Addition of support for Apache Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise extends Pythian’s leadership in extreme-scale database deployments and big data services

OTTAWA, Canada – July 8, 2015 – Pythian, a global IT services company specializing in helping companies leverage disruptive technologies to optimize revenue-generating systems, today announced the general availability of its consulting and follow-the-sun managed services support for both Apache™ Cassandra™ and DataStax®, the company that delivers Apache Cassandra to the enterprise. Cassandra is an open-source, distributed database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure.

Pythian leverages an extensive suite of managed services, tools, and database experience to get organizations up and running in their Cassandra and …

A catchy headline, and I believe more accurate than Oracle Puts the Squeeze on SMBs with MySQL Price Hike (Network World) and MySQL price hikes reveal depth of Oracle’s wallet love [MySQL Jacking up MySQL Prices] (The Register). Slightly more realistic is Oracle kills low-priced MySQL support (again The Register).

First, let’s review what Oracle has actually done: they ditched the MySQL enterprise Basic and Silver offerings. For Oracle, that makes sense. Their intended client base is “enterprise” (high end, think big corporates) and their MySQL sales and cost structure reflects this. It’s not a new thing that came with MySQL at Oracle, because MySQL at Sun …

Numerous times now, I’ve seen people have troubles creating MySQL services on Windows manually (using ‘sc’), whether it be for mysqld itself, MySQL Proxy, or the MySQL Enterprise Monitor and/or Agent.

The proper syntax for ‘sc’ can get tricky when you have spaces in pathnames, which is very common in Windows, and the need for –defaults-file (which means two paths each potentially containing spaces).

So, if you have spaces in both your binpath and your path to –defaults-file, then the following syntax will work for you (all on a single line):

sc create MySQLEnterpriseMonitorAgent
binpath= ""C:Program FilesMySQLEnterpriseAgentbinmysql-monitor-agent.exe"
--defaults-file="C:Program FilesMySQLEnterpriseAgentetcmysql-monitor-agent.ini""
DisplayName= "MySQL Enterprise Monitor Agent" start= "auto"

Note that you could easily use the exact same syntax to install a Windows service for the MySQL server itself …

The MySQL Cluster daemon for MySQL Cluster (ndbd and ndb_mgmd) doesn't by themselves yet let them run as a service (apparently ndb_mgmd does, but I haven't seen it documented anywhere on how to do that). But there are ways to fix this, using some simple Windows tools and some registry hacking.

What you need to find is the Windows Resource Kit from some version of Windows that includes instsrv.exe and srvany.exe. It is not too picky with the actual version of Windows you run it seems, I used the Windows NT 32-bit versions of these on a 64-bit Windows 7 box, and it works just fine.

These two programs are simple and are easy to use:

• instsrv allows you to install a service, it's real simple, just run the program and it will show the options (and these are few).
• srvany allows you to run any odd program, that is not intended run as a service, do do this anyway.

Now, Google a …

I’m happy to note (this is internal Open Query happiness but I’m pleased to share) that so far we have a 100% renewal rate for our Proactive Services for MySQL subscriptions. Some of the early clients have grown in the initial period and are have now moved to a higher # of hours (this can also be changed upward during a term), which is of course excellent both for the clients and for us.

I was in eager anticipation of this time since the introduction of the concept late last year, as it is of course the essential proof of whether a subscription service actually works over time. Ideally, you’d want renewal to be a simple straightforward process, with the client having experienced the value of the service. This is relatively straightforward in this case, since it’s not an insurance, emergency or retainer type arrangement – the client actually gets benefits each and …