This is about the ending of the sponsorship of the mysql.meetup.com user groups by Sun/MySQL and their suggested move to Facebook.

If people want to move to Facebook, that’s fine. For those who want to stay but don’t have the local funding, I have an offer for you. Contact Open Query, and we’ll sponsor your group for the coming months. This is not open-ended, I think a more permanent solution is important (moving, sponsorship, whatever) but I want to make the effort for the community to prevent any groups from disappearing now just because of this.

I was the one who originally set up the agreement with meetup.com when they first started charging for meetups (and it turned out to be a very good business model for them!). When that change was announced, quite a few meetup organisers were going to quit. The …

From this Tuesday 12 May until Sunday 17 May I’m going to be in Darwin (Northern Territory, Australia), teaching custom MySQL training days for a medical research institute. DarLUG has been extinct for a while, but perhaps there are some local Linux/OSS people reading this? Please do drop me a line if you’d like to catch up while I’m there! I’ve only flown through Darwin before, never visited/stayed… and I love the tropics (I lived in Cairns for a while) so this shall be a joyous few days! Oh the tough things we have to do in business. I’m also doing a day trip to Litchfield… Kakadu will have to wait until another time (perhaps with Phoebe) as I’m told it’s best visited over multiple …

After the morning and afternoon tutorials today by Andrew Eddie (Joomla dev lead), tomorrow is Joomla Day - Brisbane Joomla Users Group where I’ll be doing talk as well.

I’ve already noticed that Joomla users are a slightly different crowd. Joomla is a pretty powerful CMS with many modules/extensions, just like Drupal which runs the Open Query web site. I’m not sure the two even compete directly although there might be some overlap. It occurred to me that Joomla might be what I would call an “enabling technology” on the web, just like PHP and MySQL have been since 1995. It has a very easy entry, which of course is both good as well as bad. Again that’s quite similar to the M and the P…. love it or hate it.

I’m kinda agnostic on the subject of CMSses, there’s quite a few out there and I think that most of the …

This year the fabulous OSDC conference is 25-27 November 2009 and returning to Brisbane (Bardon Centre, Mt.Cootha which is a great venue tucked into a rainforest setting). Stephen Thorne leads the organisation team for this event.

The call for papers is now open, until June 30th. For full details, see OSDC 2009 call for papers.

We’ll definitely be there, particularly since it’s very close to Arjen’s house. And perhaps we’ll get some talks accepted on MySQL and other topics. We’ll definitely be submitting some proposals!

As I described yesterday, Open Query is doing some tests on SSDs and other devices pretending to be harddisks (SANs, battery-backed RAID controllers, etc). To aid this, I wrote a small tool to test the different kind of I/O operations MySQL would/could do, which is not quite the same as what other general purpose apps would do, and also not what other test tools measure. For instance, it tries Direct I/O as well as fsync() after each write, and also it a range of different I/O block sizes.

In a nutshell, it’s aimed to do what MySQL does, without MySQL! Testing lots of different setups for this particular purpose (even with fantastic tools like MySQL Sandbox) is a complete pest, and changing InnoDB page size requires a recompile. While Percona has tried a larger page size in the past and decided it wasn’t worth it (the default is 16K), I thought it worthwhile to include …

Open Query too is exploring utilising SSDs in a MySQL infrastructure, but we wouldn’t be us if we didn’t also try some alternative perspective on it. Right now we’re running some comparative tests against various spinning HD setups in the same box, using the same controller, so we’re looking for differences rather than absolute speed.

The results so far are interesting, but the selection of SSDs we have available is limited (never enough toys!) So, a request: do you have an SSD, it’d be great if we could run our test tool on it for a bit. It won’t take long, but naturally the box shouldn’t be used for something else while the test is running. We can either log in remotely, or exchange code and results over email. Simply contact us through our site’s contact form, and we’ll sort things out! Thanks.

If you work for a vendor and would like to have your gear put …

I’m shifting away from LiveJournal. It lacks ability to search and otherwise peruse archived blog posts. And of course it’s only me, while Open Query has more people.

From now on the posts will be at http://openquery.com/blog/ and this is aggregated to Planet MySQL as a group blog. You may have already seen Walter posting from his seat at the MySQL Conf. All posts and comments from my LJ blog have been migrated to WordPress, thanks to magic performed by young Akash Mehta. Unfortunately the comment threading can’t be exported.

The full export means that my personal posts are now also present at Open Query, although I may move those elsewhere later. The existing blog entries on LJ will stay for a while at least, although I do have to pay for the LiveJournal subdomain to keep the URLs alive.

A little sidenote …

I’m not personally there this year, but Walter Heck will be. In case you haven’t met Walter yet, photo enclosed

He’s a techie, like you, and he’d love to meet you and hear how you’re using MySQL and surrounding technologies and what things might make your life easier in terms of application architecture, development, deployment, maintenance, and so on.

This may or may not fit with the services that Open Query provides, but the key point is to listen, not sell. If there’s a good match, of course that’s fine too!

As a sidenote, just to pre-empt the inevitable question of “Arjen why are you not here?”: flying over to the US has always been fine, but coming back is a pile of grief every time taking multiple weeks to recover. I’ve never had that issue with for instance …

50 things to know before migrating Oracle to MySQL by Baron Schwartz is an interesting read, it points out clearly that MySQL is not Oracle. However, Oracle is not the benchmark by which all others are to be judged. So what do we compare with, or actually, why do we compare at all?

Hmm, so we take three steps back, and get a much better view... Marten Mickos (MySQL CEO from 2001 until the Sun acquisition in 2008) said it all along "MySQL does not compete with Oracle". I don't think people actually appreciated what he was saying, or even believed that he meant precisely what he said. They might have thought "oh that's just positioning and protesting too much to make the opposite point". But he wasn't, it was the clear plain truth and it still is today (and so it should remain, I think).

…

Did you know that by banging your head against the wall you burn about 150 calories per hour? However, there are more effective and less painful ways to exercise (no surprise there). Personally, I like an early morning walk and playing some Wii games around lunch time.

Most companies aim towards high(er) value offerings, sold at a higher price, so that their margin increases. Right?
But what they're actually doing is desperately trying to outrun their own high (and escalating) cost structure. I ask you this: why should a client have to pay for inefficiencies in a provider's organisation? Also, why says that a higher value offering needs to a) be priced higher and b) have a higher profit margin?

This is not the unavoidable way of things, but the reason it's the usual is that you can't just decide to change one aspect (such as a higher value offering), yet keep the way the company is run the same, and then still …