The latest from the MySQL community

Exit Jay, whom we will miss dearly. He was the first person that I met in the MySQL community who went to work for the company. That's when I started thinking that maybe I could become an employee as well. …

Busy next few days: Sun Systems Tour in Jakarta, Indonesia on November 5, then MyGOSSCON 2008 on November 6.

For the Sun event, there’s a corporate slide deck - MySQL from Sun: The Platform for the Web Economy. For the MyGOSSCON event I’ll be speaking about MySQL Best Practices.

If you’re in Jakarta and free on November 5, don’t hesitate to say hi. Similar invite for MyGOSSCON, though I don’t actually know if its open to all.

Update: Sun has expanded its Cloud Computing portfolio with the recent acquisition of Qlayer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds.  The Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, is now part of Sun's Cloud Computing business unit which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

Cloud computing is about managing petascale data. Sun's server and storage systems can radically improve the data-intensive computing emerging in the cloud. Some clouds are closed platforms that lock you in. Sun's open source philosophy and Java principles form the core of a strategy that provides interoperability for large-scale computing resources. Sun's virtualization solutions for advanced …

Update: Sun has expanded its Cloud Computing portfolio with the recent acquisition of Qlayer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds.  The Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, is now part of Sun's Cloud Computing business unit which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

Cloud computing is about managing petascale data. Sun's server and storage systems can radically improve the data-intensive computing emerging in the cloud. Some clouds are closed platforms that lock you in. Sun's open source philosophy and Java principles form the core of a strategy that provides interoperability for large-scale computing resources. Sun's virtualization solutions for advanced …

Simon Phipps yesterday blogged about the emerging Sun Model for Open Source business:

As time has gone by, a clear “Sun Model” for open source business has been emerging, at least to my eyes. The summary of it is:

1. remove barriers to software adoption between download and deploy;
2. encourage a large and cohesive community of software deployers;
3. deliver, for a fee, the means to create value between deploy and scale, for those who need it.

Each software team at Sun interprets this model in a slightly different way, but the model holds pretty much everywhere and works regardless of the license for the code. As a business model, it …

I probably ranted a bit too much on the marketing push that Sun has been trying to make into the Open Source community.
The economical situation isn't really perfect so Sun does deserve some credit too.

Yesterday Techcrunch published an exclusive interview with Jonathan Schwartz on the future of Sun and how Sun will be rescued .

[YouTube Movie Embedded]

More details are here

Our team is looking at how MySQL can be scaled out to improve performance.  Jenny Chen recently posted preliminary numbers on Solaris Nevada that shows scaling out MySQL with amoeba proxy (two instances that divide the duties) can significantly improve MySQL performance when the single MySQL server encountered disk I/O bottleneck.  The workload that was used was DBT2.  She does mention a few limitations in the conclusions of the report.  Check out her blog for the full results.  It should be noted that these findings should also be applicable to other platforms like Linux.

Not everything is going the wrong way on our planet. There are things that are changing for the better! And one of them is South Africa. Just back from a three-day MySQL related trip to Johannesburg and Pretoria, I saw a lot of well-founded hope around me. The hope is related to less crime, less racial tension, and more economic growth. I share the positive vibes and think they’re founded in reality.

I was in South Africa for the yearly Sun partner event in “Sub-Saharan Africa” or SSA for short. SSA is one of the fastest-growing regions within what is known as “Emerging Markets”, which in itself grows faster than Europe, North America or Asia Pacific. And partners are extremely important, as Sun uses solely indirect sales in the region.

I was so impressed by what I saw that I wrote nine blog …

Today, Giuseppe Maxia gave a presentation on MySQL Sandbox. This was our second MySQL University session using the new conferencing system, Dimdim.

Most attendees arrived in time, but like with any real-life university, some arrived late, and some left during the session. We had an average of 16-17 attendees, and a peak of 19.

Giuseppe presented using a slide set, rather than using the desktop sharing facility that Dimdim offers. Clicking through slides feels real-time, while desktop sharing requires some time for changes to arrive on the receiving end (as we've experienced with the previous session). Also, clicking through slides requires virtually no bandwidth (after the slide set has been uploaded to Dimdim). Giuseppe's voice came over loud and clear. A few attendees reported …

Recently, I came across this short video clip by Nick Kloski where he briefly describes the advantages of running MySQL on Sun Servers (Linux, Windows, and Solaris) and details some of the best server options for MySQL and when they should be used.  There's also some details on how you can try the systems out before buying them.  Check it out here.

 If you would like more specifics than the above video, then there are some examples of customers deploying MySQL in Containers and / or LDoms on Sun systems at:

http://www.sun.com/systems/solutions/mysql/ecoscale/perspectives.jsp

Additionally, here a a few references to blogs from my colleagues that post specific details on tests that they have done.