Canonical has just announced that the Ubuntu Developer Summit will no longer be face to face and every six months. Instead it will be entirely online and virtual, using Google Hangouts. (Here is the announcement.)

On the surface, this seems like a good idea: It's cheaper monetarily, it appears to open things up to people who are unable to travel, and it makes it easier to make complete records.

However, I think it's a bad idea, for several interrelated reasons.

Some decision making needs face-time to happen. For whatever reasons, internet-only communication is not enough for a good enough "meeting of the minds" for sticky or subtle engineering and design decisionmaking.

The IETF, who probably have the longest history of any organization ever of online internet-enabled …

This month is a special month. It’s not because of President’s Day or even the exciting day where we revel in groundhogs. No, this month is special because the free book give-away is happening again. This is where you, the reader, gets to win something free for doing nothing more than posting a comment saying that you want a copy of my recently published book – The InnoDB Quick Reference Guide from Packt Publishing. The book is a great reference for DBAs, PHP, Python, or Perl programmers that integrate with MySQL and want to learn more about the InnoDB database engine.

So, all you have to do is post a comment here saying that you want a copy and write out a single (or more) sentence about how you use InnoDB in your development or production environment. At the end of the month two readers will be chosen via a random list sorting script that …

SkySQL and Monty Program are on the road with our joint Meetup in Amsterdam where Monty Widenius - the origninal creator of MySQL - will unveil his vision of the future of the MySQL database via MariaDB.

Seppo Jaakola from Codership will give a presentation about Galera Cluster for MySQL and MariaDB.

In addition we will have speakers from Booking.com as well as Anders Karlsson from SkySQL who will talk about Big Data.

read more

Le 27 mars de 14h à 19h à l'Atelier du France, Paris

SkySQL et Monty Program organisent une demie journée de conférences consacrées aux bonnes pratiques et retours d'expériences autour des bases de données MySQL®et MariaDB, l'objectif étant de répondre aux préoccupations actuelles des administrateurs de bases de données.

read more

I’m pleased to announce that my first book, the InnoDB Quick Reference Guide, is now available from Packt Publishing and you can download it by clicking here. It covers the most common topics of InnoDB usage in the enterprise, including: general overview of its use and benefits, detailed explanation of seventeen static variables and seven dynamic variables, load testing methodology, maintenance and monitoring, as well as troubleshooting and useful analytics for the engine. The current version of MySQL ships with InnoDB as the default table engine, so whether you program your MySQL enabled applications with PHP, Python, Perl or otherwise, you’ll likely benefit from this concise but comprehensive reference guide for InnoDB databases.

Here are the chapter overviews …

“With MySQL 5.6, developers can now commingle the “best of both worlds” with fast key-value look up operations and complex SQL queries to meet user and application specific requirements” –Tomas Ulin. On February 5, 2013, Oracle announced the general availability of MySQL 5.6. I have interviewed Tomas Ulin, Vice President for the MySQL Engineering team [...]

Get up-to-date on MariaDB, MySQL, Cloud Databases and SkySQL’s expertise: whitepapers and presentations now available on skysql.com

read more

Tuesday, February 5th was an important day in the MySQL ecosystem due to the release by Oracle of the long-awaited MySQL 5.6 GA. Many MySQL users have been looking forward to this release in order to benefit from the improved performance and scalability. Features such as online operations/schema changes, NoSQL access from memcached to InnoDB, multi threaded-replication and Global Transaction ID significantly improve the competitiveness of MySQL.

read more

MySQL Users Group, please let us know you schedule so we can help promote your events. And if you are interested in starting a MySQL — let us know as we can help.

The MySQL Community Team wants to make sure you do not miss out on upcoming shows.

Fosdem is this coming weekend and there will be a MySQL and Friends devroom. This show in Brussels features presentations from Lars Thalmann, Sveta Smirnova, Luis Soares, Giuseppe Maxia, Øystein Grøvlen, and many more.

MySQL is a sponsor of the SunShine PHP and Ligaya Trumelle will be presenting on MySQL.

The Rocky Mountian orage Users Group will hold their training days February 11th through the 13th with a very interesting …

Reading Sheeri's MySQL 5.1 vs. MySQL 5.5: Floats, Doubles, and Scientific Notation, I was baffled at this change of floating point number notation.

However, I was also concerned about the final action taken: using "--ignore-columns" to avoid comparing the FLOAT/DOUBLE types.

The --float-precision option for pt-table-checksum currently only uses ROUND() so as to disregard minor rounding issues. But it can very easily extend to handle the difference in floating point notation. Consider again the problem:

mysql> create table tf(f float);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.11 sec) …