I'm off to do some MySQL training in Asia for the rest of the month. One week in Singapore, one week (and the weekend) in Bangalore.

Correction, Asia and the Emerging Markets. Apparently thanks to phenomenal growth, China and India have left Asia in the last few years (in our corporate parlance).

Always good to check flight status before you head to the airport, even (especially?) at 7am when you just checked 6 hours before. I now have 5 extra hours in beautiful John F Kennedy Airport, terminal 7. I haven't seen the new JetBlue terminal, but this one almost makes JFK feel like a major international airport.

Cathay Pacific seems a fine airline, though perhaps …

At OSCON, Sun had a huge booth. I mentioned that before, and I was part of the show. During booth opening hours, members of all Sun communities (Open Solaris, Glassfish, OpenJDK, MySQL) addressed the audience with technical presentations.

I was very impressed by these two booklets that were given away to whomever wanted them. They are short, well written, with the sort of practical information that a beginner wants to find immediately.

It's nice to hold them, but books are heavy, especially if you are traveling 6,000 miles with hand luggage only. So it's very nice to find them in the OpenSolaris site.

• Getting started with OpenSolaris 2008.05
• …

Brian Aker's Drizzle post was the most interesting news to emerge during OSCON 2008. In case you have been on vacation, Drizzle is a stripped down version of MySQL for horizontally scaled web applications and Cloud Computing. Full-blown SQL databases are often overkill here, a point of view espoused by this blog among others.

It's easy to get excited about Drizzle. Brian, Monty, and others define the problem space very clearly and list some intriguing feature ideas on the Drizzle wiki. Just one example: sharding across multiple nodes, which is key to scaling massive reads and writes. From a technical perspective, it sounds cool.

Still, there's a dark side for …

Thanks to Glynn for pointing me to the right thread on opensolaris.org (in a comment on my Good adventures with OpenSolaris post). The package verification thingy (pkg verify -v -f SUNWfirefox) did actually throw an error (indicating some sort of problem). So that’s pretty neat. The fact that it got into trouble in the first place isn’t good, but corruption detection is the next best thing.

I still occationally hit the bug in VirtualBox where if you have 127.0.0.1 in your resolv.conf on your host (e.g. running a local caching nameserver), VirtualBox passes this through to the guest, so the guest tries to use the guest 127.0.0.1 as a nameserver - this usually doesn’t work so well.

The good news is, Firefox now works in my OpenSolaris VM.

The bad news is that even though I’ve gone and …

I just got informed that two of my session proposals for DrupalCon 2008 got accepted - I will be speaking about the following topics there:

• MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices
• High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo

The second talk will be held in cooperation with Jakub Suchy, who will take over the practical demo. Sun Microsystems is a Gold …

First of all, thanks to everyone who commented on my previous OpenSolaris entry (which wasn’t really positive at all).

I recently tried again - this time starting with an ISO of build 93. I’d recommend completely ignoring the 2008.05 release and going straight for the build 93 image.

Installed easily in VirtualBox, adding the VirtualBox extensions was easy. Select “Devices -> Install Guest Additions” in the VirtualBox menu, then when logged into the OpenSolaris install, do the following:

su

pkgadd -d /media/VBOXADDITIONS_1.6.0_30421/VBoxSolarisAdditions.pkg

(you then say yes, i really do want to install it. rather obvious. I had to do this step again after the “pkg image-update” below though). Just logging out and then back in again gets you all the awesomeness you’d expect from running other guests (such as that system released by a large corporation in Redmond).

The “pkg …

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to explain the power-efficeincy analysis proess, power-efficiency issues and solutions in MySQL database server as an example to help identify the right tools and procedures that support the development of energy-efficient application.

Analysis Process

The remainder of the document covers the detail information on each of the above procedures 

Test Setup And MySQL Configurations

HW Installation:

This MySQL event with Kaj Arno was well received. Kaj talked about the product, from different aspects, both technical and business with bit of short history, how the community could contribute, how safe MySQL at the hands of Sun, etc. It was very engaging and informative.

In his typical style of localising presentations beyond english , he started the presentations with speaking couple of sentences in few local languages: Kannada, Tamil and Hindi. The audiences were pleasantly surprised and this received huge applause.

I talked about specifically how to contribute code to MySQL-- how to get started with a focus to contribute code. I put lots of urls through out the presentation and I promised to make the slides available through my blog. Here is the slides uploaded to slideshare.net :

…

I was with a customer last week, who leads technology and operations for one of the world's largest companies. We were talking through his priorities for the upcoming year, and on a page filled with various traditional priorities (consolidation, energy management, disaster recovery, regulatory compliance) were two interesting words.

"Open Source."

I asked what that meant, why it was there. He said they'd done an audit of the firm's development activities, and found an overwhelming number ("hundreds") of open source

projects that had been completed behind the scenes, beyond management's oversight. The projects were designed to solve problems deemed too expensive or difficult to solve with proprietary technologies - from meeting a tough budget, to automating a new process. And rather than fight the trend, they figured it was …

This MySQL event with Kaj Arno was well received. Kaj talked about the product, from different aspects, both technical and business with bit of short history, how the community could contribute, how safe MySQL at the hands of Sun, etc. It was very engaging and informative.

In his typical style of localising presentations beyond english , he started the presentations with speaking couple of sentences in few local languages: Kannada, Tamil and Hindi. The audiences were pleasantly surprised and this received huge applause.

I talked about specifically how to contribute code to MySQL-- how to get started with a focus to contribute code. I put lots of urls through out the presentation and I promised to make the slides available through my blog. Here is the slides uploaded to slideshare.net :

…