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March’s Inc. column is online: “Don’t tell your star salespeople to take the bus and stay with relatives when they make that call in St. Louis, even though that’s what you did when you started the company.”

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I got first Sun/MySQL Newsletter Today which among other things lead to the site publishing among other things links to various stuff related to Sun and MySQL and among other things - These Benchmarks

This may be great piece of Benchmarks for Sales and Marketing needs as they show sun stuff is so much cooler but they are so unusable if you really want to take informed decision and pick best of the component level.

As you can see Everything - Hardware, Virtualization, OS, Database Server, Web Server are all different.
This pretty much means you have no clue on what is the best on the component level. May be Sun would stack would get even better results on these Xeons ? or is it “Leading Virtualization Software” used with Windows is a crap ? Remembering horrible MySQL performance loss from Xen and VMWARE It is quite possible. You can same the same about other components.

Looking at container configuration - setting up 6 containers on the same box to run different MySQL and Web instances looks highly dubious to me…. at least this is not what you normally do for high performance Web apps which I have no doubt these benchmarks would be shown as.

Another funny thing is even though title speaks about UltraSparc beating Xeon we get configuration with 48 hard drives which is of course far from what you would see in even typical MySQL DB box, Not mentioning Web box which typically would have very little if any hard drives.

There is also another trap which is hardware/software configuration which is chosen. $200K per box and 830W is probably a lot more than commodity hardware most of us would be using. These days you can get 2*Quad Core Xeon box w 32G RAM and 8 2.5″ hard drives for about 10K from Dell. This would have very close CPU power which what this benchmark tends to compare.

My advice to someone looking at marketing benchmarks would be to examine issues carefully and see what the facts are and which sales decision you’re pushed to using this data. Most likely there will be the trick played with the logic.

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Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Zmanda, the open source leader in backup and recovery software, today announced they are partnering to deliver a comprehensive, global data backup and recovery solution for MySQL Enterprise subscribers. A 30-day trial of Zmanda Recovery Manager Enterprise Edition — the first open-source backup and recovery solution designed specifically for MySQL(TM) databases — is available now at www.mysql.com/zrm. Starting April 1, MySQL Enterprise customers will be able to purchase ZRM for MySQL directly from Sun worldwide. Zmanda and Sun have also agreed to joint-selling and co-marketing activities in support of MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database software.

WARNING: This is a speculative post. Caveat emptor.

One of the things that we’d like to address in the next version is line continuations. We know that they tend to annoy many developers who want to break their logical lines across multiple physical lines, and we’ve gotten many requests to get rid of them altogether. Unfortunately, there’s a reason we haven’t just dropped them–they actually are needed in certain scenarios. For example, take the following contrived example:

    Sub Main()
    End _
    Sub

If I remove the line continuation, I’ll now get a compile error because “End” now is the “End” statement, and the Sub looks like it’s trying to start a new subroutine in the middle of the current subroutine. There are quite a few of these syntactic ambiguities sprinkled throughout our grammar, some of which might be quite obscure and unnoticed until someone’s code actually broke. So instead of taking a maximalist approach and trying to remove the line continuation everywhere, we’ve been thinking about a more minimalist approach and looking at where removing the line continuation might be most useful. This produced a much more tractable list of places where we might productively remove the line continuation. In particular:

1. After binary operators in expression contexts. Note that this does not include assignment operators. For example:

   a = b +
       c

2. After the following punctuators: comma (”,”), open parenthesis (”(”), open curly brace (”{”), begin embedded expression in XML (”<%=”). For example:

   Console.WriteLine(
       “{0} {1}”,
       FirstName,
       LastName)
   

3. Before the following punctuators: close parenthesis (”)”), close curly brace (”}”), end embedded expression in XML (”%>”). For example:

   Console.WriteLine(
       “{0} {1}”,
       FirstName,
       LastName
   )

4. After an open angle bracket (”<”) in an attribute context, before a close angle bracket (”>”) in an attribute context, and after a close angle bracket in a non-file-level attribute context (i.e. an attribute that does not specify “Assembly” or “Module”). For example:

       <
           Conditional(“Foo”),
           Conditional(“Bar”)
       >
       <
           Conditional(“Baz”)
       >
       Sub Main()
       End Sub
   

5. Before and after query expression operators. For example:

   Dim ys = From x In xs
            Where x > 5
            Select
               ten = x * 10,
               twenty = x * 20,
               thirty = x * 30

One thing that is not currently on the list is allowing an implicit line continuation after a dot, so you couldn’t break up “a.b.c” implicitly. It’s not that we can’t do dot, just that it’s quite a bit more expensive and problematic for Intellisense. We’d be interested to hear if this is something people really want to/need to do, or if it’s just a nice-to-have.

Are there any other places that we missed that you can think of?

To obtain information about table columns in Microsoft SQL Server, use the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS view.

Yahoo recently published a patent applications that gives some insight on how Yahoo finds and evaluates keyword phrases on web pages. How does this affect the position of your web pages in the search results?

SANTA CLARA, CALIF. — Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has completed the acquisition of MySQL AB, developer of the world’s most popular open source database, for approximately $1 billion in total consideration. Sun also unveiled the immediate availability of MySQL’s complete portfolio of products and enterprise services backed by its 17,000-strong global sales and services organization and its extensive international network of authorized distribution channels. Sun now provides a single, secure choice for customers and developers seeking to put MySQL into deployment on a global basis. Users can get started today with free downloads at dev.mysql.com/downloads.

From my February column in Inc. Magazine: “The bureaucrats in Washington had forgotten Newton’s first law: An object in motion tends to remain in motion.”

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Neil Davidson has posted a preliminary list of some of the speakers for this year’s Business of Software Conference. “So far I’ve lined up (in no particular order) Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink, Richard Stallman, Dharmesh Shah, Jason Fried, Steve Johnson and Paul Kenny.”

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The sixth annual MySQL Conference & Expo, co-presented by MySQL AB and O’Reilly Media, is expected to bring together 2,000 open source and database users from some of the most exciting and fastest-growing companies in the world, as well as from the large and active MySQL community. The conference will take place April 14-17, 2008, in Santa Clara, California.

MySQL AB CEO Marten Mickos and Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO of Sun Microsystems, will kick off the conference with keynotes highlighting the strategic, technical and community synergies between the two companies and their pending merger. Mickos’ annual “State of the Dolphin” address is always thought-provoking for corporate customers, open source developers and MySQL ecosystem partners alike. Schwartz will be speaking on “Open Source: The Heart of the Network Economy” — how free software and open communities like MySQL are the lifeblood of network innovation. Tuesday’s other keynote will be Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, who will speak about distributed computing in the modern Internet era.

To register and learn about early registration discounts, please visit www.mysqlconf.com.