This week gives me a chance to get back into something I love to do—write. For those who don’t know, my name is Keith Murphy and I am a MySQL DBA at the Pythian Group. In addition, I have the privilege of being the editor of the MySQL Magazine, a quarterly  magazine for those who use MySQL on a daily basis, either as a DBA or a developer. The sixth issue was just released last week and is available for download now. But enough about me! Let’s see what you all had to say this week.

Beginning with the world of MySQL.

Monty Taylor kicks things off, bringing us news of the …

I had so much to say in response to a recent post asking about virtualization from Jennifer Glore that I realized it was long enough to be a blog post.

It really depends on what you’re looking to do. Many companies don’t have the money and staff to have an in-house data center with proper power and network redundancy; others don’t want the depreciation associated with owning computer hardware (even if they leased space in a data center, they’d have to buy equipment to put in it).

Some reasons to virtualize:
1) you need a fresh machine and cannot wait to order a new one or re-purpose an older one.
2) your need for machines/services fluctuates (and again, re-purposing takes time). This need can be as broad as employee desktops or as …

OpenSQL Camp is a free unconference happening Friday, Nov. 14th through Sunday, Nov. 16th in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. More details can be found at http://www.opensqlcamp.org.

Whether or not you have already registered for OpenSQL Camp by putting your name here:

http://www.opensqlcamp.org/index.php?title=Events/2008/AttendeeList

you should be aware of very important information.
(more…)

Previously on Log Buffer: Log Buffer #119.

And now.

Welcome to Log Buffer #120. My name is Warner, and I’m a SQL Server DBA at The Pythian Group. This is my first time on Log Buffer duties ever, so here’s hoping I can give everyone a fair and unbiased look at this week in the database blogging world (and related).

I admit I had no idea of the community or state of the PostgreSQL RDBMS, and so I definitely learned some new stuff this week. First off, over on “The Scale-out Blog” Robert Hodges invites us all to get our …

I took part in a webinar on cloud computing today, including some of the top names in cloud computing services. As Pythian has some MySQL clients using cloud computing, I was particularly interested…

I was interested by the many levels of what cloud computing means, including such categorizations as Facebook apps being a part of the cloud. I think many of us consider cloud computing to mean “virtual infrastructure as a service” and overlook some pretty robust cloud computing that’s already out there, such as “application components as a service” and “software [platform] as a service”.

Following are my notes:

“Our objective today is to cut through some of the noise associated with ‘cloud’ and get to a real world approach for getting some serious value from the cloud.”
…

Get it while it’s hot! The Fall 2008 issue of the MySQL Magazine is now available at http://www.mysqlzine.net. Issue 6 is chock full of 16 pages good stuff, including:

• “Decision Table”-Driven Development by Jonathan Levin
• Part I of a series on Transaction Time Validity in MySQL by Peter Brawley
• An Overview of Zmanda Recovery Manager by Pythian’s own Gerry Narvaja
• Keith Murphy, editor has a note about Drizzle.

Download the PDF directly or go to the MySQL Magazine page to download any and all of the 6 issues.

I was reading Savio Rodrigues’ post, The economy and open source, in which he responds to Andrew Keen’s thoughts that a bad economy will see fewer open source contributions.

Now, Keen feels that people will contribute less during bad financial times:

The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

I know several volunteer open source developers — I consider this to be a “role” that someone plays. A person may be *employed* as an open source developer (say, working at Sun on …

Welcome to the 119th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

We start in the MySQL world with some engine news. On Brian “Krow” Aker’s Idle Thoughts, Brian explains the state of engines in Drizzle, the pared-down MySQL. He begins, “So many engines, and so little to choose from. This is one of our two major decision points in Drizzle right now.” Maria, Falcon, PBXT, and InnoDB are in the dock.

Arjen Lentz asks a simple question: Would you prefer InnoDB to be the default storage engine?, also the subject of a quick …

Sorry for the outage, everyone. We’re looking into the causes of the downtime (and sponging the sweat off our keyboards), but for now we’re happy just to be back. Stay tuned for a real blog article soon.

The 118th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published on Ward Pond’s SQL Server blog.

Log Buffer is the only platform-neutral, distributed, human-edited article on database blogs. It receives several thousand views each week, and publishing an edition on your own blog brings those views to you. Hosting an edition of LB also introduces you and your blog to your colleagues in the DB blogosphere. Write me an email and I’ll get you started.

Now, here’s Ward Pond’s Log Buffer …