Recently I ran into major problems using GNU diff. It would crash with "diff: memory exhausted" after only a few minutes trying to process the differences between a couple 4.5GB files. Even a beefy box with 9GB of RAM would run out of it in minutes.

There is a different solution, however, that is not dependent on file sizes. Enter rdiff – rsync's backbone. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync (search for rdiff).

The upsides of rdiff are:

• with the same 4.5GB files, rdiff only ate about 66MB of RAM and scaled very well. It never crashed to date.
• it is also MUCH faster than diff.
• rdiff itself combines both diff and patch capabilities, so you can create deltas and apply them using the same program

The downsides of rdiff are:

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Check out the new OpenSolaris page and download the new OpenSolaris binary distribution.

You can easily download the integrated MySQL packages by using the Package Manager GUI or simply

pkg install SUNWmysql5

As part of the MySQL packages the MySQL Cluster (NDB) storage engine and management binaries are included. You can use the general documentation available at MySQL.comfor setting up a Cluster . Then you should be ready for high availability MySQL.

OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 is now available for download.  Its quite a departure from traditional Solaris. Why? because the CD that one will be downloading is probably just a chapter in the full book. To understand the full picture one will have to really look at the bigger picture on how the whole deployment model is now changing. The full scope is not my topic of discussion but I probably want to focus on probably couple of pieces today in order to demonstrate on how to create a PostgreSQL OpenSolaris LiveCD.

In order to create a custom LiveCD, its probably best to start with OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 installation though it is not necessary as it can be done on Solaris Express installations also but needs pkg(5) to be installed. But the two things really required to create a custom LiveCD, you need one kit to download and a repository to access. The kit to download …

Check out the new OpenSolaris page and download the new OpenSolaris binary distribution.

You can easily download the integrated MySQL packages by using the Package Manager GUI or simply

pkg install SUNWmysql5

As part of the MySQL packages the MySQL Cluster (NDB) storage engine and management binaries are included. You can use the general documentation available at MySQL.comfor setting up a Cluster . Then you should be ready for high availability MySQL.

Lets start at the point where you have just installed OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 and have logged in using your primary userid on the system.

First thing to do is install the packages for PostgreSQL and MySQL on OpenSolaris OS 2008.05. Right click on the desktop and select "Open Terminal" to start a terminal session. Use "su" to assume the root userid. (The primary user already has root role however some programs still explicitly check for userid of root and hence needed to avoid unexpected surprises.)

Verify pkg is able to communicate with the IPS repository.

# pkg search -r postgres …

The MySQL Event Schedule is one of the new features in MySQL 5.1. It is explained well in this article from the MySQL site, and in the manual itself. I'd like to demonstrate an interesting way to use it. What gave me this idea is actually a feature in SQL Server 2005, called Service Broker. It's a sort of queue manager / messaging platform, which can also be exploited in the same way.

Lets say you are writing a stored procedure, that loads data into the database. Benchmarks show that loading data in parallel from several threads increases overall throughput, as MySQL is unable to utilize several CPUs to process a single SELECT query, moreover a bulk load operation. To work in parallel, …

In a unique display of mass hysteria, one blogger after the other and even slashdot (no, I’m not going to link) managed to take the completely innocent message that certain new enterprise features might get released as closed source only and turn it into an ongoing bad press onslaught about “MySQL closing down source code”.

Why don’t you all give MySQL a break here please?  The rule is always the same for everybody: the one that writes the code gets to pick the license.  Listen, I 100% believe in open source and I consider myself to be a big advocate, but commercial open source companies like MySQL (and Pentaho) are commercial entities.  At lease try to put yourself in their position for a second.  For example, if a customer asks you to NOT to release a piece of software they paid for, you don’t release it, it’s that simple.

In the end, what MySQL is doing is simple: they are experimenting with a …

I thought I had already conquered the jet lag last night when I fell asleep at 22:00 (that's 10 pm...). But then I woke up somewhere around 2:30, read a book for a while until I decided to give up and have a nice breakfast. I kind of like jet lag though, it is a nice feeling to get out of bed 5:30, when no one else is awake, and birds are singing outside.

There would be a lot to tell about the conference, but you kind of find summaries from many live bloggers on Planet MySQL. One interesting aspect of the conference of course was to meet so many interesting people, many of whom I work with of course, but meeting them in flesh is still great. And Santa Clara being in Silicon Valley adds another funny revelational feeling to it all. For a European Yahoo, Google, Digg and others are Internet companies and seeing that they actually do have tangible offices in Silicon Valley was a …

One thing that still springs to mind when I think of the MySQL User Conference last week is Sun's opening keynote. While talking about Sun's market penetration with open source software, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, slipped in a short mention of the mobile market saying something along the lines of "Sun is going to be entering the mobile market later on this year". He didn't spend more than 5 seconds talking about it, moving on to the acquisition of MySQL.

Last year, Sun already made an announcement of …