Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a way of developing computer software applications with less effort than the traditional means.

RAD tools focus on providing code generation and automated testing capabilities with the use of convention over configuration to provide a streamlined workflow to create applications.

Even with the most advanced and easiest to use RAD tools, there are times which the traditional enterprise and the business software development vendors which are having their own implementations and in-house built frameworks are continuously refusing to adopt them.

Most of the misconceptions on the RAD are based on FUD (Fear, Uncertainty

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Yes, you read the title correctly — there are three editions of MySQL available, according to http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/server.html (http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/server.html). Well, that page names two, and then of course there is the community edition….

From the manual page:

MySQL Enterprise Server is available in the following editions:

* MySQL Enterprise Server – Pro is the world’s most popular open source database that enables you to rapidly deliver high performance and scalable Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications.
* MySQL Enterprise Server – Advanced is the most comprehensive edition of MySQL. It provides all the benefits of MySQL Enterprise Server Pro and adds horizontal table and index partitioning for improving the performance and management of VLDBs

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The MySQL Enterprise Spring 2010 Release includes key improvements designed to help you proactively optimize MySQL performance and identify potential issues before they can become costly outages or slowdowns. In this webinar we will explore the new features of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.2 that are designed to save DBAs and Developers time and effort in keeping MySQL systems running at the highest levels of security, performance and availability. Join us and learn about:

• How the MySQL Connectors can now be used to collect, aggregate and monitor MySQL query performance data
• How to quickly identify which queries are performing full table scans
• How to isolate your worst performing queries based on total execution counts, time, data returned, date/time, query content, query type, and more
• How to identify and drill

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I have been upgrading more MySQL database instances recently and have found a few more potential gotchas, which if you are not careful, can potentially be rather nasty. These are not documented explicitly by MySQL, so it may be handy for you to know if you have not come across this type of thing before.

Most of the issues are those related to upgrading MySQL instances which are replicated, either the master servers or the slaves. Some seem specific to the rpm packages I am using (MySQL enterprise or MySQL advanced rpms), though others are not.

Take care upgrading a 5.0 master when you have 5.1 slaves

It is not a good idea to run a mixed major version of mysql in a replicated environment so why would I be doing this? If you work in a replicated environment and have several slaves then it is recommended that you upgrade the slaves first. I work with quite

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I had originally posted this on the 16th of September, but I had been changing hosting providers and such and it has managed to drop through the cracks.  So, if you didn’t see it before here it is..

I have long held the opinon that SSD (Solid State Disk) drives are going to be a major part of the database future. I just checked and I wrote a blog posting about them two years ago. I am not alone in this opinion.  It has long been realized that both I/O access speed and throughput increases have not kept pace with the increases in CPU power and the steadily decreasing cost of RAM. Storage space has increased, but both access speed and throughput performance have only had marginal increases in performance.

Solid state disks have long held the promise of lowered access speeds, especially when it comes to random access.  Even so, prices for SSD drives

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MySQL is proud to announce the MySQL Enterprise Fall 2009 Release!

The MySQL Enterprise Fall 2009 Release includes the MySQL Enterprise Monitor with the improved MySQL Query Analyzer - now with new correlation graphs for faster performance optimization. Join our webinar series and see a live demonstration of the new MySQL Enterprise Monitor and the improved Query Analyzer, hear about the new Advisor rules and support services and get live answers to your questions from our MySQL experts.

The "What's New in the MySQL Enterprise Fall 2009 Release - EMEA (http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-428.html)" web presentation will be delivered on Wednesday, September 16.

For those of you who speak Italian I'll deliver a local version of it on the Thursday, September 24 at 10am CET. Register and





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In the past few weeks I've been implementing advanced search at Plaxo, working quite closely with Solr enterprise search server. Today, I saw this relatively detailed comparison between Solr and its main competitor Sphinx (full credit goes to StackOverflow user mausch who had been using Solr for the past 2 years). For those still confused, Solr and Sphinx are similar to MySQL FULLTEXT search, or for those even more confused, think Google (yeah, this is a bit of a stretch, I know).

Similarities

• Both Solr and Sphinx satisfy all of your requirements. They're fast and designed to index and search large bodies of data efficiently.
• Both

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I just read Björn Schotte's post on the activities of the European Union antitrust regulators concerning the intended takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle.

Björn mentions a news article that cites EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes saying that the commission has the obligation to protect the customers from reduced choice, higher costs or both. But to me, this bit is not the most interesting. Later on the article reads:

The Commission said it was concerned that

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As our data warehousing process grows and the workflows get more complex, we've revisited the question of what tools to use in this process. Out of curiosity, I had a look at basing such a process on Hadoop/Hive for scalability reasons, but the lack of mature tools and the sacrifices on efficiency that would entail meant we're better off using something else as long as a distributed processing platform is the only thing that can get the job done. I'm also curious about the transition to continuous integration, a model I noticed showing up a couple of years ago and now getting some air under its wings as CEP, IBM's

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I'm conflicted about the latest twist of the MySQL release saga, ie the announcement of the 6.0.11 alpha version and the accompanying note that it's the last 6.0 release and will be replaced by the already discussed milestone model. From an engineering point of view, I think this is the right step. I'm not sure about that, because I can't really tell exactly what is the engineering model chosen: trunk-first, then backport, or fix-in-releases, then forward port. I also can't tell whether the milestone model is going to be timeboxed or feature-scoped. Personally, I would prefer to see the former of both alternatives.

From a customer point of view, I'm even more confused, though much less concerned. Okay, so 6.0 won't become the marketing version number of any

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Yesterday, The Pythian Group issued a press release about my book, Pythian’s partnership with Sun, and our new “MySQL Adoption Accelerator Package”. I am not a marketing guru, but I can tell you what we the package means in terms of new work that the MySQL teams have been doing.

Basically, the MySQL Adoption Accelerator Package combines customized training with a comprehensive audit of systems. The name “Adoption Accelerator” makes it sound like it’s only for new applications that are almost ready to go live. What the program actually does is have us evaluate your systems, and intensively train you in the areas you want and need. The program is designed to suit all your needs, whether it’s teaching you about one topic (say, query optimization) or an entire range of topics, from Architecture to

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I was working on a client’s server today to troubleshoot some variances between the result timing of some queries. Guess what I came across - the profiler is not available in certain enterprise releases but it is available on community versions of the same release number.

I can understand if that feature was something that wasn’t fully tested in the enterprise code base and thus was only released in the community version - but if that’s the case then I don’t understand why the same version releases of Community and Enterprise can have different feature sets. That goes against the whole idea of versioning. Someone correct me if I’m wrong here but that is very frustrating.