With many apologies to David Bowie, come 2009 it was my 5 year anniversary with Sun (well, MySQL AB and then Sun). Companies tend to like to talk about how they like to retain employees and that many employees stay with the company for a long time. It is very, very expensive to hire the right people, so this is largely a good plan.

In 2009, it was five years since I joined MySQL AB – something I didn’t quite originally expect (let’s face it, in the modern tech industry you’re always surprised when you’re somewhere for more than a few years).

The whole process of having been with sun for 5 years seemed rather impersonal… it largely felt like a form letter automatically sent out with a certificate and small badge (below). You

I'm happy to release Outbrain's Propagator as open source. Propagator is a schema & data deployment tool which makes it easy to deploy, review, audit & fix deployments to your database servers.

What does multi-everything mean? It is:

• Multi-server: push your schema & data changes to multiple instances in parallel
• Multi-role: different servers have different schemas
• Multi-environment: recognizes the differences between development, QA, build & production servers
• Multi-technology: supports MySQL, Hive (Cassandra on the TODO list)
• Multi-user: allows users authenticated and audited access
• Multi-planetary: TODO

With dozens of database servers in our company (and these are master database servers), from

This is the 8th installment in the rather long series that started with Part 1 about a month ago.

Back in 2006, we were in the situation where MySQL 5.0 had taken forever, and the first “GA” release was not suitable for production. Looking towards MySQL 5.1, it was also unlikely to be out any time soon. The MySQL Cluster team had customers that needed new features in a stable release. The majority of users didn’t use the MySQL server at all, they directly used the C++ NDB API for the vast majority of queries – so the vast majority of release blocker bugs in the MySQL server would not affect the production

1. Read Modify Write

  fd=open("aaa.dat", O_WRONLY);
  for(i=0; i< 100000; i++) {
    write(fd, buf, 1000);
  }
  fsync(fd);

The MariaDB project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 10.0.9. This is a Release Candidate release.

Among other changes, XtraDB is now the default InnoDB implementation, Oracle’s InnoDB is included as a plugin and can be dynamically loaded if desired. Packages for Ubuntu 14.04 “trusty” and Debian “Sid” have also been added to the MariaDB Ubuntu and Debian repositories.

See the Release Notes and Changelog for detailed information on this release and the

In less than a month I'll be giving these two talks at Percona Live:

• common_schema: DBA's framework for MySQL

If you are still unfamiliar with common_schema, this will make for a good introduction. I'll give you multiple reasons why you would want to use it, and how it would come to immediate use at your company. I do mean immediate, as in previous common_schema presentations I happened to get feedback emails from attendees within the same or next day letting me know how common_schema solved an insistent problem of theirs or how it exposed an unknown status.

I'll review

Digging through piles of old stuff in the house, I came across a nice little artifact of MySQL history, an old business card. One benefit of a small company is that you can tend to get your first name @company.com, which of course, I had.

I wonder which other MySQL AB employees still have a business card laying around somewhere?

Firebird is an open-source DBMS with a long history and good SQL support. Although I measured Firebird's importance as smaller than MySQL's or MariaDB's, it exists, and might grow a bit when Firebird becomes the default LibreOffice DBMS.

I decided to compare the current versions of MySQL 5.6 and Firebird SQL 2.5. I only looked at features that end users can see, without benchmarking. Preparing for the comparison was easy. I looked at the instructions for downloading Firebird with Ubuntu and within 15 minutes I was entering SQL statements.