We have published a new SPECjAppServer 2004 result: 2925.18 JOPS@Standard. Total list price for the configuration, software and hardware together, is $78,834.00, yielding $26.95 per $/JOPS (or, if you are brave enough to go without support, $13.29). The setup includes GlassFish v2.1 and MySQL 5.1.30 and Sun Fire X2270 and Sun Fire X4170 (both Nehalem-based). Full details in the entries by Madhu, Tom, Kevin and Jennifer.

This is an outstanding result. As Tom describes it:

To give some idea of the actual performance , this configuration of 2 x 8 Core servers and open source , supports a virtual concurrent user load of more than 22,750 web application virtual users and uses > 800 connections to the MySQL 5.1.30 via the Glassfish connection pools!

And this is without the substantial additional improvements from MySQL 5.4, which was not yet available! Stay tuned for further improvements.

The required Disclosure Statement:
SPEC and SPECjAppServer are registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 04/20/2009.
Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1 on Sun Fire X2270 with MySQL 5.1 on OpenSolaris 2008.11. Application Server: 1 x X2270 8 x cores (2 Chips) and Database Server: 1 x X4170 8 x Cores (2 Chips) 2925.18 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard

Mon-Thu I'll be attending the MySQL User's Conference here in Santa Clara. The tone of the conference is noticeably different to that of its (even larger) sibling JavaOne in San Francisco, and the topics are very grounded in the practical needs of the Users of the technology. There are many very interesting talks, below is a small selection extracted from my Personal Schedule. Starting with those related to topics we normally cover here: Several BOFs: OpenSSO, OpenDS and LDAP, JavaFX Clients, OpenSolaris and Web Stack. Several Technical Sessions: MySQL and ZFS, Twitter and NetBeans and GlassFish and MySQL (that's Arun).

The rest of this list is not comprehensive but, here it is...

• Keynotes: State of the Dolphin, Google, KickFire, Cloud, Andi, SmugMug, Infobrite and JasperSoft, Obama.
• Fun Events Quizz Show.
• Tutorials: Scale out, MapReduce, Partitioning, Memcached
• DTrace: Intro, MySQL and Dtrace, Another DTrace
• Cloud: MySQL and EC2, Hadoop and MySQL, Cloud Backup for MySQL, MySQL Clusters in the Cloud, MapReduce
• Drizzle: Rethinking MySQL, Memory, libdrizzle, Drizzle BOF, Clusters
• Memcached: Beginners, Distributed and InnoDB, And Flash!, Libraries, Advanced Use
• Engines: InnoDB, Falcon, Maria, PBXT.
• General: Performance and Scalability, the Future, Code Contributions (Masood's), Craig's List, Sandbox, Death.

... and I reserve the right to add and/or remove entries from my schedule at any time :-)

The MySQL Campus Tour has come to California. The long trip that Dups started in March from Montreal is near the end. He is getting reinforcements. Five MySQL community enthusiasts are now about to tour the campuses in North and South California, giving free lectures on MySQL. The full schedule is available in the MySQL Forge wiki. Participation is free, and it's an unique chance to get in touch with the MySQL experts and ask the tough questions.

The MySQL Users Conference is April 20-23rd in Santa Clara, CA and we are all getting ready for it. Dups has one of the longest preps - he is traveling (by train and bus) from Montreal in his North American Tour visiting Universities around the way. Arun only needs to drive across town to present about GlassFish and MySQL, and he has been building up the demo material for his session - see his note on how to use EclipseLink on GlassFish to do pagination on MySQL - he will present at 3pm on Tue, Apr 21st.

On my side, I don't have any sessions but I'll be there to meet community, partners and customers, specially around GlassFish and Hudson.

There is a new White Paper that shows how to Leverage MySQL and GlassFish in an Identity Manager deployment, building on the earlier announcement of IdManager 8 on MySQL. This extensive (40pages) white paper provides an overview of the function of Sun Identity Manager, and explains how to install it with GF and MySQL. The combination of the three provides a very compelling value-proposition.

Just slightly over a year ago I posted Welcome Aboard, MySQL! from Orlando. Since then we have worked together in many things including GF Bundles, IdMgr, Telco, OSS Price/Performance, Pricing, even Legal. Possibly the biggest impact of the acquisision has been on the non-engineering side: the MySQL team brought an emphasis on volume and that is making a huge difference - I can point to some Isolated deals and to Sun's financials.

I've enjoyed the MySQL team throughout the year and now we will have even more opportunities to work together since the engineering team is going to report into Karen Padir, my manager. As you would expect the news have been reported in the online press and blogosphere. If you are interested, I'd start with Kaj's post, and, if you are attending FOSDEM you may want to attend his Q&A Session. Other reports include ArsTechnica, SJMercury, CW, ITWorld, IW, ZDNet, Reuters, the451group, OWDeveloper and The Register; of these, the post I probably find most interesting is Matt Asay's.

