A client of ours is just getting started with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and I wonder as time marches on how popular this cloud solution is going to play out for them and Amazon as a valid/useable service offering. Many times in the past we have encountered off-the-shelf solutions from vendor A based on [...]

With Oracle OpenWorld just around the corner & MySQL Connect already underway I can’t believe yet another year has passed.  This is my third OOW and I must have a following as folks are already reaching out to me on twitter @pythiansimmons (log buffer lady seems to be a handle I can’t seem to shake). [...]

In honor of our fifteenth anniversary, I have assembled a few nostalgic items from our earliest years in business.

On September 7, 1997 I went to the Ottawa U public library to come up with some names for the company Steve Pickard and I wanted to found the next morning. The goal was to choose the company name, register the dot-com, and then go incorporate it. I really felt that I lucked out when I discovered the word Pythian, which means “about the Pythia“. The Pythia was the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece. (Remember that we launched as an Oracle ecosystem services company, and our other practices came afterwards with MySQL launching in 2002 and SQL Server launching in 2005).

I was also delighted that the Pythian Games were also hosted by the Pythia, and those were the most important …

Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just over a month away, and yes, we are organizing the Annual Oracle Bloggers Meetup — one of your top favorite events of OpenWorld.

What: Oracle Bloggers Meetup 2012

When: Wed, 3-Oct-2012, 5:30pm

Where: Main Dining Room, Jillian’s Billiards @ Metreon, 101 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 ( …

This last week was the first time we have this kind event here in Argentina, of course this is a great initiative and a good starting point for next events. My impressions: being the first time that these kind of conferences were done in Argentina I have to say it was great, small but great. [...]

Well day two here at PgEast has drawn to a close and it was another
very informative day.

Today I concentrated on the more common tasks of a Pg DBA so I attended three
talks (four if you count mine) that where rather heavy on the technical side of being a Pg DBA

Keven Kempter drew me back again with his excellent talk on Backup and recovery methods
this time giving some very good advice on how to use and abuse of pg_Dump_all and
PG_restore. He also touched on three different recipes PITR on ProstgreSQL and gave some handy
advice on when and why to use it.

I also caught another Mongo talk this time by Steve Francia it was on the application of Mongo
in a real world web retail store. He presented a very convincing argument for the NoSQL side of things in
the retail realm namely that RDBMS works great when you have but a few similar products
such as books, CDs and …

Hello Birmingham!

It’s past Sunday midnight and I’m stuck in my room in the last couple hours finishing my slides for my masterclass tomorrow. Turns out that I’m presenting the very first session of the conference at 9am. I wish there is a keynote instead so that I could grab one more hour of sleep (it’s going to be deep into the night back home in Canada). Strange that the keynote was moved to Wednesday — I hope UKOUG has really good reason for that!

My two hours masterclass will start at the same time as Tom Kyte’s a-la keynote session — what a competition. On the other hand, there is no other sessions in server technology so I expect that folks without interest of database development will automatically end up in my session. I’m in Hall 5 – quite large room. Is it the second biggest room after the Hall 1?

I will need to work hard to keep the audience… maybe I shouldn’t plan for any breaks to make …

Today marks my last day at Pythian. I have been at Pythian for almost three years. In those three years, Pythian’s already thriving MySQL practice has grown even more. I have worked with big and small clients alike, across many industries, managed a team of up to 4 DBAs, and learned a lot not just about MySQL, but what my goals are in general.

Though I am leaving, everything I said in the blog post I made when I announced I was coming to Pythian still holds true. Pythian is a challenging environment and one I would recommend to anyone who finds their current DBA environment boring that they should come to Pythian and experience what it is like to work here. I had lunch with Paul Vallee yesterday and we even discussed possible future collaborations (hence the title, a joke that I am “forking” off of Pythian). …

Yes, you read the title correctly — there are three editions of MySQL available, according to http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/server.html. Well, that page names two, and then of course there is the community edition….

From the manual page:

MySQL Enterprise Server is available in the following editions:

* MySQL Enterprise Server – Pro is the world’s most popular open source database that enables you to rapidly deliver high performance and scalable Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications.
* MySQL Enterprise Server – Advanced is the most comprehensive edition of MySQL. It provides all the benefits of MySQL Enterprise Server Pro and adds horizontal table and index partitioning for improving the performance and management of VLDBs (Very Large Databases).

How is “horizontal table …

Updated: 29-Jun-2010, 30-Jun-2010.

For me, ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 started on Friday with the ACE Directors briefing. Best practices topic was touched there slightly and I twitted about it. I decided that the feedback deserves a blog post so I’m simply quoting the conversation here. If you have anything to add, you know where to find the comment box.

alexgorbachev:
best practices should be forbidden or rather renamed to blue-prints #ACED …