Oracle launches Unbreakable Kernel, updates MySQL and Java plans. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Oracle launched its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.

# Oracle announced the release candidate of MySQL 5.5.

# Oracle outlined its plans for Java platform. JavaWorld has the details.

# Novell and SAP have collaborated on SUSE …

To benchmark IO on Linux and MySQL transaction processing, SysBench is a popular choice that can do both. After poking around at the source code, it seems PostgreSQL and Oracle are also included for transaction processing testing if you have the proper header files, but I didn’t test those.

To benchmark IO on Windows and SQL Server transaction processing, Microsoft provides two tools, SQLIO and SQLIOSim. SQLIO is a misnomer in that it really doesn’t have much to do with SQL Server. It is a general purpose disk IO benchmark tool.

So today I was playing with SysBench and noticed that I can compile and build it on Windows as well. I decided I should run IO benchmark on a single machine with both tools (SQLIO and SysBench), and see if I could reconcile the results.

To make things simple, I thought I would just benchmark random read of 3G (orders of magnitude bigger than disk controller cache) files for 5 minutes (300 …

We’re proud to announce the next release of MySQL Workbench, version 5.2.28. This maintenance release features improvements to the Workbench scripting Shell as well as various fixes.

Enhancements to the Workbench 5.2.28 Scripting Shell makes development and usage of Workbench Scripts and Plug-ins easier by

• Providing a new workbench shell scripting file browser
• Allowing users to more easily create/edit/save/execute Workbench python and lua scripts
• Including Handy Workbench “Scripting” snippets that can easily be executed or copied.
• Adding a new script results output panel

For more on Workbench Scripting and Plug-in development see

http://wb.mysql.com/?page_id=664

As always, we want to thank everyone for the great feedback we have received. This helps us to continuously improve and extend …

Since 5.5 is announced as Release Candidate now, I'll not compare it with 5.1 anymore - I think there was written enough about the performance gain even since introduction of 5.4 :-)

From the other side, we want to be sure that the final 5.5 will be at least as good as 5.5.4 release, and here the feedback from real users with real workloads will be very precious! So, please, don't keep quiet! :-))

After that, few notes while testing MySQL 5.5 on dbSTRESS and points for discussions..

Buffer Pool and Purge

Last month I've got some time to focus on the Buffer Pool pages management I've observed many months before with older MySQL/InnoDB versions, and now was curious if I'll reproduce the same issue with MySQL 5.5.4 too...

Few words about the tested workload:

• still dbSTRESS ;-)
• but "light" scenario which may be very common for many web servers: there are only SELECT and …

The Drupal community just recently released another alpha test release of their upcoming Drupal 7 version, to shake out the remaining bugs and to encourage more users to test it.

If you would like to give it a try, but you don't have a free server handy, how about using a virtual machine instead? Using the fabolous SuSE Studio, I've created an appliance based on openSUSE 11.3, Drupal 7.0-alpha7 and MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled (both for the …

Lately I worked quite a bit with Python and Linux, writing monitoring and automation utilities. I am in a transition period, so I thought I ought to write some Python stuff interfacing with MySQL for fun, and start positioning myself for expanded career horizon, I hope.

To get started, I thought it would be fun to rewrite a Perl utility I wrote before with Python. That script converts MySQL character sets to utf8, a very common task for wikis and blogs during an upgrade. This time, I did everything from scratch: firing up an Amazon EC2 Linux instance, hand install and configuring MySQL 5.1.50 (creating mysql user, group, wget tarball, setting directory ownership and permissions, creating symbolic to MySQL binaries, editing my.cnf, /etc/init.d/ and chkconfig automatic startup, environmental variables, the works), compiled and …

We continue to see more evidence of the themes we discuss in our latest CAOS special report, Seeding the Clouds, which examines the open source software used in cloud computing, the vendors backing open source, the cloud providers using it and the impact on the industry.

First, as usual, we are seeing consistencies between our own research — which indicates open source is a huge part of today’s cloud computing offerings from major providers like Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Terremark and VMware — and that of code analysis and management vendor Black Duck. In its analysis of code that runs the cloud, Black Duck also found a preponderance of open source pieces, in many cases the same projects we profile in our report.

Indeed, open source software is an important part of the infrastructure, …

In this latest release I’ve added a basic MySQL connection pool to the benchmarking script which improves the method in which connections to MySQL are handled and reused. In addition, there have been some optimizations made to the thread handler functions for better debug reporting. Download the latest release now and see how your MySQL server performs against the rest of the community! Download here: download page.

As previously mentioned, Darren Cassar has been working on a new automated installer for the DBbenchmark program. It’s now available for download: click here. All you need to do is save it to the directory that you want to install to and then make sure it’s executable: “chmod 700 installer.sh”, then run it “./installer.sh”.

So far the benchmarking script supports Linux, FreeBSD, and OSX. I’m installing virtual machines today to get ready for development on the next OS that the community wants to have supported. Vote today for your choice. Development will begin Friday 2010-09-03.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.