Why Sun acquired MySQL AB

ACM Queue, Vol. 5. No. 6 Sep/Oct 2007, “A Conversation with Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore“:

“If you have a database sitting on top of a transactional file system, the database is sitting up there being very careful about ordering its writes to the log and being clear about saying when it wants to know this stuff is flushed out. Then beneath it, you’ve got this transactional file system creating transaction groups, putting in a bunch of changes, and then committing those out to disk atomically.

Why not have a blending of the layers where basically the whole back end o the database – the part that isn’t parsing the SQL – participates directly in the transaction groups that ZFS provides, so that consistency is no longer a problem the database has to solve? It can be handled entirely by the storage software below”.

So, Sun has acquired MySQL AB to spreads the adoption of its ZFS file system. Interestingly enough, MySQL has a plugin based architecture, so it’s possible do define more than one data-engine to deal with your data. Saying that we’ll soon see a plugin for MySQL that leverages on ZFS it’s even too easy.

Now that this acquisition is done, I could write some more. About one year ago I heard rumors that Red Hat was considering to buy MySQL AB, and that they stopped at the very last time as they prefer not to put their relationship with Oracle at risk. It’s entirely possibile (but it’s a my own speculation) that Oracle Enterprise Linux came out as a stop signal for Red Hat, which got the message.

Now, some key pieces of a modern Linux installation (Java stack, MySQL database) that Red Hat supports and offers to its customer, are owned by Sun, which became a key player in the Linux market. Another speculation is that, in a one-two years time, Solaris will be the best choice for a “LAMP” architecture, to rename it “SAMP”.

Yes, you can use Ruby on Rails if you want to depart from PHP and avoid Java, but recall to your mind who is behind JRuby, and you got the picture.

Filed under: mysql, oss, mysql, redhat, sun

Mongrel integration for RHEL, Fedora and derivatives: new release

I have made a new release of my script for controlling mongrel instances in RHEL, Fedora and derivatives.

The most important thing is that now you can selectively choose which instances start or stop. To do so, after the start or stop directive, you can add a prefix, each filename starting with that prefix (and ending with .conf, as usual) will be processed.

As an example, if you have these instance description files in your /etc/mongrel:

testsite.internal.example.com.conf
newapp.internal.example.com.conf
newportal.internal.example.com.conf
fileserver.extranet.example.com.conf

a command line as service mongrel start test will start each instance described by a filename like test*conf, so for the above example you’ll start the instance(s) described in testsite.internal.example.com.conf. In the same way:

• service mongrel start new will start instances described in newapp.internal.example.com.conf and newportal.internal.example.com.conf;
• service mongrel stop newapp will stop instance(s) described in newapp.interna.example.com.conf (newportal.etc won’t be touched);

If you don’t specify any prefix, the command will be applied on all files. Note that service mongrel status will ignore any prefix.

Click on the link to download the mongrel service script.

EDITED: The script is available here, but you can better use mod_passenger, which embed a Ruby interpreter in an Apache or NGINX web server.

Filed under: fedora, rhel, ruby on rails, centos, fedora, mongrel, redhat, rubyonrails, scientificlinux