After all the fuss it appears that MySQL will be remaining open source after all. As Kaj Arno and Monty Widenius report, Marten Mickos announced at CommunityOne that the MySQL Server will stay open source, as well as the forthcoming encryption and compression backup features, which MySQL had considered making available only to paying customers.

“The change comes from MySQL now being part of Sun Microsystems. Our initial plans …

Note: Installing Oracle 11gR1 on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is now published.

After our last post about installing Oracle 11g on Ubuntu 7.10 (November, 6th), and considering Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was released on April 21st, I spent some time reviewing and putting together this new HOWTO for the installation.

Please note: I’ve used the x86 server version of Ubuntu 8.04, but the same steps should work without any problems for the Desktop version. Also notice that this whole procedure can easily take over six hours to complete, so don’t complain I didn’t …

UPDATE: There are some examples being added at the MySQL Forge now.

When I first started installing MySQL for myself, it was quite handy to have the example my.cnf files in the source package. I was a noob to the MySQL configuration. Even after I became more experienced, I would use them as a starting point. However, I now find that they are so behind the times they are not as useful. Here are some of the comments from the files.

my-small.cnf

# This is for a system with little memory (<= 64M) where MySQL is only used
# from time to time and it's important that the mysqld daemon
# doesn't use much resources.

my-medium.cnf

# This is for a system with little memory (32M - 64M) where MySQL plays
# an important part, or systems up to …

i was going to write some reactions to an observation that postgresql has no bug tracker and its discussion last week, but lost the spark and abandoned the post after a few days. but today i ran across a quote from linus torvalds that neatly sums up my thoughts:

We’ve always had some pending/unresolved issues, and I think that as our tracking gets better, there’s likely to be more of them. A number of bug-reports are either hard to reproduce (often including from the reporter) or end up without updates etc.

before there was a bug tracking system for mysql, there was a claim that all bugs were fixed in each release (or documented), and there has been a lot of pain in seeing how well that sort of claim stacks up against a actual …

There were free copies of the Linux Journal handed out to attendees outside in the hallways here at CommunityOne and I noticed that they just published this year's Readers' Choice Awards - MySQL was voted as the favourite database by 62.7% of their readers!

MySQL is not only the world's most popular open-source database, it's your favorite as well. Although PostreSGL,
SQLite, Firebird and others registered votes, the competition was not fierce. It doesn't hurt that MySQL runs on more than
20 different platforms.

Thanks a lot to the readers of LinuxJournal, we really appreciate the support!

Right now there is a discussion on Planet MySQL regarding MySQL / Linux swap problem. Peter Zaitsev originally brought the problem of MySQL swapping to light. Recently, Dathan Pattishall also wrote about it in his post Linux 64-bit, MySQL, Swap and Memory. Don McAskill followed up with his post, MySQL and the Linux Swap problem, and an interesting way to get around the issue: "make swap partitions out of RAM disks." Don also points to another article by Kevin regarding …

The VM for Linux prefers system cache over application memory. What does this mean? The best way I can explain is by example.

Imagine you have 32 GB of RAM
MySQL is set to take 20 GB of RAM for a process based buffer and up to 6M for the various thread buffers.

Over a period of time the box swaps. The only thing that is running is mysql and its memory size is around 21GB for resident memory. Why does swap grow when there is plenty of memory? The reason is when a memory alloc is needed (thread based buffer is tickled) the VM will choose to use swap over allocating from the system cache, when there is not enough free memory.

DO NOT TURN OFF SWAP to prevent this. Your box will crawl, kswapd will chew up a lot of the processor, Linux needs swap enabled, lets just hope its not used.

So how do you stop Nagios pages because of swap usage? Well if you have a few choices.

…

Ever since Peter over at Percona wrote about MySQL and swap, I’ve been meaning to write this post. But after I saw Dathan Pattishall’s post on the subject, I knew I’d better actually do it.

There’s a nasty problem with Linux 2.6 even when you have a ton of RAM. No matter what you do, including setting /proc/sys/vm/swappiness = 0, your OS is going to prefer swapping stuff out rather than freeing up system cache. On a single-use machine, where the application is better at utilizing RAM than the system is, this is incredibly stupid. Our MySQL boxes are a perfect example – they run only MySQL and we want InnoDB to have a lot of RAM (32-64GB …

I like Ubuntu's philosophy. Among the Debian derived Linux distros, it's the one that appeals to me the most. The first live CDs (Knoppix, Mepis) were a revolution, but Ubuntu has perfected the trend by adding a quality that was missing from these early ones.
I especially like the ease of installation. Plug to the net, apt-get install package_name, and presto! you got what you want.
MySQL server comes with just one line:

apt-get install mysql-client mysql-server

This will get you the latest server and client binaries, ready to use.
Yesterday I wanted to build MySQL 5.1 from source. The latest one (5.1.24) that has been released is missing the Federated engine, and I wanted the complete thing. So I installed Ubuntu in a spare machine, and got the source code from the development tree.
By …

It is perhaps fitting that the last word on the recent MySQL licensing row should belong to Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz. In a twitter Q&A with Web 2.0 Expo attendees, courtesy of Tim O’Reilly, he states that:

“we have no plans whatever of ‘hiding the ball,’ of keeping any technology from the community. Everything Sun delivers will be freely available, via a free and open license (either GPL, LGPL or Mozilla/CDDL), to the community.

Everything.

No exception.”

Which would appear to be pretty conclusive, despite his additional claim that “leaders at Sun have the autonomy to do what they think is right to maximize their business value - so long as they remember their responsibility to the corporation and all of its communities (from shareholders to developers). Not just …