I attended the Sun Tech Days last week here in Sydney, Australia with a number of objectives in mind. The first was to meet up with people I knew in Sun to see how the newly confirmed merger was working here in Australia and also to see some of the talks scheduled, particularly the database related ones.

I met Tom Daly on the PostgreSQL stand and had a good talk with him about how things were working and being utilised and attended his talk later that afternoon on MySQL and PostgreSQL: The Sun database. Tom gave a good overview, but did not get into too much technical detail because of all the materials to cover in such a short time. Tom is more into performance and OLTP than the DW/BI side, so we seemed to complement each other quite well in the areas of knowledge we were pursuing.

However, one of the most rewarding talks was that on ZFS on the second day. I had heard about ZFS and that is was a new design to offer more features, but still had the thoughts it was "just another filsystem". The features of ZFS that were explained has increased my interest in ZFS and see great potential for database solutions based around it use. The only problem currently is that Linux does not support it at the kernel level, only in FUSE, but FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Solaris have it so I will have to focus some more attention on these systems.

The DTrace capabilities to trace bad queries was also quite informative and provides transactional feedback and other statistics via the Chime tool under Solaris.

I did manage to catch up with people within Sun and it looks promising for the future of MySQL. I hope to be working more closely with Sun in the future in helping promote the open source databases within Australia.