In this blog I'm sharing the results of a series of tests designed to explore the impact of various MySQL and, in particular, InnoDB tunables. Performance engineers from Sun have previously blogged on this subject - the main difference in this case is that these latest tests were based on Linux rather than Solaris.

It's worth noting that MySQL throughput doesn't scale linearly as you add large numbers of CPUs. This hasn't been a big issue to most users, since there are ways of deploying MySQL successfully on systems with only modest CPU counts. Technologies that are readily available and widely deployed include replication, which allows horizontal scale-out using query slaves, and memcached, which is very effective at reducing the load on a MySQL server. That said, scalability is likely to become more important as people increasingly deploy systems with quad-core processors, with the result that even two processor systems will need to …

In this blog I'm sharing the results of a series of tests designed to explore the impact of various MySQL and, in particular, InnoDB tunables. Performance engineers from Sun have previously blogged on this subject - the main difference in this case is that these latest tests were based on Linux rather than Solaris.

It's worth noting that MySQL throughput doesn't scale linearly as you add large numbers of CPUs. This hasn't been a big issue to most users, since there are ways of deploying MySQL successfully on systems with only modest CPU counts. Technologies that are readily available and widely deployed include replication, which allows horizontal scale-out using query slaves, and memcached, which is very effective at reducing the load on a MySQL server. That said, scalability is likely to become more important as people increasingly deploy systems with quad-core processors, with the result that even two processor systems will need to …

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We released our official earnings on Thursday last week, after pre-announcing the news one week prior alongside the announcement of our intent to acquire MySQL.

Our second quarter financial announcement came down to this: we doubled our profitability compared to a year ago, with $260 million in net income on revenues of $3.6 billion, while generating $336 million in cash from operations. We also repurchased $750 million of our own shares within the quarter, and reaffirmed our guidance for the full year of low to mid …

Given the timing of my recent blog, Are Proprietary Databases Doomed?, I've been asked if I knew in advance about Sun's recent MySQL acquisition. Not at all! I was just as surprised and delighted as most others in the industry when I saw the news.

In the blog I outlined counter strategies that proprietary database companies might use to respond to the rise of Open Source Databases (OSDBs). One strategy was acqusition and I noted that MySQL, being privately held, was probably the most vulnerable.

The good news is that MySQL is no longer vulnerable. Sun has an unparalleled commitment to open source. No other organization has …

Given the timing of my recent blog, Are Proprietary Databases Doomed?, I've been asked if I knew in advance about Sun's recent MySQL acquisition. Not at all! I was just as surprised and delighted as most others in the industry when I saw the news.

In the blog I outlined counter strategies that proprietary database companies might use to respond to the rise of Open Source Databases (OSDBs). One strategy was acqusition and I noted that MySQL, being privately held, was probably the most vulnerable.

The good news is that MySQL is no longer vulnerable. Sun has an unparalleled commitment to open source. No other organization has …

Given the timing of my recent blog, Are Proprietary Databases Doomed?, I've been asked if I knew in advance about Sun's recent MySQL acquisition. Not at all! I was just as surprised and delighted as most others in the industry when I saw the news.

In the blog I outlined counter strategies that proprietary database companies might use to respond to the rise of Open Source Databases (OSDBs). One strategy was acqusition and I noted that MySQL, being privately held, was probably the most vulnerable.

The good news is that MySQL is no longer vulnerable. Sun has an unparalleled commitment to open source. No other organization has …

We announced big news today - our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we're acquiring MySQL AB.

If you're interested in the financial details for the quarter, tune in to our conference call (see details on sun.com) today - we'll obviously have more to say as we release our formal results on January 24th.

But the biggest news of the day is... we're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you're an industry insider, you'll know what that means - we're acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world's most popular open source database.

You'll recall I wrote about a customer event a few weeks ago, at which some of the …

Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs) have been quietly increasing their penetration, but until recently they have lacked the capabilities to seriously threaten proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

All that has changed. OSDBs now boast the necessary features and robustness to support commercial databases hundreds of Gigabytes in size. And a growing trickle of competitive benchmark results shows them …

Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs) have been quietly increasing their penetration, but until recently they have lacked the capabilities to seriously threaten proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

All that has changed. OSDBs now boast the necessary features and robustness to support commercial databases hundreds of Gigabytes in size. And a growing trickle of competitive benchmark results shows them …

Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs) have been quietly increasing their penetration, but until recently they have lacked the capabilities to seriously threaten proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

All that has changed. OSDBs now boast the necessary features and robustness to support commercial databases hundreds of Gigabytes in size. And a growing trickle of competitive benchmark results shows them …