It's now been 12 months since Oracle absorbed Sun. A lot has happened in that time, and the good news is that Sun's technology has a new lease on life. Reviewing my blog entries over the last 2 or 3 years, most of them were focussed on MySQL and T-series systems. Lots of good things are happening with both product lines.

As for me, I've been working on SPARC Supercluster. More on this topic later... ;-)
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Every March we have a lot of bug reports and support issues about Daylight Saving Time changes.

General rule here is to remember 1 hour at March, 27 night will be missed in most of European countries: for example in Moscow after 01:59:59 next time will be 03:00:00. And yes, I am too late for America =)

MySQL handles such timestamps properly, therefore expect no such time and date will be inserted in STRICT mode and next valid date will be inserted for not existent time in forgiving mode. For Moscow '2011-03-27 03:00:00' will be inserted if you try to insert timestamps in '2011-03-27 02:00:01' - '2011-03-27 02:59:59' range.

You can see how Europe switch to DST at http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/europe-starts-dst-2011.html Please note some countries such as Turkey have special rules for year 2011.

If you use timezones with special rules for this year make sure your operating system zoneinfo information is up to date, then reload MySQL time_zone* tables using mysql_tzinfo_to_sql utility and finally restart MySQL server. You can read about mysql_tzinfo_to_sql at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysql-tzinfo-to-sql.html

Have a nice spring!

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On September 8, 2010 Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3

Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3, built on the solid foundation of Oracle Solaris, offers the 
most extensive Oracle enterprise High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions for the 
largest portfolio of mission-critical applications.

Integrated and thoroughly tested with Oracle's Sun servers, storage, connectivity 
solutions and Solaris 10 features, Oracle Solaris Cluster is now qualified with Solaris 
Trusted Extensions, supports Infiniband for general networking or storage usage, and can 
be deployed with Oracle Unified Storage in Campus Cluster configurations. It extends its 
applications support to new Oracle applications such as Oracle Business Intelligence, 
PeopleSoft, TimesTen, and MySQL Cluster.

The single, integrated HA and DR solution enables multi-tier deployments in virtualized 
environments. In this release, Oracle Solaris Containers clusters supports even more 
configurations including additional applications (Oracle WebLogic Server, Siebel CRM, and 
more) and integration with Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition.


Benefits:

    * Delivers unrivaled High Availability on Oracle Solaris OS for much faster failure 
detection and recovery

    * Enables cost-savings without performance compromise by integrating seamlessly with 
Oracle Solaris Containers for applications and databases consolidation

    * Out of the box support for a wide selection of applications

    * Certified with a broad range of storage arrays from Oracle and third parties on 
SPARC and x86 platforms


New features:

-------------

Availability:

- Active Monitoring of Storage Resources

- Flexible load distribution of application services



Virtualization:

- Extended Oracle Solaris Containers cluster support:

* NAS, GFS, RDSV1

* More applications : Oracle WebLogic Server, OBIEE, MySQL cluster,

 PeopleSoft, TimesTen



Hardware Integration:

- InfiniBand on public network and as storage connectivity



Application Integration

- New agents: Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition,

 PeopleSoft Enterprise, MySQL cluster, TimesTen

- Updates on Oracle E-Business Suite, WebLogic Server, MySQL, SAP

- Oracle 11gR2 database and RAC support


Disaster Recovery

- Containers cluster  with Geographic Edition

- Sun Unified Storage 7xxxx in campus cluster


Security

- Solaris Trusted Extensions



Ease of use

- Wizards for ASM configurations set-up

- GUI and CLI performance improvements

- Power Management User interface

- Node rename



Compatibility information

--------------------------

Supported Solaris release: Solaris 10 10/09, Solaris 10 9/10



Media Kit and downloads

-----------------------------------

Software is available through

- OTN (for evaluation and tests)

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris-cluster/downloads/index.html


- e-delivery (for production use - requires purchase of commercial license)

http://edelivery.oracle.com

Select Product Pack:  Oracle Solaris

From results pick:  Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 Media Pack


Documentation

---------------------

* Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 Documentation Center:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/documentation/solaris-cluster-33-192999.html


* Release Notes Information:

http://wikis.sun.com/display/SunCluster/Release+Notes+Information

The Release Notes documents on this site are regularly updated with new

documentation to support new features, hardware qualifications, bug

workarounds, and other late-breaking information. Check the Release

Notes or Release Notes Supplement for your release before installing the

cluster or performing any maintenance.



