I’m sure by now you would have read the great news that is Sun Microsystems acquisition of MySQL!

Sun have been forging ahead in the Open Source world with OpenSolaris, an Operating System that scales to Enterprise proportions and is an ideal host for the number one Open Source Database Server that is MySQL.

Whether this will have any impact on the MySQL Linux / FreeBSD / Windows offerings is something I am sure the community will be watching closely, but in my experience Java runs much faster on Solaris as it can take advantage of the MultiThreading libraries that help Solaris set those performance records.
Don’t forget, it was not that long ago that combined with Sun hardware MySQL was able to set it’s own world records!.

With that in mind it should only be a matter of time before we will begin to see the fruits of Sun / MySQL’s labour and I don’t know about you but I can’t wait!.

How this move will affect the future of other database servers such as PostgreSQL and Oracle I cannot begin to imagine.
Personally I never understood how Oracle devoted so much attention to Linux when the Oracle server (and App servers) have such a dependency on Java (which as I say always works better running under Solaris )?
As for PostgreSQL, Sun have always endorsed PostgreSQL on Solaris, will we see this focus switch to MySQL in the near future?.

One thing is for certain, MySQL combined with Solaris makes for one world class package that is going to be hard to beat!!.

I know it’s a little late, but as this is my first post of 2008 I wanted to start on a high!

After receiving my copy of the MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA book at Christmas, I spent an hour or so each day with my head engrossed in MySQL Cluster technology, so much so that my goal of reading every Perl book I own (cover to cover) has been somewhat put on hold…

The book was much smaller than I expected, in both physical size and pages (266) which was not a bad thing as I could carry it around if needed, and each chapter could be read within 15-20 minutes, just about right for my attention span

I booked the exam a couple of weeks ago thinking I might need some incentive to fully digest MySQL Cluster details. I need not have worried, the book provides a great introduction to MySQL Cluster in easy-to-read chapters bringing you up to speed in no time, much more entertaining than the reference manual!

The exam itself consisted of 70 questions and on this occasion ended with a prompt asking to print to a file……argghhh……I suddenly got worried that the exam had crashed and that all my answers were lost?!, after all you normally get an instant result on screen and a printed record. I knew I should have used my regular testing centre Print -> File -> USB Stick -> another PC -> Adobe Distiller -> Print and I finally got the result - Passed - Phew!.

So the holidays are over and I have more time to focus on the fun stuff, like upgrading this site to the latest version of WordPress or adding GnuPG based encryption to AuthStor. If history is anything to go by the next few months are bound to see a spate of version bumps. I am personally looking forward to FreeBSD 7.0!

You never know, I might even find time to finish reading those Perl books before Perl 6 is complete