Oh yes, 2012 was an incredible year for the MySQL Community!
That’s why I would like to change the rules this year and I would like to offer you a new survey for this [Plus] reader’s choice 2012.

Community users, bloggers and events made the whole community last year, tell us how you used this community?
It will only take 5 minutes of your precious time, votes will be closed Jan. 31.

Vote for what you used! (with your heart, again…)

Giuseppe Maxia of Continuent and long time creator of MySQL Sandbox.

Only works on Unix-like servers. Works with MySQL, Percona & MariaDB servers. MySQL server has the data directory, the port and the socket – you can’t share these.

To use it: make_sandbox foo.tar.gz. Then just do ./use.

$SANDBOX_HOME is ~/sandboxes. You can also create ~/opt/mysql/ and if you have MySQL 5.0.91 binary in that directory, you can just do “sb 5.1.91″.

Sandbox has features to start replication systems as well. You can have varying master/slave setups with varying versions as well (good idea to test from MySQL -> MariaDB master->slave for migration).

You can now also play with

Giuseppe Maxia of Continuent.

MySQL replication is single threaded. Multi-master replication is complex with MySQL. Circular replication works but is very fragile. Once you’ve achieved the feat, how do you avoid conflicts? The lack of global transaction ID today also means you may have slaves that may not be synchronized fully. Finally, some people like to replicate to PostgreSQL, Oracle and MongoDB.

This is where Tungsten Replicator comes into place. Opensource. 100% GPLv2. You can do easy failover (no need to synchronize the slaves manually when a master dies), have multiple masters, multiple sources to a single slave, conflict prevention, parallel

In addition to the Boston edition, there’s an OpenSQL Camp at the same time and place as FrOSCon mid-August in Germany. The call for papers is open until July 11th. As always, the conference is about all kinds of open-source databases: MySQL and PostgreSQL are only two of the obvious ones; MongoDB and Cassandra featured prominently at the last one I attended, and SQLite was well represented at the first one.

Related posts:

How it works

At the May 2009 Boston MySQL User Group, Giuseppe Maxia of Sun Microsystems gave a presentation about MySQL 5.4 with use cases and benchmarks to show how it outperforms all other current MySQL releases (including the Google patches and the OurDelta/Percona releases).

The slides can be downloaded from http://www.slideshare.net/datacharmer/mysql-54-theory-and-practice

The video can be watched below, or directly on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giT4SYXuVqA&hl

Both Giuseppe and Kaj have blogs in languages that I don’t understand. In fact, even Planet MySQL has feeds for German, Spanish and French blogs.

Want to keep up with non-English based blogs? Happen to use Google Reader? Then use their nifty “Translate into my language” feature.

I can now read Giuseppe’s

This is the last day I'm taking off work to hack on mk-table-sync, and I thought it was time for (yet another) progress report. Here's what I have done so far. (Click through to the full article to read the details).

Very fast, as it turns out. Click through to the full article for details.