Web site

----------------

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris-cluster/overview/index.html

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Here's your weekly helping of developer info:

The sudden but inevitable Apple news

Several pieces of news on the Apple front this week. First up: the Gold Master seed (which either sounds like something you plant to get nice apples, or something out of a bad SF eugenics novel) for iOS 4.2 dropped, signaling the green light for iPad/iPhone/iPod developers to submit 4.2-ready applications to the App Store. Traditionally, the pre-release to developers is followed about a week later by the general release, and is identical.

Meanwhile, continuing to muddy the waters about what is and isn't allowed on the iPhone, Adobe gave a sneak peak of a tool that converts Flash movies into standard HTML5 movies, thus making them viewable on iOS devices (and HTML5 browsers without Flash installed.)

And evidently the iPhone will be coming to Verizon in 2011. I'm sure you've already heard about it, I just didn't want to be the last journalist on the planet to report it. Is there such a thing as a secret at Apple anymore? At this point, if Apple had been in charge of the D-Day invasion, the Germans would have been waiting on the beach with gift baskets.

Motivations behind Oracle's Sun acquisition get clearer

So far this year, Oracle has sued Google over Java on the Android and pretty much killed off OpenSolaris. So what's next for Larry & Co.?

The answer came when 33 contributors from the OpenOffice project jumped ship for LibreOffice. Evidently, Oracle appeared to have little interest in putting much effort into OpenOffice. Decoding the corporate-speak from Oracle's PR department, the reaction to the defections so far might best be summed up as "Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out."

As former Sun projects acquired by Oracle drop like flies, it becomes possible to deduce what Oracle really bought Sun for simply by listing what's left: mainly MySQL and Sun's hardware business. Bets, anyone?

Is IE slowly heading toward minority status?

No one browser can take the credit, but Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues to slowly lose traffic share to Firefox, Chrome, and the other hungry young punks nipping at its heals. Now down to 59.25 percent of total browser usage, IE is a far cry from the heady days of 90-plus percent dominance. For all you AJAX and HTML5 developers out there, it should serve as a signal that the days of "This website requires Internet Explorer" need to be laid to rest for good, unless you like alienating 40 percent of your potential user base.

Another week, another platform

So, you say that developing for OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS, J2ME, HTML5 and Android isn't enough diversity to keep your mind occupied. Now you can add Chrome OS to that list. Vendors will soon release an onslaught of Chrome-powered netbooks, smartbooks and notebooks. Conventional wisdom is that the world doesn't need another notebook operating system, but conventional wisdom said the same thing about Android, and now everybody laughs at him at the water cooler at work. In other words, ignore Google at your peril.

That's it for this week. Suggestions are always welcome, so please send tips or news here.

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After four years working with the MySQL team, under three different companies, it's time for me to pursue a new career. Tomorrow is my last working day at Oracle. (Working? But it's Sunday! So, ehm, kind of, anyway, you got the point.) You may look at my personal blog in the coming days to know what I am going to do next.

Right now, I would like to just say thank you to all my colleagues in the MySQL Team, and to all the community people with whom I have shared the wonderful experience of these four years.

And also, thanks to all the ones who have offered me a job. Really. There were many offers. I am sorry I could not take them all and I had to choose one in the end, but thanks, my friends, for believing in me.

See you around!

P.S.: This blog will not be updated anymore.

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I’d meant to finish writing this way back in July… but I failed at that. Now is a good time to talk about Rookie-O as my again new colleague Andrew Hutchings (Buy his and Sergei’s book on MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development!) just went through the same thing (but in London instead of Hong Kong) given by the same trainer (Hi Eddie!).

Rackspace is the second employer I’ve had that has some kind of new hire training (the first being Sun). I am, of course, not quite counting Salmiakki as new-hire training for MySQL (although I probably should). To quote from the Wikipedia article: “Although the rumor of the heart attack was a hoax, the drink may still cause harm. The strong flavor almost completely masks the presence of ethanol, and the drinker may not realize he is consuming a drink almost 40% alcohol by volume (80-proof), leading to possible alcohol poisoning.” A promising introduction to the company.

I could possibly say something about the Sun New-Hire training… but I’m just trying to find something positive to say – and I can’t. I got a bit of hacking done? Seriously.

Actually coordinating a time to attend a Rookie-O (Rookie Orientation, the Rackspace name for new hire training) was rather tricky. There was one right before the MySQL User Conference back in April (not the best of timing), one during an upcoming team meeting (again, not ideal) and one that got organised in the middle of everything for the office in Hong Kong. So, I headed to Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong office is relatively new (late 2008) and there were people there who hadn’t gone through the standard Rackspace Rookie-O (Orientation).

It was rather cool to hang out with other people who worked for the company – and in totally different areas than I do. I did get a better understanding for how the rest of the company operates and the people involved. The training itself was useful and substantially less geared towards not-my-job than Sun’s was.

