I’ve been thinking about SaaS (in the form of Spinn3r) and how it relates to Open Source for the past few months and I think I’ve come to some interesting conclusions. I think SaaS might be a strong competitor to Open Source in that it’s cheaper and higher quality in a number of situations.

Apparently, I’m no the only one:

Open source is always driven by some organisation – a central body that leads community development efforts to support developers and build revenue streams. In essence, that body gives away the base code and knowledge of the community version to encourage development of the service and expand distribution; to make the software go ‘viral’.

However, I believe software as a service …

Sun reports second quarter results. Compiere reports 216% quarterly revenue growth. EnterpriseDB grows customers accounts. Hyperic and JasperSoft team up on BI for IT. Microsoft embraces Apache but resists GPL. And more.

Sun up or Sun down?
There was some comparatively good news from Sun, which reported a net loss of $209m on revenue down 10.9% at $3.2bn. As Sam Diaz at ZDnet notes, however, “after excluding one-time costs related to recent layoffs and other costs, the company posted a profit of 15 cents per share, beating analysts’ expectations of a 10 cent loss”. In regular trading, shares of Sun were up more than 5%.

Matt Asay noted the impact open …

I’ve been asked about this and realized that it may not be obvious to people who are more familiar with Windows than with Ubuntu. So here is a tip.

When learning MySQL on Ubuntu, it is helpful to be able to get to MySQL’s data directory and observe file creation and modification while you are performing database and table creation and modification, index creation and modification, etc. You can find out MySQL’s data directory by running:

show variables like ‘datadir’;

Suppose your datadir is /var/lib/mysql. And suppose you have a database called test. After opening a terminal window and type:

cd /var/lib/mysql/test/

You will likely receive an error like below:
bash: cd: /var/lib/mysql/test/: Permission denied

Now if you try the command below, as it seems logical on Ubuntu

sudo cd /var/lib/mysql/test/

You will likely get this message:

sudo: cd: command …

This is a simple mysql circular replication implementation on a single machine (just a proof of concept) which can easily be done on a broader scale. Just be aware of the cons of circular replication which mainly gets down to: once a node freaks out or stops for one reason or the other, it’s a bitch and you need to take care of IMMEDIATELY.

Download Sandbox from https://launchpad.net/mysql-sandbox/+download
Download MySQL from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads

Copy the downloaded software onto the your *nix box onto any folder of your preference called $BASEDIR

run:

cd /$BASEDIR

gunzip mysql_sandbox_X.X.XX.tar.gz
tar -xf mysql_sandbox_X.X.XX.tar

ln -s mysql_sandbox_X.X.XX sandbox

time /$BASEDIR/sandbox/make_replication_sandbox –circular=4 –topology=circular /$BASEDIR/mysql-5.1.30-linux-x86_64-glibc23.tar.gz


user@hostname $ time …

The e1000 Nic is very common and can be found in many servers.  During my last NBD cluster engagement, on a set of 5 Dell 1950 servers equipped with a quad e1000 Nic, we were trying to tune cluster performance and one of the thing that was disapointing was that the system time, to processed interrupts from the Nics, was always low.  Since neither the ndbd processes or the mysqld processes were using a significant amount of CPU, we were wondering where the bottleneck was.

Then, Michel Donais, from the client, read the Linux driver documentation and bingo!!! Those e1000 Nics throttle interrupts by default at 8000/s.  8000… it is a big limiting factor….   design to prevent DOS attacks.  We removed the throttling and… reach more than 30,000 interrupt/s and guess what, the number of transaction per second scaled with it along with the ndbd and mysqld cpu usage.  Interesting isn’t it? Then I remembered another …

Dear Lazyweb,

So, I’ve been in Chicago for a week teaching a beginner and an intermediate course on using and administering Linux machines. This week, I’ll teach an intermediate and an advanced course on Linux, and the advanced course will cover profiling and debugging. The main tools I’m covering will be valgrind and oprofile, though I’ll be going over lots of other stuff, like iostat, vmstat, strace, what’s under /proc, and some more basic stuff like sending signals and the like.

So what makes me a bit nervous is, being that the advanced students are mostly CS-degree-holding system developers, they’ll probably be expecting me to know very low-level details of how things are implemented at  the system/kernel level. I’d love to know more about that myself, and actively try to increase my knowledge in that area! Alas, most of my experience with low-level …

In MySQL 5.0, InnoDB gained the ability to use Linux Large Page support for allocating memory for the buffer pool and additional memory pool.

A few customers have asked about using it and there is virtually no documentation on what is required on Linux to enable it. I actually ended up having to read some of the Linux kernel source code to figure out some of this.

This uses the API as documented at:

http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt

To set this up and use it, you first need a kernel that supports it. All of the recent RHEL kernels do by default from what I can tell. On my Ubuntu systems, I'm not seeing it enabled normally.

Then on the OS level you will need to do the following procedures:

 # Set the number of pages to be used …

Red Hat gets a new VP. rPath appoints former Red Hat COO as chairman. Ubuntu Launchpad to go open source. Open source Windows. SCO formally files for Chapter 11. And more.

Official announcements
Industry Veteran Greg Symon Joins Red Hat as Vice President and General Manager of North American Sales Red Hat

rPath Welcomes Ex-Red Hat COO Tim Buckley rPath

Liferay Portal Released in Enterprise Edition LifeRay

Adaptive Planning …

We've now concluded our call for papers for the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium, which will be open on Sunday, 8th of February from 09:00-17:00.

We received some excellent proposals and I am very excited about the schedule. Here's the quick summary of the talks:

• Vladimir Kolesnikov: Practicing DBA's Guide to the PBXT Storage Engine
• Kris Buytaert: Monitoring MySQL
• Geert Vanderkelen: MySQL Cluster
• Roland Bouman: MySQL 5.1 Plugins
• Kaj Arnö: MySQL, powering and using Social Networks
• Ewen Fortune: Percona MySQL patches and the XtraDB storage engine
• Giuseppe Maxia: Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• Jurriaan Persyn: Database Sharding

See the …

We've now concluded our call for papers for the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium, which will be open on Sunday, 8th of February from 09:00-17:00.

We received some excellent proposals and I am very excited about the schedule. Here's the quick summary of the talks:

• Vladimir Kolesnikov: Practicing DBA's Guide to the PBXT Storage Engine
• Kris Buytaert: Monitoring MySQL
• Geert Vanderkelen: MySQL Cluster
• Roland Bouman: MySQL 5.1 Plugins
• Kaj Arnö: MySQL, powering and using Social Networks
• Ewen Fortune: Percona MySQL patches and the XtraDB storage engine
• Giuseppe Maxia: Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• Jurriaan Persyn: Database Sharding

See the …