Update: Sun has expanded its Cloud Computing portfolio with the recent acquisition of Qlayer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds.  The Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, is now part of Sun's Cloud Computing business unit which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

Cloud computing is about managing petascale data. Sun's server and storage systems can radically improve the data-intensive computing emerging in the cloud. Some clouds are closed platforms that lock you in. Sun's open source philosophy and Java principles form the core of a strategy that provides interoperability for large-scale computing resources. Sun's virtualization solutions for advanced …

My prayers have been answered.

We have found a worthy replacement for Jay Pipes: Dups.

• Dups joined MySQL in July 2007.
• Dups until recently was in the MySQL Web Team, and has joined us now.
• Dups comes from Canada (Newfoundland).
• Dups even lives in Canada (Montreal).
• Dups will roam the North American continent to serve the MySQL community, to learn from it, to explain Sun to the community, and to explain the community to Sun.
• Dups is sometimes mistaken for Colin Charles, because of similarities in physical appearance.
• Dups has a somewhat challenging name, Duleepa Wijayawardhana.

I’m very happy we got Dups as our Jay clone, because

• Dups is a MySQL user since last century.
• Dups knows MySQL very well.
• Dups is an excellent communicator: he structures his thoughts clearly and writes an enjoyable …

Exit Jay, whom we will miss dearly. He was the first person that I met in the MySQL community who went to work for the company. That's when I started thinking that maybe I could become an employee as well. …

Busy next few days: Sun Systems Tour in Jakarta, Indonesia on November 5, then MyGOSSCON 2008 on November 6.

For the Sun event, there’s a corporate slide deck - MySQL from Sun: The Platform for the Web Economy. For the MyGOSSCON event I’ll be speaking about MySQL Best Practices.

If you’re in Jakarta and free on November 5, don’t hesitate to say hi. Similar invite for MyGOSSCON, though I don’t actually know if its open to all.

Update: Sun has expanded its Cloud Computing portfolio with the recent acquisition of Qlayer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds.  The Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, is now part of Sun's Cloud Computing business unit which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

Cloud computing is about managing petascale data. Sun's server and storage systems can radically improve the data-intensive computing emerging in the cloud. Some clouds are closed platforms that lock you in. Sun's open source philosophy and Java principles form the core of a strategy that provides interoperability for large-scale computing resources. Sun's virtualization solutions for advanced …

Update: Sun has expanded its Cloud Computing portfolio with the recent acquisition of Qlayer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds.  The Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, is now part of Sun's Cloud Computing business unit which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

Cloud computing is about managing petascale data. Sun's server and storage systems can radically improve the data-intensive computing emerging in the cloud. Some clouds are closed platforms that lock you in. Sun's open source philosophy and Java principles form the core of a strategy that provides interoperability for large-scale computing resources. Sun's virtualization solutions for advanced …

Simon Phipps yesterday blogged about the emerging Sun Model for Open Source business:

As time has gone by, a clear “Sun Model” for open source business has been emerging, at least to my eyes. The summary of it is:

1. remove barriers to software adoption between download and deploy;
2. encourage a large and cohesive community of software deployers;
3. deliver, for a fee, the means to create value between deploy and scale, for those who need it.

Each software team at Sun interprets this model in a slightly different way, but the model holds pretty much everywhere and works regardless of the license for the code. As a business model, it …

I probably ranted a bit too much on the marketing push that Sun has been trying to make into the Open Source community.
The economical situation isn't really perfect so Sun does deserve some credit too.

Yesterday Techcrunch published an exclusive interview with Jonathan Schwartz on the future of Sun and how Sun will be rescued .

[YouTube Movie Embedded]

More details are here

Our team is looking at how MySQL can be scaled out to improve performance.  Jenny Chen recently posted preliminary numbers on Solaris Nevada that shows scaling out MySQL with amoeba proxy (two instances that divide the duties) can significantly improve MySQL performance when the single MySQL server encountered disk I/O bottleneck.  The workload that was used was DBT2.  She does mention a few limitations in the conclusions of the report.  Check out her blog for the full results.  It should be noted that these findings should also be applicable to other platforms like Linux.

Not everything is going the wrong way on our planet. There are things that are changing for the better! And one of them is South Africa. Just back from a three-day MySQL related trip to Johannesburg and Pretoria, I saw a lot of well-founded hope around me. The hope is related to less crime, less racial tension, and more economic growth. I share the positive vibes and think they’re founded in reality.

I was in South Africa for the yearly Sun partner event in “Sub-Saharan Africa” or SSA for short. SSA is one of the fastest-growing regions within what is known as “Emerging Markets”, which in itself grows faster than Europe, North America or Asia Pacific. And partners are extremely important, as Sun uses solely indirect sales in the region.

I was so impressed by what I saw that I wrote nine blog …