Posts by Paul Vallee
If this post seems a bit like an “advertorial”, please believe me — it’s not. Well, at least it’s not an advertisement for Pythian in any way. What it is, however, is a post about a longstanding business partner of Pythian’s who run a very useful service I think more of you should know about. Rest assured there is nothing “in it” for me or for Pythian for writing this.
Dave has been sick these past two days and as a result, we do not have a comprehensive log buffer ready. I had two choices – cancel this week’s log buffer, or try to make it great despite this adversity. Never one to accept defeat easily, I’ll go for the second option. So this week’s log buffer is as follows: we are counting on each and every one of you, our faithful readers, to propose the one article you read in the last week, and include a short paragraph as to why this article was interesting to you and why it should interest us.
A short note to let everyone know that I’ll be heading to Dubai later today to participate in Pythian’s exhibit in the Business Solutions Hall. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, GITEX is like COMDEX for the Middle-East – it’s literally the third largest tradeshow in the world where COMDEX is #1 – and it’s big, really really big, like 120,000 attendees big. Hope to see you there!
There’s an interesting dynamic going on right now in the DBA world. MySQL’s growth and installed base, as a function of its size three or five years ago, is perhaps five if not ten times larger than it was. In 2002 when Pythian’s MySQL services launched, we took on the platform at the explicit request of an existing customer that was primarily an Oracle shop, but that was adopting MySQL for some bolt-on systems. Today, MySQL is our fastest-growing practice in terms of new customer acquisition. The point I want you to take away from that is simply this: there are about five to ten times more high-value environments running MySQL in the world today than there were three years ago.
I just read a fascinating article on clustering architectures for databases from Kevin Closson of Polyserve (now HP). All I can say is that he has one of the most informed and incisive views and insights on clustering, SMP, high-availability and high-performance environments in the industry. I thought I would share this with the broader community because I think a lot of MySQL, SQL Server and EnterpriseDB folks who need to read this and think about this subject might otherwise miss it, simply because they may not be regular readers of Kevin’s blog.
I am sad to report that my RSS feed for oracle-wtf definitely made me say WTF! but not in a good way. Actually visiting the site confirmed my suspicion, it’s been hi-jacked by a splogger.
As you might imagine, the traffic to the open letter from the oracle.com domain has been spiking in the last few days. Two days ago, in fact, Christo received an email from Oracle putting into question the fact that AWR data collection could not be disabled without a license to the diagnostic pack, and promptly forwarded that note to me. So as it turns out, Oracle has been working on a package to disable the AWR data collection without requiring a license for at least two months. But as of yesterday, it had not yet been published.
A short post to draw your attention to this article by Kevin Burton titled “MySQL and the Death of Raid”. Although it’s written from the MySQL point of view, he does bring up some interesting points on the advantages of what he calls a “RAISe” or Redundant Array of Independent Servers” architecture (actually I coined the RAISe acronym just now :-) ) over the traditional RAID approach of hardening the availability and performance of your disk. Take a look and let me know what you think.
This is more of an essay than a blog post, but this subject comes up time and again, and since I tripped across this interesting blog post by Pedro Timóteo about why he has decided not to be a sysadmin any more, I thought now’s as good a time as any to comment on what I think is a significant industry trend in production engineering work.
It seems Google couldn’t wait to have their code evaluated for merging into the main source tree, and decided to release it to the general public as patches to 4.0.26 for the community to evaluate. What have we added and enhanced?
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