H3 code light=”true”

$ sed "s/foobar/fudbaz/g" 2>&1
$

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetaur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

H4: sourcecode language=”css” gutter=”false”

div.matter {
    width: 450px;
    color: #339;
    background: #ff9;
    font-family: 'Luxi Sans', sans-serif;
    margin: 50px auto 50px auto;
}

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetaur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

H5: python highlight=”5″

#!/usr/bin/env python2
# -*- mode: python; tab-width: 4 -*-
# vim: tw=80 ts=4 sw=4 et:

'''Foo!'''

import string
import os
import sys
from optparse import OptionParser

path = '.'
ERROR = sys.stderr.write

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetaur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

The purpose of this post is to test the feed-based updates to the website. And that’s all.

On Monday August 31^st, Gowlings hosted a debate on open source licenses organized by the Free and Open Source Software Learning Centre (FOSSLC).

The debate was conducted between the proponents of three major Open Source licenses: Mike Milinkovich for the EPL, Matt Asay for the GPL, and David Maxwell for the BSD license.

It was organized into three rounds: first the panelists had ten minutes to sell us their license of choice. Then they were given five minutes to rebut points made by the two other panelists. A final one minute was given to rebut any rebuttal. After those three rounds, the audience—both the live one and that watching the feed—asked their questions.

From what I could estimate, between 50 and 70 people physically attended the event. Andrew reported that between 25 and 50 viewed the live feed. Videos of the event are available on the FOSSLC site.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Mike Hogan, CEO of ScaleDB spoke at the Boston MySQL User Group in September 2009:

ScaleDB is a storage engine for MySQL that delivers shared-disk clustering. It has been described as the Oracle RAC of MySQL. Using ScaleDB, you can scale your cluster by simply adding nodes, without partitioning your data. Each node has full read/write capability, eliminating the need for slaves, while delivering cluster-level load balancing. ScaleDB is looking for additional beta testers, there is a sign up at http://www.scaledb.com.

Slides are online (and downloadable) at http://www.slideshare.net/Sheeri/scale-db-preso-for-boston-my-sql-meetup-92009

Watch the video online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emu2WfNx4KA or directly embedded here:
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Oracle Open World 2009 is just few weeks away and I firmed up my presentation schedule now. I will present three “normal” presentations and couple unconference sessions. I’m arriving in San Francisco few days before the conference (7th of October) get to the Oracle ACE Directors briefing so I’ll spend the first few day in Redwood Shores and then off to Moscone Center.

Before I get to the schedule, if you want to catch up with me during OOW — tweet me @alexgorbachev. You are likely to see me in the OTN Lounge or in “The Cave” if you know what I’m talking about.

Here is a quick summary of my presentations:

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Welcome to the 162^nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Oracle

The big news this week came was Oracle’s unveiling the OLTP Oracle Database Machine & Exadata v2, as reported by Alex Gorbachev.

Kevin Closson covered it, of course: Oracle Drops Exadata In Favor of Sun FlashFire Based OLTP Database Machine?, and he and his readers kick it around in a diverting way.

The dbaStreet blog offered their very thorough HOWTO, 11gR2 rac installation on 64 bit Linux step by step.

Iggy Fernandez was questioning Method R, in an excellent interview with Cary Millsap.

If that’s not enough “R” for you, there’s another item in the “Q” — Cary himself on the importance of diagnosing before resolving.

The ORACLE-BASE Blog observed that the RELIES ON clause is no more. To which Tom Kyte responded, Read the rest of this entry . . .

One of the customers (actually a prospect) here in Australia asked me about minimal Oracle licensing on a quarter rack database machine. This prompted a thought of using Oracle Standard Edition instead of full blown Enterprise Edition with bunch of options.

Before even going into possibility of using Oracle SE for the database machine, let’s see if we even want to.

Why Oracle Standard Edition?

If the environment is data warehouse then it’s extremely unlikely that Standard Edition will cut it. Lack of many feature make it non-feasible to use for data warehousing — no partitioning licensing, no parallel query, and dozens more.

Oracle Standard Edition might fit OLTP environments depending on the application design and data volumes. Since Database Machine is made to store large amounts of data, we assume that it makes financial sense to run databases that are quite large. Oracle SE lacks some critical features in order to successfully manage VLDB (Very Large Databases). It’s not impossible and depends a lot on the presence of outage windows, how active is the development life-cycle, availability requirements and etc.

Where Standard Edition seems to fit nicely is Read the rest of this entry . . .

Now that I, apparently successfully, predicted OLTP Database Machine on Sun hardware, I had to wake up before 6AM in Sydney to tune into Larry’s joined with Sun Microsystems webcast (just to learn that he is late, by the way – 8 minutes so far…). As the follow up post’s comments show, people are interested in the role of SPARC platform in the new OLTP Oracle Database Machine (turns our there is no role for SPARC as of now).

Waiting… Waiting… ah here it comes — yachts, BMW (yeah love it as well) and Larry walks in — he starts by mentioning lo-o-o-ong partnership with Sun and announced –
“Oracle Exadata version 2 – hardware by Sun and software by Oracle.” Funny, I heard exactly the same sitting at the Oracle Open World last year but with HP. He then proceeds — “It is the *First* Database Machine that does OLTP. All the other machines, Teradata, Netezza, etc. are designed just for data warehousing.”

Interesting that Larry’s speech was very harsh on competition and where it comes to data warehousing, it’s Netezza and Teradata, while in hardware it’s IBM. I need to count how many times Larry said “better/cheaper/faster than IBM” during his announcement.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

On the 23^rd of June 2008, I wrote a note saying that I had just joined Pythian. Today I am posting a similar, but different, note saying that as of the last of September, I will no longer be employed by Pythian, the time has come to look for new challenges. Although I am sad to leave, I do look forward to the future and what it may hold for me.

I wanted to take this moment to thank Pythian for having me, for having such great co-workers whom I count myself lucky to have worked with. I also want to give a special thanks to Augusto for taking care of me when I first joined, and showing me around how the company works. I must thank Paul as well—he is an exceptional person to work with, and I’ve come to value his opinion and expertise very highly.

I will still be around. I will be working with MySQL, and I will be active (probably even more than currently) in blogging, in conferences, and in the MySQL community—so you have not seen the last of me. It’s been a great time so far, and I intend to make even more of it in the future, to involve myself much more than I have done so far.

As a closing note, I want to address a concern I had in that very first blogpost, and that was, if it’s cold in Canada in July—and I can tell you that it is! I had to wear a jacket (even during the day!). I also fondly remember some days talking to the team from here in Malta, and someone reported a temperature -23C, and I look outside and it’s +19, so I guess that comparing Ottawa with Malta may not be the easiest, nor the most fair, comparison. It’s like poutine versus pastizzi!

Thanks, and we will be in touch. I hope to see you all around the world and to cross paths again! As we say in Maltese, Narak iktar tard!

In line with my prediction from few days ago, Larry Ellison is announcing the new Database Machine — the new version is targeting OLTP workloads and is based on Sun hardware.

Looks like I just got the date wrong. Oh well, now is the announcement, hype and demo is at the Oracle Open World and shipments are to start upon Oracle-Sun acquisition completion.

So what’s new in Exadata that I didn’t mention in the previous blog post? Ah, right — Sun FlashFire technology. It’s no surprise that the new OLTP version of Database Machine is boosting the IOPS (IO’s per second) capacity by introducing the flash drives. Nothing prevented Oracle to place flash disks into the original Exadata, not from technology perspective.
Read the rest of this entry . . .