I saw the public announcement this morning but didn't have time until now: Monty is leaving Sun, this time for real, to go to his company: Monty Program Ab. Monty gives more details, and is no surprise that he will continue to work on Maria. Other reports are from Matt, eWeek and Brian. My best wishes to Monty and looking forward to his commits into Maria!

In the last few months Sun has expanded significantly our online outreach efforts and we currently have (at least :-)) three Webinar series that cover the GlassFish products. Going through them:

The MySQL webinars are polished presentations that are broadcasted in high-quality and targeted at specific busines needs. Future presentations include Binod on MySQL and SailFin and Arun on JRuby, NetBeans and GlassFish. These presentations are also available for Replay. A very similar series is the new Software Webinar series. Future events include OpenSSO and MDM; replays available include GlassFish HA and more. Finally, we also have our weekly TheAquarium Online. These Community presentations, broadcasted using uStream.TV are more informal and technical.

This piece of news came up just before holiday break but is still worth posting: the latest patch of Sun's Identity Manager (8.0.0.4) now (again) supports MySQL Enterprise - see the notes from Mani and from Paul. This combination provides another example of how to leverage the different software (and hardware) components into very compelling value-propositions to Sun's customers. In another related example, the Marines Corp is using the Identity Manager, Role Manager, OpenSSO and Directory Server to provide Access and Identity Management Solutions to more than 400K marines; the Goverment is particularly interested in using Open Source to reduce costs (and also to increase security!) BTW, I don't know if MySQL will be used in this particular solution - I'll see if I can find out and share.

Registration is open for the MySQL Users Conference and Expo 2009. The review committee had 350 proposals to choose from, and most of the schedule is already done. The tutorials section is complete, with a juicy choice of topics from popular classics to the newest ones, all of them with some innovative contents, as the theme Innovation Everywhere requires. Register before February 16, and save as much as $200.

Some recent news of interest:

SIP technology, the basis of Project SailFin, is consolidating its position as the leading standard for setting up and tearing down converged multimedia communication sessions. Communication Service Providers are investing in Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) to leverage the opportunity presented by the network convergence. The Service Execution Environment is a key layer of any SDP, and the application servers and databases are the key components of this layer.

A new white paper about Creating a Carrier Grade Service Execution Environment with MySQL Cluster and the Sun GlassFish Communications Server is available now. Take a look. You need a MySQL account to access the white paper.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be posting a series of entries to take a closer look at SailFin, specifically the SIP container. If you havent tried SailFin so far, give it a whirl.

MySQL, the most popular open source database, releases today, November 27, 2008, its version 5.1 GA (General Availability). Downloads are available for all operating systems. Version 5.1 introduces several enhancements to the already rich set of features. Most notable are partitioning, row based replication, the event scheduler, a new plugin infrastructure, and logs on demand.

There are more new features, but the general improvement is better performance and manageability. Many users have already adopted MySQL 5.1 in production. Their feedback has been reported in the MySQL technical articles. Check them out. MySQL 5.1 is ready for prime time!

Commercial Open Source is a game changer, but it is also a game of balances between different interests: the free user and the paying customer, the individual developer and the partner and the corporate developer, short-term adoption and long-term revenue. There are a number of different business models for OpenSource that attempt to navigate these interests and Sun follows a combination of support, services, hardware/systems drag, and Add-Ons.

Sun just announced a new Add-On as part of the MySQL Enterprise Subscription. The MySQL Query Analyzer is designed to save time and effort in finding and fixing problem queries; "time and effort vs money" being the trade-off between the free and for-pay offerings. For details, check the Overview article, Zach's Introduction and the interview with the project lead, Mark Matthews. Coverage of the new offering includes InformationWeek and ComputerWorld. There is already a very nice testimonial from the Clickability CTO; another report (nb. from a sun employee) is here. And you can make your own evaluation through the MySQL Trials offering.

Sun has posted SPECjAppServer 2004 results for a full OpenSource stack including MySQL 5.0, GlassFish v2 U2 and OpenSolaris 2008.05 on Sun's 1U SunFire x4150. The setup uses two x4150 running GF and one running MySQL, all on OpenSolaris. Check out the detailed posts by BMSeer and Tom (Overview and Price Analysis). Also see the SPEC detailed submission and the relevant x4150 Benchmark page. The results take advantage of recent MySQL Performance Improvements including [1], [2], [3], [4].

Note Required disclosure : SPEC and SPECjAppServer are registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 11/05/2008. 2xSun Fire X4150 (8 cores, 2chips) and 1xSun Fire X4150 (4 cores, 1 chip) 1197.10 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard; Best result with 8 cores in application-tier of the benchmark: 1xHP BL460c (8 cores,2chips) and 1xHP BL480c (8 cores,2 chips) 2056.27 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard; Best result with 2 systems in application-tier of the benchmark: 2xDell PowerEdge 2950 (8 cores, 2 chips) and 1xDell PowerEdge R900 (4 chips, 24 cores) 4,794.33 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.