Oracle just announced a new line of Nehalem based x86 servers and they are beasts:

The long and short of it for me seems to be that the machines are beasts but power hungry beasts. None of the lower power Nehalems really seem to be on the table. Until we see prices, it will be…

If you’re like me, you love the granular permissions capabilities of MySQL but hate the work that goes into managing them…
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be anything like groups in MySQL and according to plans won’t be added officially until MySQL 7.0 (WL#988)…
While searching around, I found Securich…

Last night I watched almost the entire 5 hour live webcast announcing Oracle’s strategies regarding the Sun Microsystems acquisition. As a near-evangelist for Sun and Solaris, I’m very happy with the deal finally going through and even happier that most of what Oracle said makes sense to me as a customer.

Obviously, it is easy…

You may say, “It only takes me 3 hours to do a full backup of everything”, but over time backup windows are notorious for becoming too small. Backups are split over multiple days, technologies upgraded, etc. When planning a backup strategy, my approach is to eliminate the backup window altogether- that is do whatever…

Reporting projects are the kind of projects which never seem to end. After a couple iterations I’ve come to the following conclusions:

Absolutely no reports should run on a production database.
Moving/aggregating data from a production database to a reporting database using ETL tools prone to synchronization issues and pretty unreliable.
The best option is to set…