These are my spoken notes from last week's earnings call - rather than recraft them, I figured I'd simply republish.

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And thank you all for joining us this afternoon. 

I'll start with some perspective on our Q2 results and the current climate, then follow-up with commentary on our products disclosure - slides 6 and 7 in the slide deck. Then I'll turn it over to Mike Lehman (Sun's CFO) for commentary on financial metrics, and an update on the restructuring plan we announced back in November.

Overall, results for Q2 were in line with what we expected, as macro worries factored into customer discussions across all geographies. These concerns resulted in decisions related to higher end system purchases being pushed out - so billings were down year over year for SPARC Enterprise …

As Peter Gulutzan just announced - we’re opening up a “new” worklog that we’ve been working on, Worklog #2360. PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA.

In fact - it’s not “new”, it’s something that has been in the worklog system for a long time, and has had much much much discussion internally between some of the brightest engineers in the group.

The astute among you out there that read my post on the benchmark with Maria for the the tokutek challenge, may have noted this in the configure line that I used:

./configure –prefix=/usr/local/mysql –localstatedir=/data0/mysqldata \
–without-query-cache –with-extra-charsets=complex –with-pic …

A little late to post (I’ve known a while), but I thought I’d plug my talk for any interested readers out there, that are going to the conference, and use MEM!

I’m talking about Extending MySQL Enterprise Monitor with Custom Advisors, Graphs and Data Collections.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the team that writes the MEM software (the “Enterprise Tools” team, internally and lovingly known as the “Merlin Team“, the codename that has survived various renames of the product!) for a little over 3 years now. I can’t say I was there at it’s conception, but I started working with them before the initial release of the product, and have watched (and I like to think helped shape) the product very closely whilst being the “Support Coordinator” for the Support Team for MEM. It’s …

So I saw the tokutek challenge, and wondered to myself how Maria would get along with it. I duly downloaded a 6.0 tree, and the iiBench code, tinkered with it to make it actually build, and fired things up.

I watched it closely, for about a day, then got bored and forgot about it. I remembered today that I should take a look!

CPU Usage (Quad Core)

Average rows per second inserted

Load Averages

You can …

My presentation at LOSUG on tuesday went down like a house on fire - I think it would be safe to say that the phrase for the evening was ‘It’s a cache!’.

For that to make sense, you need to look at the slides, which are now available here.

Attendance was great, but it seems the last minute change of day meant that some people missed the session. We had 151 people register, and about 80 turned up on the night.

Just today I got yet another email asking me why we do not rewrite PHP to get rid of all the cruft and past mistakes. These kinds of emails obviously have become more frequent since the namespace backslash decision. First up I wonder why people send such emails to me? After all I have only very rudimentary knowledge of C, let alone all the PHP specific infrastructure (macros etc.). So I am probably the person with the least ability to make something like that happen or even judge its feasibility among all of "PHP core" folks. But still since the question is often enough posed to me, I guess its more efficient if I reply to it in an easily linkable location. So the gist of my answer is: I would welcome a serious effort to rewrite PHP from scratch, but I do not think it should be done by PHP.net

Let me start with a disclaimer: Of course PHP is not without error. Far from it. …

Ok, here is something I wish I could travel back in time and shoot who ever decided it would be smart to make RDBMS locale dependent. As in crap like different decimal separators or worse yet date formats. If at all leave this work to the client, but better yet leave it to the frontend. Today I went through a bit of work until I finally figured out that in order to have SQL Server understand an ISO date (running against a DB configured as German), I needed to set the dateformat in the connection session with a query like "SET DATEFORMAT ymd". You might be wondering about the fact that "ymd" doesn't look very ISO date, but all it actually tells SQL Server is that the numbers between the separators are to denote year first, month second and day third. What really ticks me off though is that I once again forgot to look at the number one source for making RDBMS …

Follow up from Part 1.

Attended "What Developers should care about MySQL ?" by Colin and "Groovy and Grails" by Chuk-munn Lee.

I enjoyed both the talks for different reasons. Colin's talk explained the pluggable storage engine architecture that is unique to MySQL (pronounced my-ess-kew-ell, not my-sequel). It was interesting to know that the different storage engines can be picked a la carte based upon the requirements. The performance comparison for INSERTs was 5x between MyISAM, InnoDB and Archive storage engines. But then InnoDB provide transactions and other goodies. Multiple performance tuning tips such …

Follow up from Part 1.

Attended "What Developers should care about MySQL ?" by Colin and "Groovy and Grails" by Chuk-munn Lee.

I enjoyed both the talks for different reasons. Colin's talk explained the pluggable storage engine architecture that is unique to MySQL (pronounced my-ess-kew-ell, not my-sequel). It was interesting to know that the different storage engines can be picked a la carte based upon the requirements. The performance comparison for INSERTs was 5x between MyISAM, InnoDB and Archive storage engines. But then InnoDB provide transactions and other goodies. Multiple performance tuning tips such …

In the last few months Sun has expanded significantly our online outreach efforts and we currently have (at least :-)) three Webinar series that cover the GlassFish products. Going through them: