I'm stuck on skype v4.0.0.8 because the latest linux skype client crashes literally every minute or so. And I'm not the only one who has this problem.

Sadly they don't include php with any of the pre-compiling accelerators like Eaccelrator. It's pretty common to get 5 to 10x performance increase using this.

My Chromebook is working just fine. Seeing as it runs Chrubuntu.

OK it's pretty obvious you are mixing up copyright and licensing. Innodb is owned outright by Oracle. They've owned it and the copyright on it for a VERY long time. It was released under both commercial and GPL licenses a long time ago. The code already released under the GPL will remain under the GPL forever. It can't be "revoked" as the previous poster supposed.

Now, Oracle and update Innodb code all they want, and provide it only as binaries if they so desire. BUT they cannot revoke a previous license on the code that's already out there.

The CMS was custom built for the application.

That's actually a pretty big thing to be missing. All my production pgsql servers log ddl (and username host etc) and we can identify exactly when a table changed and by who, in case we get something that breaks something. this is true on all dev, testing, QA, staging and production machines. Not knowing who issued a statement, especially ddl, is a serious lack in thelogging department.

What version of MySQL started supporting this? Up until 5.1 it just silently ignored the keywords and didn't implement the cascades for real.

How exactly do you revoke a GPL license?

I've run two big sites on PostgreSQL now, the first is a content management system for schools across the US with ~3M users with 1K to 3K active at the same time. 300G db on machines with 128G RAM, 34 15kSAS drives, HW RAID controllers and 48 AMD opteron cores. We ran a very aggressive autovacuum schedule, 8 threads with 1ms sleep and max work limit in the 5000 or higher range. We ran several other services on top of pgsql as well, a search engine, stats db, and session servers on it there. Each setup somewhat differently, all 24/7 and quite reliable. The main ~300G cms database was replicated by Slony, since it was setup some time ago when slony was the only real reliable etc replication engine at the time we started. Honestly, it was great performance wise, and reliability wise. Working around Slony for ddl updates is a gigantic pain in the ass tho. Things have gotten better.

The second site, in my current job is also 24/7 and on big hardware but is used as a core db for a storage system consisting of literally thousands of TB sized HDs. The actual db is only a fraction of our storage.

Once you teach your developers to be db centric (start with the data model and work upwards) and the little tricks of postgresql they usually are pretty happy with it. But if you don't have a pg specialist on staff the developers often hate using pgsql because it's NOT what they're used to.

An example is when I was teaching a new guy to use it and he was bitching at how poor insert performance was. He had a 10k file to import and it was about 10% imoprted after 10 minutes. I had him truncate the table and wrap the inserts in begin;commit; and the whole thing imported in about 10 seconds. This was back on pg 7.1 and php3.0 days. Pg has gotten much faster but the ratio of 10k transactions / individual inserts versus batching all 10k together is still quite large.

The fact that you can wrap anything except create / drop database / table or setval/nextval in a transaction and roll it back makes it amazing for development work. You can wrap some huge db updates in a transaction and if there's an error anywhere the whole thing rolls back and you can try again without cleaning up a half-updated db.

It's not perfect, but once you get a handle on performance tuning, autovacuum tuning, and replication it's pretty amazing both performance and reliability wise.

Actually HD280s go on sale for $65 or so all the time on NewEgg and go for $100 almost everywhere, like Amazon etc.

Last line should be "All systems nominal." But it's close

Newt Gingrich made 1.8Million consulting after he left office for a job where he can't even remember what he did. Do you really think these people need the salary they get for being in Congress?

QUOTE: There's already a glut of IT workers.

Have you tried hiring truly qualified 24/7 ops type IT people lately? They are, and will continue to be, hard to find.

outer joins CAN'T be reordered...

PostgreSQL will reorder joins as it pleases to make more efficient joins. Note that outer joins can be reordered because changing their order changes the meaning of the joins.