Dibbler's Net

http://www.crypticide.com/dropsafe/article/2461

So I too found the recent Internet fluff on MySQL and enterprise only features being added since Sun bought the product to be an interesting topic.
IE:
www.techspot.com

The basic rumor was that with the next release of MySQL there would be non-GPL backup features and this was the warning shot that Sun was close sourcing the product and it was time to jump ship. Then something amazing happened, a useful comment was found in the comments of the story on Slashdot (which has a s/n ratio of 1/1000). The former CEO of MySQL posted what the real story was and that really people are in a panic over nothing. No reason to drop MySQL and change to something else. This also speaks to the ideas that never believe something you read just because 20 news sites carry it. This is one of the downfalls of the Internet News and how one story that is inaccurate can become very pervasive when people care about the subject.

Please read the link and become well informed. Opensource is alive and well in MySQL and expect Sun will keep it that way.

D~

ZFS and Boot -http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/boot/

Normally I am not wowed by File systems. ufs has just worked forever. Most of the time I end up using vxfs because veritas is somehow involved, the added bonus there is the shared file access and other veritas features. With Sun getting into the clustering game more and more and now they are working the filesystem game. First they bought their way into QFS with the storagetek buy. QFS if you haven’t played with it is a really slick shared filesystem. Having used it with some policy based file systems QFS is really nice. The 4,000$ per system can make it a bit costly but still worlds cheaper than veritas. Now along comes ZFS, with things like massive partition sizes, the new promise of no fsck’ing and a promise that someday ZFS and QFS will merge making a really robust file system.

So the early adopters have been playing with ZFS and I really like it. The one draw back has been no boot support for a ZFS filesystem. Well that is now the fast up and comer and hopefully now that it is in opensolaris will soon make it into Solaris 10 sparc builds.

So check out the developer page and if you haven’t used ZFS yet give it a try.

D~

So a while back Symantec bought Veritas. Like many other mergers this has led to in my opinion worse support, and delayed product development. For a long time the standard for System Clustering and Failover was Veritas Clustering Tools. Even with the Symantec buyout and the problems that caused there were not alot of options for Clustering. Sun has long had Sun Clustering but it has always been a version or two behind Veritas and lacked certain features and real commercial adoption like Veritas had. Well in the last year I have seen a real shift. Sun has had time to catch up as Veritas 5 has been only a minor improvement on 4. To add to all this Sun has done something very new. As part of their open source movement Sun has released their clustering software as open source and now with version 3.2 has released what looks to be a real contender to Veritas. http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/cluster/features.xml

Sun has added support for Oracle with RAC and several other commercial applications that it was previously missing. The interesting part is that Sun is making this less expensive than a similar Veritas install and now has a very comparable and in some ways better product. We are used to price giving you better quality but that is something that is changing more as vednors are drastically changing how they market their products.

If your using Veritas then I would recommend taking some time and downloading Sun Cluster and giving it a try. If your using vxfs then also look at Sun SAM +QFS for that replacement. Eventually we will see the best of QFS in ZFS which will then really trump vxfs but until then the SAM+QFS works well.

D~