content on another site here. It seems that most if not all is the same.

In response to your cover story article “The Usual Suspects Four databases we suspect your business could be quite interested in.” which appeared in the December 2005 edition, I would have to sum up your article in one word “Disappointing”. Let me provide some feedback from my perspective.

You start by defining a scenario, which is the only approach you can take for a suitable comparision of database products due to diversity of features available in …

zip:

At last night's Boston MySQL meetup someone raised a point that I've been thinking about off and on for the last day.

The attendee suggested that for years MySQL was the database that didn't have all the frills. It was simple to use, easy to maintain, and performed better than a more complex database. MySQL AB has been working on changing that perception for some time. Misconceptions about lack of transactions and referential integrity have been a battle since back in the 3.23.x days. Now with the release of 5, the message seems to be even stronger. It's no longer the database that it used to be, it's grown up, all of the features that it's been criticized for not having are now there in some form, and a lot more greatness is in the pipe. …

Having a sysadmin background, I am fairly familiar with cron. I’m amazed at how many companies set up cron jobs and assume everything will just work. If root mail is not checked (or forwarded to someone who actually reads it), a cron job could fail and you would never know.

Having an automated task fail silently is a Bad Thing ™. I take commands which should have no output normally (such as mysqldump > dumpfile.sql and mysql < maintenance.sql) and pipe the output into a script called mailif. The script will e-mail a specified recipient if standard input is not blank.

In plain English, if the automated task has ANY output or error code, it e-mails me.

One of my current tasks is going through all the database maintenance scripts and making sure it e-mails me if there’s an error.

Standard cron entries have 6 …

Wow! I just stumbled across mysqldumpslow (while RTFM’ing) and what a tool!

It goes through the slow query log you give as an argument and tallies up the number of times each query appears and a lot of other summary data. Not knowing about this before, it makes it easy to prioritize which slow queries to work on first.

DB User = dba
DB Pass = dba
DB Name = TEST
command = trace_on
argument = TRACE_INSERT

Voila:

$ dbmcli -u dba,dba -d TEST trace_on TRACE_INSERT