As of today, Continuent is part of VMware. We are absolutely over the moon about it.

You can read more about the news on the VMware vCloud blog by Ajay Patel, our new boss. There’s also an official post on our Continuent company blog. In a nutshell the Continuent team is joining the VMware Cloud Services Division. We will continue to improve, sell, and support our Tungsten products and work on innovative integration into VMware’s product line.

So why do I feel exhilarated about joining VMware? There are three reasons. 

1.     Continuent is joining a world-class company that is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions. Even …

Dealing with churn, is one of the most important elements of building a subscription business.  While some churn is inevitable over time, too much churn indicates a more fundamental problem: customers aren't finding value in your product.  

I wrote an article over at GigaOm on this subject including some examples about how to reduce churn from my experience at MySQL and Zendesk.

Having churn is like rowing a leaky boat. After a while, you spend more time bailing water than moving forward. By contrast, organizations that focus on reducing churn will find that their revenue grows every quarter.

To accurately measure what’s going on, you should begin by breaking out churn (customer cancellation) from …

Over the last few years there has been an increasing interest in immutable data management. This is a big change from the traditional update-in-place approach many database systems use today, where new values delete old values, which are then lost. With immutable data you record everything, generally using methods that append data from successive transactions rather than replacing them.  In some DBMS types you can access the older values, while in others the system transparently uses the old values to solve useful problems like implementing eventual consistency.

Baron Schwartz recently pointed out that it can be hard to get decent transaction processing performance based on append-only methods like append-only B-trees.  This is not a very strong argument against immutable data per se. …

Marketo provides the leading cloud-based marketing software platform for companies of all sizes to build and sustain engaging customer relationships. Marketo's SaaS platform runs on MySQL and has faced data management challenges common to all 24x7 SaaS businesses:

Keeping data available regardless of DBMS failures or planned maintenance Utilizing hardware optimized for multi-terabyte MySQL

Learn how Modernizing Medicine, an electronic medical records company, serves thousands of customers and leverages Continuent Tungsten to manage databases on Amazon AWS. Modernizing Medicine is as fast growing SaaS company, offering electronic medical records management solution for thousands of small and medium-sizes dermatology, ophthalmology, optometry, plastic surgery, cosmetic and

Join Continuent and our customers Modernizing Medicine and Marketo to learn how to run business-critical MySQL applications in the cloud or on-premises. Modernizing Medicine is a fast-growing SaaS company, offering electronic medical records management solution. Matthew Lang, Sr. Site Reliability Engineer at Modernizing Medicine, describes how Modernizing Medicine serves thousands of customers

This article is the third in a series on data fabric design and introduces the fabric connector service design pattern.  The previous article in this series introduced the transactional data service design pattern, which defines individual data stores and is the building block for data fabrics based on SQL databases.  The fabric connector builds on transactional data services and is another basic building block of fabric architecture.

Description and Responsibilities
Fabric connectors make a collection of DBMS servers look like a single server.  The fabric connector presents what appears to be a data service API to applications.  It routes each request to an appropriate physical …

As the world's most popular web database, MySQL has quickly become the leading database for the cloud, with most providers offering MySQL-based services.

Access our Resource Kit to discover:

• Why MySQL has become the leading database in the cloud, and how it addresses the critical attributes of cloud-based deployments
• How ISVs rely on MySQL to power their SaaS offerings
• Best practices to deploy the world’s most popular open source database in public and private clouds

You will also find out how you can leverage MySQL together with Hadoop and other technologies to unlock the value of Big Data, either on-premise or in the cloud. …

Cloud databases have a memory problem.   Continuent has been doing a lot of Amazon deployments lately, and it is becoming apparent that memory utilization in those environments is more than just an inconvenience.  In this article I would like to discuss the memory problem that we see in customer implementations and some new features of Tungsten Enterprise that help alleviate it for MySQL.

The Cloud Memory Problem and Database Arrays

As I discussed in a recent article about prefetch, the amount of RAM allocated to the InnoDB buffer pool is one of the principle determinants of MySQL performance.  The speed difference between using a page in the buffer pool …

Here are some of the fake O'Reilly book covers I mentioned in a prior post.  These have been optimized for use as black & white Kindle screensaver wallpaper images.  If you haven't done so already, you can install a Kindle screensaver hack with a couple of downloads. 

Update: I've embedded a slideshow from PicasaWeb, but it requires Flash.  If you don't see it you can click on the links below to go directly to PicasaWeb.

• Kindle hacks:  …