Network.com setup in Vegas, Thumper disk bay, green by Shawn Ferry

As I expected it would, the fact that I used ZFS compression on our MySQL volume in my little OpenSolaris experiment struck a chord in the comments. I chose gzip-9 for our first pass for a few reasons:

1. I wanted to see what the “best case” compression ratio was for our dataset (InnoDB tables)
2. I wanted to see what the “worst case” CPU usage was for our workload
3. I don’t have a lot of time. I need to try something quick & dirty.

I got both those data points with enough granularity to be useful: a 2.12X compression ratio over a …

Want to use Dtrace or ZFS but are unfamiliar with building MySQL on Solaris? Dont panic, its never been easier. Here are the steps that worked for me.

1. Install OpenSolaris using the latest development ISO file
2. Install developer tools

   pfexec pkg install ss-dev

3. Download 5.1.28rc source
4. Build it

   export CC=/opt/SunStudioExpress/bin/cc
   export CXX=/opt/SunStudioExpress/bin/CC
   export CFLAGS="-xO3" #Your fav compiler flags go here 
   export CXXFLAGS="-xO3"
   
   ./configure --with-plugins=innobase,myisam --with-mysqld-libs=-lmtmalloc
   gmake 
   

Yes, it is that simple. Of course you could just download the binaries and use them too; they work just fine.

Want to use Dtrace or ZFS but are unfamiliar with building MySQL on Solaris? Dont panic, its never been easier. Here are the steps that worked for me.

1. Install OpenSolaris using the latest development ISO file
2. Install developer tools

   pfexec pkg install ss-dev

3. Download 5.1.28rc source
4. Build it

   export CC=/opt/SunStudioExpress/bin/cc
   export CXX=/opt/SunStudioExpress/bin/CC
   export CFLAGS="-xO3" #Your fav compiler flags go here 
   export CXXFLAGS="-xO3"
   
   ./configure --with-plugins=innobase,myisam --with-mysqld-libs=-lmtmalloc
   gmake 
   

Yes, it is that simple. Of course you could just download the binaries and use them too; they work just fine.

A compilation of today's news of interest:

Pimp My Drive by Richard and Barb

There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not, so I did what any enterprising geek would do: Built a box, threw some data on it, and tossed it into production to see if it would sink or swim.

I’m a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMug’s datacenters (and our EC2 images) are built on Linux. But the current state of filesystems on Linux is awful, and …

I thought I'd share a note I sent earlier in the week to Sun's leaders - about the turmoil we're seeing in the markets, and how I want our team focusing their efforts.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Begin forwarded message:
From: Jonathan Schwartz
Date: September 30, 2008 12:02:29 AM PDT
To: All Sun
Subject: Headlines, Financial Crisis, etc.

You can't have missed today's headlines - the American Congress failed to pass a critical bill authorizing the Treasury to put a floor under the US banking sector. The market swooned, and politicians in the US, and across the world, are bickering over the right long term answer - jump in and take action to save the troubled institutions, or step aside and …

Recently I am been testing few pieces of Storage projects of OpenSolaris with PostgreSQL. One of tests involves using an iSCSI disk  with PostgreSQL.  Unfortunately the storage that's available is  in Colorado  while my PostgreSQL server is  located in Massachusetts. Latency will definitely be one of my top problems since storage  is halfway across the country (in Colorado). Plus the fact that I will be running a database server on my end  doesn't really sound like a good idea. Come to think about it, this could be a more common problem nowadays since Cloud Storage (for example Amazon S3 Webservice ) could be  optimistically  half way across the country and pessimistically be on the other side of the world.

 So what are my options to solve such problems?  …

Recently, I had to futz with an Ubuntu server that was to run mail, web, and database services.

You slowly learn that Ubuntu as a desktop is easy to use, but as a server, its “different”, if you come from a Red Hat based background (especially if you’ve been using Red Hat-based distributions for the last thirteen years or so).

From example, while service httpd start works (well, the equivalent is service apache start), enabling things on boot using chkconfig (I wrote about it a while back) is replaced with update-rc.d.

In fact, if you’re an rpm aficionado, dpkg is a little different. I applaud the Ubuntu folk for creating an article such as …

Last week Kenai went beta, with the usual services in a development hub site plus an additional "connected" angle. Our GF CORBA project is already using its Hg repository but another very interesting angle is the technology mix.

Knut Anders Hatlen writes about memcached user-defined functions (UDF) for Java DB on OpenSolaris.

Knut has also mentioned the recent release of Apache Derby 10.4.2. A corresponding Java DB release should be available for download soon. (Usually this happens immediately but we're all at a developers' conference for the next couple of …