We all know that a megabyte in binary system is not the same as one million bytes (in decimal system). But have you actually cared much about it? I have to admit I haven't. I know there is a small rounding error, but by and large I always treated 2^10 = 1 kB = 1024 bytes and 10^3 = 1 kB = 1000 as the same thing. (Update: Opening sentence was edited to remove units MB and MiB since it seems even I managed to use them backwards! The math in this article is correct. The rest of the article uses MB, GB and TB mostly to refer to binary magnitudes, which is apparently incorrect. See comments for wikipedia links and discussion.)

More importantly, when you move into larger numbers, rounding errors usually become even less important. Unfortunately, in this case they become bigger:

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While Oracle deserves some praise for its donation of OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Foundation, it is disappointing again to see a legitimate open source market contender that has been marginalized by miscommunication and mismanagement of the project by a large vendor.

OpenOffice.org, warts and all, was probably the most significant competition for Microsoft Office for years and in many ways demonstrated the advantages of open source, helping usher in wider use of it, as well as greater usability. OO.o was in fact my reason for originally investigating and moving to open source software more than a decade ago. Regardless of past mismanagement of community and technology, that competitive factor has been diminished greatly since Oracle took ownership of OO.o. Now, after prompting a fork — as has …

Linus announces Linux 3.0. Attachmate maintains commitment to SUSE Linux. And more.

# Linus Torvalds announced the release candidate of Linux 3.0.

# Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn maintained that the company is committed to SUSE Linux.

# OpenX raised $20m series D funding.

# Cloudera proposed Flume as an Apache incubator project.

# Isidorey unveiled CloudSandra: a NoSQL database-as-a-service based on Apache Cassandra.

# Wayne Beaton …

The MySQL Developer Tools team is pleased to announce the next release of it’s flagship product, MySQL Workbench, version 5.2.34. This is a maintenance release containing 100 bug fixes; ranging from stability improvements on all supported platforms – including some that prevented startup in certain environments – to minor but significant usability corrections.

As always, we want to thank everyone for the great feedback we have received. This helps us to continuously improve the functionality and stability of MySQL Workbench – we appreciate all your ideas for improving MySQL Workbench.  Please keep sending us your ideas!

MySQL Workbench 5.2 GA

• Data Modeling
• Query (replaces the old MySQL Query Browser)
• Administration (replaces the old MySQL Administrator)

Please get your copy from our Download site. Sources and binary packages are available for several platforms, …

One of the ‘things I wrote down during OSBC’ was this statement from Benchmark EIR, Rob Bearden:

“Misalignment between a business model and the community’s tolerance point will never be accepted. This will manifest itself in multiple distributions.”

At first glance the statement may seem obvious to anyone who has studied open source-related business strategies or communities, but I believe provides the context for further understanding the complexities of balancing the needs of a business for control and the needs of a community for openness.

As the following graphic demonstrates, the statement suggests that there is a window of opportunity within which the control point of the vendor, and the tolerance point of the community must be closely aligned:

…

I wrote this up a while ago and decided that I didn’t want to lose it in a shuffle of documents during my transition to a new workstation. It’s the basics of setting up Heartbeat (LVS) + DRBD (block replication between active/passive master servers) + MySQL. This should give you the basics of a H/A system without the benefits of SAN but also without the associated cost. The validity of this setup for H/A purposes is highly dependent on your workload and environment. You should know the ins and outs of your H/A solution before deciding to blame the system for not performing as expected. As with all production systems you should test, test, test and test some more before going live.

When I get around to it later I’ll post my How-To for setting up RHCS + SAN + MySQL. You can download the DRBD document PDF here: …

Quick update to the framework that was released yesterday; I’ve added automatic graph generation. I chose DyGraphs due to the quick ability to enable support – the HTML is very quick and simply loads the CSV data. It has the same zooming features of Highcharts without the JS overhead.

Now when you run a load test you will get (in the output directory) a mixture of files: the main cumulative CSV and HTML file for the hostname that was tested, and then one CSV and HTML per report variable that was tested. This means you don’t have to drag the main CSV file into an alternate program or spend time parsing out certain variables one at a time to generate specific graphs.  I’ve also added support for limiting output of SNMP variables (LOAD,CPU,MEM). Head over here and download the update: http://code.google.com/p/quadrant-framework/

To enable …

It seems that everyone loves load testing these days. Problem is that everyone is using their own quick scripts, simple or complex, to drive their tests without the ability for other DBAs to duplicate those tests. Let’s say I write a great test and share my results and graphs on the blog – you want to run the same tests to see how your new DB servers compare in performance: this framework allows you to do that without duplicating any work or writing code. This is a basic release that will get the ball rolling. I’ve included some sample tests in the README file, so give them a try.

This codebase offers a user friendly framework for creating and visualizing MySQL database load test jobs. It is based around Sysbench, which is generally considered the industry standard load test application. The framework allows you to do the following:

• standardize your tests without requiring you to write one-off bash scripts to handle …

Two years ago I published a post entitled “things I wrote down during OSBC”. It tuned out to be surprisingly popular, so I decided to try the same formula again.

Just as was the case two years ago these are presented chronologically. I wrote down a lot more than this, to be clear, but these were the most quote-worthy things. Also, as in 2009, some of them confirm things we already think about commercial open source (or in some cases data management), others were interesting ways of expressing old ideas:

“The next generation of computing is being led by users, rather than vendors.”
Jim Whitehurst

“The value of open source has moved from commoditization to innovation.”
…

Next Monday, May 16, I will be hosting session at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco focused on NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond.

The presentation covers our recently published report of the same name, and provides some additional context on the role of open source in driving innovation in distributed data management.

Specifically, the presentation looks at the evolving influence of open source in the database market and the context for the emergence of new database alternatives.

I’ll be walking through the six core drivers that have driven the development …