Since I use MySQL for the statistical analysis on a project, I wanted to optimize the database queries and learned a lot about stuff like number theory, set theory and partial sums. I took my MySQL UDF, I've published two years ago, for this purpose and added new functions for a deeper statistical analysis. The project is around for a while, so it's time to share things with the public to start a discussion of how things could be further optimized. The source and a small documentation can be found on Github:

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A new company often means new responsibilities and learning new ways of doing things. For a tech guy, it often means picking up a new framework or maybe if you are a glutton for punishment, a new language. I recently switched OSes, languages, and databases as a DBA/DB Developer. This was quite a massive shift for me. I went from the stable, enterprise database, SQL Server, to the little engine that could, MySQL. Before the switch, I would stew over the fact that SQL Server lacked features in comparison to Oracle or Postgres, but now I realize that there are far better things to worry about (such as non-blocking backups). I just wanted to go over some of the differences I found.

1. MySQL is a collection of binaries that manipulate data files. It is not a monolithic application that persists its data to disk, but instead it allows another process to manipulate its files even while it’s running. It interprets a folder in its data directory …

The MySQL Connect 2012 conference event being held in San Francisco on Sep 29-30 has a long list of quality MySQL speakers including myself. I will be giving 2 presentations on:

CON8322 – Lessons from Managing 500+ MySQL Instances

In this presentation, learn about the issues of managing a large number of instances of MySQL, supporting 50 billion SQL statements per day. Topics covered:
• The need for monitoring and instrumentation
• How to automate installations, upgrades, and deployments
• Issues with MySQL’s Replication feature with 300 slaves per master
• Traffic minimization techniques
• Creating high availability with regions and zones
• Real-time traffic stats (aggregated every five seconds)

CON8320 – …

MySQL has taken another leap forward. It is not a dramatic new feature or my long requested –run-faster command line option. Recruiters are now very actively seeking MySQL Database Administrators and Developers. One recruiter was offing a $5,000 ‘finders fee’ for a lead on MySQL DBAs.

The MySQL Certified Professionals group on LinkedIn, for one example, has several postings each week looking to fill positions. The Jobs board on forums.mysql.com is busy. My local MySQL Users Groups gets several requests each month to post jobs on the website.

I used to work for an on-line recruiting company and still occasionally lurk about various recruiting sites to see how MySQL is trending. And MySQL is trending upwards.

Much of this is from start-ups looking to take advantage of the LAMP stack. Some of this comes from governments and …

Yes, We will be at OSCON next week. I will be talking about Optimizing MySQL Configuration and host a BOF on MySQL Sharding Replication and Clustering if you’re interested in any of these technologies please come by and share your story. I would love to see both users and technology vendors working in this field.

Jay Janssen is going to talk about Writing non-blocking code for interaction with data systems and web services in Node.js and Perl and about Running a high performance LAMP stack on a $20 Virtual server.

In the past two days I was fortunate enough to speak to two different groups of people at the Ministry of Science, Technology and Tertiary Education in the Parliament building in Port of Spain, Trinidad – yes, I spoke at Parliament! The PDF slides for my talk are available: The Art of Cat Herding: How to Manage Geeks and Ideas for DBA’s – not “best practices”, but ideas you may or may not want to implement.

I was in Trinidad as part of the Latin America Oracle Technology Network tour of Latin America (North leg). I also spent time in Cali, Colombia and Quito, Ecuador (including visiting the Equator!). Today I am in Guatemala, and I will give talks on more MySQL-specific subjects: …

Changes (as compared to 10.12) include:

Features:
* Saved connections can now be exported and imported. The option is available in the ‘tools’ menu.
* Added an option to open exported CSV and Excel XML files directly with the program associated with the file extension on the system.

Bug fixes:
* Exporting Schema Designer canvas as image on Wine generated empty boxes for tables with no information about columns. It is actually a bug in Wine (incomplete Windows API implementation for drawing routines) .
* The height of GRID-cells will now adjust to fit font setting for the GRID .

Downloads: http://webyog.com/en/downloads.php
Purchase: http://webyog.com/en/buy.php

…

When you use SHOW VARIABLES LIKE “have_%” to see whether a particular feature is enabled, you will note the value of NO for some, and DISABLED for others. These values are not intrinsically clear for the casual onlooker, and often cause confusion. Typically, this happens with SSL and InnoDB. So, here is a quick clarification!

• NO means that the feature was not enabled (or was actively disabled) in the build. This means the code and any required libraries are not present in the binary.
• DISABLED means that the feature is built in and capable of working in the binary, but is disabled due to relevant my.cnf settings.
• YES means the feature is available, and configured in my.cnf.

SSL tends to show up as DISABLED, until you configure the appropriate settings to use it …

Read the original article at Why I Wrote the Book – Oracle and Open Source

Back in the late 90′s New York City was deep in the dot-com boom. Silicon Alley was being born, and a thousand internet startups were sprouting. Everyone was hiring, it was an exciting time to work in technology!

Trend Spotting Circa 2000

As an independent consultant, I had the opportunity to work at quite a few startups. The technology stack was identical at almost all of them. Sun Microsystems hardware, Apache webservers, and Oracle on the backend. The database was always the sticking point, and developers struggled to get their queries right.

It was an interesting role to hold. Most career DBAs worked …

Earlier this week we all read GigaOM's article with this title:
"Why the days are numbered for Hadoop as we know it"I know GigaOM like to provoke scandals sometimes, we all remember some other unforgettable piece, but there is something behind it...

Hadoop today (after SOA not so long ago) is one of the worst case of an abused buzzword ever known to men. It's everything, everywhere, can cure illnesses and do "big-data" at the same time! Wow! Actually Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications, derived from Google's MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers.

My take from the article is this: Hadoop is a foundation, low-level platform. I used the word …