I rarely use MySQL Fulltext indexes. Their performance is just not good enough, so often its better to just stick with "LIKE" or move to something else like Sphinx, Lucene etc. The only nice thing about them is the ability to compute a match "rank". Well anyways I had to write a new search plugin for a project that is based around MySQL Fulltext indexes and a match rank and all as well .. except that for some reasons some words just would not produce any results. As I was trying to find a pattern I finally noticed that in my test data some words were used in most rows and exactly those were not matching. Obviously it makes sense to exclude automatically any words that have a very high hit ratio. And indeed the documentation states that by default …

As consumer spending slows across the world, a variety of "brick and mortar" retailers are clearly feeling the impact. Foot traffic is slowing, and it's getting harder to balance debt laden real estate portfolios and fickle consumer trends.

For consumer product manufacturers, retail distribution is key - it's how you get in front of a customer. It's why the big PC manufacturers are all working hard to score deals with big retailers (or build their own retail outlets) around the world.

But making money on PC's is tough - for most PC makers, you're remarketing someone else's operating system and someone else's microprocessor - it's not for the faint of heart (or faint of balance sheet). For Sun, our retail distribution concerns don't surround consumer hardware (we don't make PC's) as much as consumer software - the popularity of which defines our market opportunity. …

The country of Israel is broken up into 6 administrative districts with 15 sub-districts and 50 natural regions. It is my understanding according to the Isarael Central Bureau Statistics that the sub-districts are similar to what we call Provinces/States in North America and the natural regions are similar to municipalities/counties.

I’m not fully understanding the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Are they territories of Israel or a part of another country? How would one reference where you lived if you were lived in one of these regions (ie. West Bank, Isarel)?

This knowledge maybe helpful for those that need to reference contact information or allow clients to select their country and province/state/district.

Source: Israel Central Bureau Statistics
Source: …

Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

A new era

In the past few years, I published many articles using Oracle as a database server. As a former Sybase system administrator and former Informix employee, it was obviously not a matter of personal choice. It was just because the large majority of Sun's customers running databases were also Oracle customers.

This summer, in our 26 Sun Solution Centers worldwide, I observed a shift. Yes, we were still seeing older solutions based on DB2, Oracle, Sybase or Informix being evaluated on new Sun hardware. But every customer project manager, every partner, every software engineer working on a new information system design asked us : Can we architect this solution with MySQL ?

In many cases, if you dared to reply YES to this question, the next interrogation would be about the scalability of the MySQL engine.

This is why I …

Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

A new era

In the past few years, I published many articles using Oracle as a database server. As a former Sybase system administrator and former Informix employee, it was obviously not a matter of personal choice. It was just because the large majority of Sun's customers running databases were also Oracle customers.

This summer, in our 26 Sun Solution Centers worldwide, I observed a shift. Yes, we were still seeing older solutions based on DB2, Oracle, Sybase or Informix being evaluated on new Sun hardware. But every customer project manager, every partner, every software engineer working on a new information system design asked us : Can we architect this solution with MySQL ?

In many cases, if you dared to reply YES to this question, the next interrogation would be about the scalability of the MySQL engine.

This is why I …

Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

A new era

In the past few years, I published many articles using Oracle as a database server. As a former Sybase system administrator and former Informix employee, it was obviously not a matter of personal choice. It was just because the large majority of Sun's customers running databases were also Oracle customers.

This summer, in our 26 Sun Solution Centers worldwide, I observed a shift. Yes, we were still seeing older solutions based on DB2, Oracle, Sybase or Informix being evaluated on new Sun hardware. But every customer project manager, every partner, every software engineer working on a new information system design asked us : Can we architect this solution with MySQL ?

In many cases, if you dared to reply YES to this question, the next interrogation would be about the scalability of the MySQL engine.

This is why I …

The bursting of the internet bubble was good for the computer industry.

Many of us didn't like the medicine, but I can't remember a single customer upset at the idea of paying $20,000 for computing infrastructure that used to cost them $100,000. The price compression came from open source software, and a move toward general purpose servers, and resulted in companies formerly making 65% gross profit on products (Sun among them) facing a new reality.

But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Since then, Sun's built the biggest open source software business around (see this report for details), from platform software to application infrastructure (even a …

On Thursday, November 13, 2008 (14:00 UTC / 14:00 BST / 15:00 CET), I’ll be presenting a MySQL University session on MySQL and OpenSolaris.

The presentation will be similar to the presentation I did at the London OpenSolaris Users Group in July, you can see that presentation by visiting the LOSUG: July 2008 page.

The presentation on thursday will be slightly different - I’ll be providing a bit more hands-on information about how to install MySQL, how to configure and change the configuration and some more detail on solutions like the Webstack and Coolstack distributions.

I’ll also cover our plans for the inclusion of MySQL 5.1 in OpenSolaris, which will happen next year, and provide some examples on the new DTrace probes that we have been adding to MySQL generally.

Of course, if there’s anything specific you want me to …

At the European Customer Conference a couple of weeks back, one of the topics was the use of DRBD. DRBD is a kernel-based block device that replicates the data blocks of a device from one machine to another. The documentation I developed for that and MySQL is available here.

Fundamentally, with DRBD, you set up a physical device, configure DRBD on top of that, and write to the DRBD device. In the background, on the primary, the DRBD device writes the data to the physical disk and replicates those changed blocks to the seconday, which in turn writes the data to it’s physical device. The result is a block level copy of the source data. In an HA solution, which means that you can switch over from your primary host to your secondary host in the event of system failure and be sure pretty certain that the data on the primary and seconday are the same.

…

On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.

I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, BarackObama.com.

Lest many of you get your hopes up, we cannot guarantee the White House to all MySQL users.