CloudBees raises $10.5m. Microsoft commits $100m to SUSE. And more.

# CloudBees secured $10.5m in Series B venture funding.

# Microsoft renewed its vows with Attachmate’s SUSE business unit, committing to invest $100m in new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates over the next four years.

# Oracle announced that it has acquired Ksplice, twhioch offers zero downtime update technology for Linux.

# Ingres announced that Steve Shine has been named Chief Executive Officer and President.

# Dell …

Earlier today my colleague Depesz posted a nice write up showing one of the use cases for the new 9.1 feature, "Writable CTE's". It certainly shows one handy thing that this feature will enable, but it's not the only one. Here's a quick little bit of SQL I have been playing with for some time that re-implements the infamous "UPSERT" command (a long time sticking point for people trying to make MySQL apps more cross-database compatible) into Postgres.

pagila=# select * from actor where first_name = 'AMBER' and last_name = 'LEE';
actor_id | first_name | last_name | last_update
----------+------------+-----------+-------------
(0 rows)

pagila=# with upsert as
pagila-# (update actor set last_update = now() where first_name = 'AMBER' and last_name = 'LEE' returning actor_id)
pagila-# insert into …

These are some of my notes from some sysbench in-memory r/o testing in past day or so:

• At ‘fetch data by primary key’ benchmark with separate read snapshots at each statement, MySQL shines until ~200 concurrent threads, then performance starts dropping slightly faster than one would want, I think mostly from table cache LOCK_open contention
• auto-commit cost (establishing read snapshot per statement) for SELECTs is ~10% for MySQL, but for PG it can be +50% in plain SQL mode and +130% (!!!!!!!) when using prepared statements (this can be seen in a graph – obviously the global …

While Mark was looking at MongoDB, I was playing comparing various aspects of MySQL and Postgres performance. Certain PG performance numbers I saw (40kqps vs 110kqps from MySQL) made me really upset, so I ended up discussing with people at #postgresql – and started comparing various versions/configurations/machines/etc.

Apparently 2.6.32 kernel, which is in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) and is also basis for future RHEL6 kernel has nearly 20% performance degradation for PG (though not for MySQL, phew) – and apparently it was news to their community (I have started an email thread, will see where it goes).

While I was doing my research, of course I could observe plenty of gems of wisdom:

<davidfetter> domas, …

Last week's "announcement" of the death of OpenSolaris has steered a lot of questions my way about where people should go, and/or where OmniTI will go, now that OpenSolaris future looks non-existent. As one of the more open users of Solaris related technology, and running some beefy loads on top of it, it makes sense that people would be curious as to what we might be doing next. I would start with saying that as a company, we don't have an official policy on this yet, and probably won't. We evaluate each situation on a customer by customer basis, so what follows here is more my personal …

Does it matter if the end user knows what the database is?

Recently I got a wonderful view of a database from the end user perspective.

While I was traveling I had found a restaurant where I had decided to let friends who live locally know where I was at. Part way through my food I got a message from a local friend that said "Don't eat there, their food always makes people sick!"

"Always" is a word that I would think would be a little too strong when applied to a restaurant, right?

Nope, the next day I got to feel the full truth of the word.

A couple of days later I am telling some friends about this and a local asked me "Where was this, I want to avoid them." I didn't get asked this question once, I got it asked a dozen times.

I don't know where the place is. Why is that? Because the system I was using lost the entire day worth of my data. I don't know how …

Howdy folks,

slides are up for my talk, "Database Scalability Patterns", which I gave this week at OSCon 2010. You can get them from the OSCon page, from slideshare, or just watch it below

Database Scalability PatternsView more presentations from Robert Treat.

Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly roundup of DBA industry happenings.

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ODTUG/Kaleidoscope 2010 roundup:

Sheeri …

OpenSQLCamp is less than 4 months away, and I have finally gotten around to updating the site. Special thanks go to Bradley Kuzsmaul and the folks at Tokutek for getting the ball rolling and making the reservation at MIT. Using MIT means that we will have *free* reliable wireless guest access and projects.

OpenSQL Camp is a free unconference for people interested in open source databases (MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, Drizzle), including non-relational databases, database alternatives like NoSQL stores, and database tools such as Gearman. We are not focusing on any one project, and hope to see representatives from a variety of open source database projects attend. As usual I am one of the main organizers of Open SQL Camp (in previous years, Baron Schwartz, Selena Deckelmann and Eric Day have been main organizers too; this year Bradley Kuzsmaul is the other main organizer). The target audience …

One of the things I preach about a lot is good monitoring of your database servers; having tools in place to tell you both what good looks like and when things go bad is critical for large scale success. But sometimes you just need to monitor a momentary process, where setting up a check in your normal monitoring software is overkill. In these cases one tool that can help out is the watch command.

Case in point, the other day I needed to back up a fairly large partitioned table (about 1.3TB on disk). The plan? A quick little script to pg_dump each of the partitions (about 325). Feed the script through xargs -P so I don't swamp the box, but I get some concurrency out …