Join 15,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. 1. MySQL does not compete with Oracle It’s a myth that MySQL somehow poses a threat to Oracle. Oracle’s customers tend to be large enterprises running apps like e-business suite. These are certified to run on Oracle, and further they sit close to finance. MySQL […]

I am currently working with a large customer and I am involved with servers located in two data centers, one with Solaris servers and the other one with Linux servers. The Solaris side is cleverly setup using zones and ZFS and this provides a very low virtualization overhead. I learned quite a lot about these technologies while looking at this, thanks to Corey Mosher.

On the Linux side, we recently deployed a pair on servers for backup purpose, boxes with 64 300GB SAS drives, 3 raid controllers and 192GB of RAM. These servers will run a few slave instances each of production database servers and will perform the backups.  The write load is not excessive so a single server can easily handle the write load of all the MySQL instances.  The original idea was to configure them with raid-10 + LVM, making sure to …

Any secure system needs to be configured correctly to best serve the needs of users and the business. Previously, I've covered AppArmor and MySQL, and more recently SELinux and MySQL. To round out a healthy trio on running MySQL in environments with mandatory access control, Glenn Faden has written a post on Oracle Solaris Extended Policy and MySQL.

Extended Policy is a feature of Solaris that allows you to assign named privileges on resources—such as ports and files—to services. I'm not hugely familiar with Extended Policy (or Solaris for that matter), but according to Glenn it's similar to SELinux …

Data is the currency of today’s web, mobile, social, enterprise and cloud applications. Ensuring data is always available is a top priority for any organization – minutes of downtime will result in significant loss of revenue and reputation.

There is not a “one size fits all” approach to delivering High Availability (HA). Unique application attributes, business requirements, operational capabilities and legacy infrastructure can all influence HA technology selection. And then technology is only one element in delivering HA – “People and Processes” are just as critical as the technology itself.

For this reason, MySQL Enterprise Edition is available supporting a range of HA solutions, fully certified and supported by Oracle. MySQL Enterprise HA is …

Topics for this podcast:

*Hadoop v1.0 and year ahead
*Oracle-Cloudera deal for more Hadoop
*Oracle’s ‘Sun spot’ with Solaris
*Open Source M&A outlook for 2012
*Our new MySQL/NoSQL/NewSQL survey

iTunes or direct download (28:49, 4.9MB)

The installation through the Solaris repository is as simple as typing:

$ pkg install mysql-50

to obtain MySQL 5.0.91 (status Jan 18, 2012) or click on this link to launch the interactive installer.

$ pkg install mysql-51

to obtain MySQL 5.1.37 (status Jan. 18, 2012) or click on this link to launch the interactive installer.

Previously, I’ve called out years for non-desktop Linux in 2008, Linux in both the low and high-ends of the market in 2009, ‘hidden’ Linux in 2010 and last year, cloud computing in 2011. For 2012, I see continued growth, prevalence, innovation and impact from Linux, thus leading to a 2012 that is dominated by Linux.

I expect to see nothing but continued strength for Linux and …

using one of the two databases

• Oracle 11.2.0.3
• MaxDB 7.8.2.26 

with SAP Kernel 7.20_ext are supported on Solaris 11. The details are documented in the SAP note 1643799 (access for SAP customers only).

Lots of great energy, events, presentations and receptions going on at Oracle Open World. Two very key receptions are happening Tuesday night. The Solaris Family Reunion reception and the MySQL reception. The Solaris reunion reception info is: http://smartos.eventbrite.com/ The MySQL … Continue reading →

Last week we concluded our first Oracle Technology Network Sys Admin Day in Sacramento (CA). Well, it was actually the second Sys Admin Day, but the first one that had two parallel tracks of sessions about both Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris.

I helped preparing for the event by creating the Linux lab handbook as well as the VirtualBox appliance of Oracle Linux 6.1 that was used for the exercises. Unfortunately I could not be there in person, but it would have been pointless for me to go on an intercontinental flight just for one day.

From the feedback we've received so far, the attendees really enjoyed the event and were positively surprised about the depth and quality of the practical hands-on lab sessions.

If you've missed the first one and happen to live …