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 ZFS (special issues with running MySQL on ZFS, that is, but that did not fit a cute …

This alliance is an excellent step, showing the maturity, breadth and depth of expertise for MySQL related services! Of course Open Query is an active early member, with our training and subscription services, and initiatives like the OurDelta builds project.

Kudos to MontyW and PeterZ for driving this further while at the MySQL Conference last month.

Problem With the release of MySQL 5.1, many DBAs are going to be scheduling downtime to upgrade their MySQL Server. As with all upgrades between major version numbers, it requires one of two upgrade paths: Dump/reload: The safest method of upgrading, but it takes out your server for quite some time, especially if you have a large data set.mysql_upgrade: A much faster method, but it can still be

We introduced Oracle SQL Developer to our developers about a year ago. They seem to like it for querying Oracle, but the MySQL connectivity was quirky in previous releases.Now that Oracle SQL Developer 1.5.4 has been released, I figured I'd give it a try again. I downloaded the software and it started right away with no problem (although I wasn't paying attention and I forgot to migrate over my

A lot of people are into the whole cloud computing scenario these days. However, no one has talked about offering DBA-like services in the cloud, all automated, so that startups don’t have to get their own DBAs.

Enter FathomDB. They are poised to offer databases as a service (maybe they’ll charge per database - so you can in theory run both WordPress and Mediawiki, if you prefix wp_ and mw_ in your table creation, for example). They are using MySQL. They’ve also taken the worry of running a database out - they will backup, they will setup (so you don’t have to issue GRANT commands :P), and they will also monitor your databases for you.

But what really takes the cake? The fact that they will also offer performance advisors. This totally reminds me of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor (aka …

South Californians, mark your calendars! On February 24th at 7,30pm the Los Angeles Meetup Group will host Chris Schneider, Facebook DBA, who will talk about "Scaling MySQL".

Now, if I talk about scaling MySQL, I will refer to personal experience in my consulting career, when 10 million people connected all at once to my customer's web site. You may be interested in the story or simply yawn. But when a Facebook DBA talks to you about scaling, 10 million connection is low traffic, and scaling takes a completely different meaning.

In this meetup, Chris will talk about different methodologies used at Facebook to deal with their scaling issues. If you are near Los Angeles on February 24th, you don't want to miss this …

South Californians, mark your calendars! On February 24th at 7,30pm the Los Angeles Meetup Group will host Chris Schneider, Facebook DBA, who will talk about "Scaling MySQL".

Now, if I talk about scaling MySQL, I will refer to personal experience in my consulting career, when 10 million people connected all at once to my customer's web site. You may be interested in the story or simply yawn. But when a Facebook DBA talks to you about scaling, 10 million connection is low traffic, and scaling takes a completely different meaning.

In this meetup, Chris will talk about different methodologies used at Facebook to deal with their scaling issues. If you are near Los Angeles on February 24th, you don't want to miss this …

South Californians, mark your calendars! On February 24th at 7,30pm the Los Angeles Meetup Group will host Chris Schneider, Facebook DBA, who will talk about "Scaling MySQL".

Now, if I talk about scaling MySQL, I will refer to personal experience in my consulting career, when 10 million people connected all at once to my customer's web site. You may be interested in the story or simply yawn. But when a Facebook DBA talks to you about scaling, 10 million connection is low traffic, and scaling takes a completely different meaning.

In this meetup, Chris will talk about different methodologies used at Facebook to deal with their scaling issues. If you are near Los Angeles on February 24th, you don't want to miss this …

I have a friend who needs some Adobe Acrobat automation. The project description is:We need to find a programmer who is willing to do some high-end Adobe form work for us.We need to embed a "send to" button in some of our company forms so we can email the form to clients who can input the data and submit the form back to us by clicking on a submit button on the form.If anybody has this skill set

The MySQL 5.1 DBA exam is in alpha-test right now and some of the reviewers have had questions about upgrade exams. The new exams are no longer multiple choice. They are based on a candidates performance with a real database on a virtual server.
In the past I have stated that there was not going to be an upgrade exam. This was due to the change in exam format and the history of previous upgrades not being popular. Less than forty folks took the Core to Dev upgrade exam (about 5% with that certification) and the numbers are worse for the Pro to DBA upgrade. Why spend time on something that is not going to be cost justifiable?

But my reviewers are trying to convince me to have an upgrade. It would not be that much more work to offer a hands that could be taken over the Internet. You …