The good news is that Andrew thought it was useful too. Pretty impressed so far.

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Translation of "Methods for searching errors in SQL application" just finished, epilogue is at http://sql-error.microbecal.com/en/concl.html

It contains list of methods which had been discussed.

Epilogue

Finally I'd like to repeat methods which we discussed. Unfortunately
there are several problems left. I will be glad to know your opinion
about what else to descuss. I will be waiting your notes at sveta_dot_smirnova_at_oracle_dot_com or sveta_at_js-client_dot_com

List of methods.

...

Rest of the text is here

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Translation of appendix about methods of copying and moving MySQL databases just published. This is just short overview of possible methods and does not pretend to be detailed guide. It starts as:

Appendix. Methods of copying and moving of MySQL databases.

In this application I'd like to shortly discuss general methods of backup and moving of mySQL databases.

Easier and recommended way of data moving is mysqldump utility. You can copy data with help of following command:

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Welcome to Log Buffer. The weekly roundup of posts, and news of what’s happening in the database world.

At Pythian, we’re pretty much recovered from a hectic Oracle OpenWorld 2010, and I’m no longer an OOW virgin. What an experience! I had the pleasure of meeting many of you Log Buffer readers and contributors at the Annual Blogger’s Meetup at Jillian’s. Great to put faces to names. And I now officially feel like “Vanessa from Log Buffer”, as many of your t-shirts will show.

Many thanks to Marc Fielding for providing the hot items for this week’s post, in Log Buffer #203. Enjoy.

The hubdub from OOW10 continues:

Opinions on the newly announced Exalogic are starting to form. Alex Williams on Read Write Cloud points out why Exalogic is not an elastic cloud. David Dorf provides his perspective for Exalogic’s application to the retail industry as a means to simplifying infrastructure, in conjunction with Exadata. Lorraine Lawson tries to clear up the confusion around “what exactly is Exalogic”.

Floyd Teter, on ORCLville provides his thoughts on the show, and Ray Wang provides good final wrapup notes, OOW from an insider’s perspective.

Congratulations to Asif Momen of The Momen Blog, who won the t-shirt signature contest. The Apple TV meetup contest winners will be announced on Monday, and listed in next Friday’s Log Buffer.

A litigous Oracle is very different from the old Sun. Aside from the well-publicized Google Android lawsuits this week Oracle is suing Micron, Samsung and other-chip makers for pricing fixing.

Katherine Noyes reports on the ‘Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel’.

Greg Rhan, from Structured Data gives a good overview of the newly released Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 & X2-8 for those who missed it. Referenced is Alex Gorbachev’s tidy table of hardware components, comparing Exadata V2, X2-2 & X2-8.

Moving away from Oracle, in the MySQL world:

Jayant Kumar experiments with MySQL/Postgres speed tests in a part 1 and part 2 post series.

MySQL cluster benchmarks appear on Johan Andersson’s Cluster and HA blog.

Andrew Hutchings, LinuxJedi, writes a drizzle migration article on his new blog, since joining Rackspace as a Drizzle developer.

Guiseppe Maxia, the Data Charmer, highlights a funny recipe to convert an IP address into an integer in order to use it as a server-ID, and then offers a better solution.

In SQL Server news, SP2 is out, promising tighter integration with Sharepoint.

Pinal Dave tells how to get query running session on SQLauthority.com.

Microsoft MVP Sean McCowan shows DBAs how to use PowerShell to Administer SQL Server 2008, a good thing to know, in his, and the “Scripting Guy’s” opinion. Vijay Patel talks about partitioning.

Robert Catteral focuses on catalogue statistics as a way to improve query performance in a DB2 for z/OS environment.

Now that I know many of you, I’ll be chasing you down personally to host an edition of Log Buffer. Seriously, to keep the tradition alive, we need more than the voice of “Vanessa Log Buffer”. Please connect to the Log Buffer coordinator (me), if you’re interested.

Have a great weekend.

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Translation of summary of last part, "Techniques, used for debugging of Production applications" just published. This is almost end, only appendix about backup techniques and epilogue left.

Summary.

In the last chapter we discussed methods of testing problems which can happen only on production server. Lets repeat them:

Method #25: if something unexpected happens check error log first.


Method #26: turn InnoDB Monitor to on to have information about all InnoDB transactions in the error log file.


Method #27: use slow query log to find all slow queries.


Method #28: use MySQL Sandbox for fast and convenient testing of your application using several versions of MySQL server.


Method #29: use part of data when work with queries which return wrong results from huge tables.

Original text is here

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