The linux.conf.au organisers have given all miniconfs an additional few weeks to spruik for more proposal submissions, huzzah!

So if you didn’t submit a proposal because you weren’t sure whether you’d be able to attend LCA2010, you now have until October 23 to convince your boss to send you and get your proposal in.

Maximize your strengths, minimize your weaknesses.

You can apply this approach to many things in life, I apply it to describing and using MySQL the product, and it’s components. The Query Cache like many features in MySQL, and indeed features in many different RDBMS products (don’t get me started on Oracle *features*) have relative benefits. In one context it can be seen as ineffective, or even detrimental to your performance, however it’s course grain nature makes it both trivial to disable dynamically (SET GLOBAL query_cache_size=0;), and also easy to get basic statistics on current performance (SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE ‘QCache%’;) to determine effectiveness and action appropriately.

The Query Cache is course grained, that is it is rather simple/dumb in nature. When you understand the path of execution of a query within the MySQL kernel you learn a few key things.

• When enabled, by default the Query …

The article was published in July but I noticed it only today. I guess I should pay more attention to my favorite topics when I travel.

Oracle is keeping MySQL. Yahoo is selling Zimbra. Linus is feeling bloated. And more.

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

# Larry Ellison reportedly said Oracle has no intention of spinning off MySQL.

# Yahoo is trying to sell Zimbra, according to All Things D.

# Linus Torvalds said Linux is “bloated and huge”.

# GroundWork Open Source released GroundWork Monitor 6.0.

# Zend launched Simple API for Cloud Application …

With a discussion on identifying CPU and Memory bottlenecks achieved, let us now look at how Disk can affect MySQL performance.

One of the first steps when addressing a MySQL performance tuning problem is to perform a system audit of the physical hardware resources (CPU,Memory,Disk,Network), then identify any obvious bottlenecks in these resources.

There are several commands you can use including vmstat, iostat and sar (both part of the sysstat package) to provide information on disk I/O.

vmstat is a good place to start for an overall view for multiple resources, however for disk it only provides a total system overview.

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- …

Topics for this podcast:

*Microsoft founds CodePlex Foundation, losing Sam Ramji
*Software patents at the center of MS, OIN maneuvering
*Eucalyptus Systems releases hybrid cloud product
*Oracle-Sun Microsystems and the potential fate of MySQL

iTunes or direct download (26:40, 6.1 MB)

Citrix joins the Linux Foundation. BonitaSoft raises $3m. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Citrix joined The Linux Foundation.

# Open source BPM vendor BonitaSoft raised $3m from Ventech and Auriga Partners.

# Jaspersoft updated JasperReports Professional with enhanced data visualization.

# US CIO Vivek Kundra outlined the government’s cloud strategy, using NASA’s open source Nebula cloud.

# Infobright …

We’re happy to announce the availability of the next Alpha release of MySQL Workbench 5.2. There have been further improvements to the querying part and we added the foundations for the administration part (which will be onboard in the next alpha).
On startup, MySQL Workbench 5.2 now doesn’t automatically create a new design-document anymore – thats for decreasing resource-usage when you only launch Workbench for running a few queries against your database. Also the fix to make Workbench work on Snow Leopard has been included in 5.2 now as well.

Please download the program, take it for a test-drive and tell us what you think. But keep in mind, that this is still an alpha version – so be advised to not use it for production data! Also please note, MySQL Workbench files saved with version 5.2 cannot be opened with previous versions of our
program.

For Linux we now …

Before I even start this post I am going to repeat our view that Oracle is well aware that it has little to gain from killing off MySQL and that we expect MySQL to become the scale-out database for non-transactional web applications and to compete with SQL Server in departmental deployments.

That said there has been some interesting discussion on Twitter this week in response to the European Commission’s investigation of Oracle-Sun about whether Oracle could - in theory - kill off MySQL. Here’s a Q+A explaining my view as to how Oracle could kill MySQL but probably won’t, and why MySQL AB’s choice of dual licensing and the GPL has come back to haunt Monty Widenius.

Q. Oracle can’t kill MySQL even if it wants to, because its open source. Right?

A. …

Following the release of our report, ‘The Myth of Open Source License Proliferation’ and during research for it, we heard and sensed a feeling that open source software licenses had evolved to become a generally well-accepted piece of the the enterprise IT and IP market. However, we also heard from numerous vendors, developers and other individuals that the next battlefront is obviously software patents, which are in need of reform, according to many supporters of free and open source software.

This week, we saw some of the software patent skirmishes that are driving and validating this thinking. There was first news that the Open Invention Network, the consortium dedicated to legal and IP defense of Linux, had bought some software patents that related to …