There has been a lot happening in the MariaDB community recently, and there has been growth. Here are some of the highlights. Thank you to all our current contributors, and to others that want to contribute, shoot community[at]askmonty[dot]org an e-mail.

MariaDB 5.2.3 binaries for Solaris and Debian Sparc

Our Sparc community contributor, Mark, has continued to make popular binaries for Solaris 10 and Debian Sparc. He’s kept up to speed with MariaDB 5.2.3, so please visit him and download the binaries.

MariaDB 5.2.3 on the openSUSE Build Service

Community contributor Michal Hrušecký has packaged MariaDB for openSUSE and its available via the …

Now that installing MySQL in Solaris zones is even officially supported by the MySQL support group (see http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/supportpolicies/policies-06.html#q03), the question is: What is the right way of installing MySQL in a zone. Of course this depends on what you want to achieve. The following description is based on Solaris 10. On Opensolaris this is different (somewhat easier, as there are no more sparse root zones.)
If you run a local zone as a whole root zone, you can easily install MySQL from tarball or the package installer.
If you run a local zone as a sparse root zone, there are different options:
First you cannot use the package installer, as this procedure will copy binaries to /usr/bin. But /usr/bin is inherited from the global zone and write protected. You have to use the tarball installation. …

Tomorrow I will be attending the Solaris 10 User Group Part X at the offices of Sun Microsystems, 101 Park Ave., New York, NY. This is an all day event and there is even a MySQL talk by Philip Antoniades. Other presenters include Ambreesh Khanna, Isaac Rozenfeld, Neal Weiss, Sunay Tripathi, Amjad Khan, Damien Farnham and Dave Teszler.

Unfortunately, the event registration is now closed, but if you're attending I look forward to meeting you.

Right now there is a discussion on Planet MySQL regarding MySQL / Linux swap problem. Peter Zaitsev originally brought the problem of MySQL swapping to light. Recently, Dathan Pattishall also wrote about it in his post Linux 64-bit, MySQL, Swap and Memory. Don McAskill followed up with his post, MySQL and the Linux Swap problem, and an interesting way to get around the issue: "make swap partitions out of RAM disks." Don also points to another article by Kevin regarding …

The video of one of my three sessions, "Optimizing MySQL and InnoDB on Solaris 10 for World's Largest Photo Blogging Community", presented at MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 has been uploaded by Sheeri. I am very thankful to her for doing all the hard work and making it available.

There are a few slides that were edited out of video because of reasons beyond my control. However, you should still be able to enjoy most of the video.

There is one point related to this video that I would like to make: Based on my particular experience I was leading to believe that Solaris 10 Kernel had the …

"The two metrics that are most important to me are first customer satisfaction and second growth." - Don McAskill

Today, I noticed Don is featured on Sun's customer success stories page:


Don McAskill is the CEO and Chief Geek of Smugmug, a photo and now hi-def video (using H.264) sharing site with a successful business model behind it.

I initially met Don last year at the MySQL Conference when my then boss told me that he is interested in meeting him. That was my introduction to Smugmug. I was impressed by SmugMug's presentation of photos and the care they took to make your photos and galleries look awesome.

This year, as a member of Smugmug, me and my wife got to interact with Don on a personal level.

We had several suggestions related to how our …