So sad I'm going to miss it. Thanks for the updates, keep 'em coming!

This month marked SkySQL's first anniversary.  It also marks my 6 months with the company, after being with MySQL AB (and then Sun and finally Oracle) for over 5 years. As good a time as any for a look back and some musings of the future.

In late 2005 I took a position in the web team (a part of Marketing) at MySQL AB.  It was a great company to work for, with a great team of people and a truly great spirit.  The idea that they were making a difference every day was palpable. I then saw it taken over by Sun Microsystems and shortly after by Oracle Corporation.  We went from 500 employees to 30,000 and then to 100,000.  My job satisfaction started to decline.  I felt more like I was battling for every concession rather than revelling in what we were able to achieve.  I needed a change.

When I joined SkySQL it was like going home - I knew pretty …

In my previous posts I introduced two new conflict detection functions, NDB$EPOCH and NDB$EPOCH_TRANS without explaining how these functions actually detect conflicts? To simplify the explanation I'll initially consider two circularly replicating MySQL Servers, A and B, rather than two replicating Clusters, but the principles are the same.

Commit ordering

Avoiding conflicts requires that data is only modified on one Server at a time. …

Blackhole tables are often used on a so-called “relay slave” where some operation needs to happen but no data needs to exist. This used to have a bug that prevented AUTO_INCREMENT columns from propagating the right values through replication, but that was fixed. It turns out there’s another bug, though, that has the same effect. This one is caused when there is an INSERT into a Blackhole table, where the source data is SELECT-ed from another Blackhole table.

I think it’s wise to keep it simple. MySQL has tons of cool little features that theoretically suit edge-case uses and make ninja tricks possible, but I really trust the core plain-Jane functionality so much more than these edge-case features. That’s precisely because they often have some edge-case bugs, especially with replication.

Suomeksi: MySQL käyttäjätapaaminen Helsingissä 1. marraskuuta. Klikkaa allaolevaa linkkiä ilmoittautuaksesi, siellä saat myös lisätietoa suomeksi.

Finally it's here! So many of you have always asked about it. Markus and other Elisa guys. Osma and Ilkka at Habbo Hotel. And others... MySQL was born in Helsinki, InnoDB was born in Helsinki, a lesser known database / also MySQL engine called Solid was born in Helsinki, and 2 great replication companies, Continuent with multiple generations of clustering for MySQL, and Codership with Galera, are Helsinki companies. And amidst this embarrassment of riches, what did we not have?

A MySQL User Group.

read more

I just finished reading a couple of interesting, and somewhat related, blog posts which I think are worth sharing (apologies to anyone who has already seen them). One is from Jelastic and the other is from Michal Hrušecký.

I’ve written about MariaDB and the Jelastic cloud before (see MariaDB now available as a hosted database via Jelastic cloud platform). Now Jelastic has published statistics on the relative popularity of the various databases they offer. The good news is MariaDB is currently the database of choice for 14% of their customers. The bad news is that we’re in fourth place behind their other three database choices (MySQL, …

Apache Web Server, GNU/Linux Operating System, MySQL Database, Mozilla's Firefox Browser.

All pillars among the open-source community.

Each of these deserves its imminent position as a venerated project. Each has changed the world, and not a little. Moreover, they are the projects that spring to mind when we seek to justify the brilliance of the open-source licensing and development models.

But if this is intended to be a list of the highest-impact and most significant open-source projects, there is a project missing from this list.

VA VistA.

VA VistA is arguably the best electronic health record (EHR) in existence. It was developed over the course of several decades by federal employees in a collaborative, open-source …

(Tune in tomorrow where I tell you how you can win USD$100, like I did last week!)

Not signed up for Percona Live:London and need some motivation to do so?  How about a £40.00 discount?  That means the Expo Hall is free, regular registration is £260.00 and the tutorials + conference price is £500.00.  Use discount code "PDBUK".

In just 3 weeks, RightScale is having a cloud conference in Santa Clara, CA Nov 8-9.  There is a Zero-to-cloud training on Tuesday, November 8th, and you can get a 25% discount on the …

For me, next week’s Percona Live is a lot like other events: I know I will be busy meeting and greeting and helping unpack boxes and so forth, but I’ll also be talking and attending other talks. With five concurrent tracks, it’s tough to decide. This is roughly the equivalent of the MySQL conference every year, which has more tracks, but historically it’s been easy to cross off some talks as sales pitches. Not so with this event! Here’s what I want to see the most:

• Clustrix’s keynote. I’ve watched the progress of our tests with Clustrix very closely. If you’re coming to the conference, don’t oversleep.
• Henrik’s …

In early 2006 Paul Hurley (ideeli’s CEO) and I (Mark Uhrmacher, CTO) were thinking about a new business. We had the idea to create a community based around great deals for Women’s fashion products where we saw a great deal of potential for great content and product sales. Now, over five years later, we’ve realized much of that vision. Our business success has been chronicled over the years in several places (see here and here). Though we’re very proud of our achievements there, that isn’t what this blog is about.

Insatiable Demand is about a mostly untold story. Over the past five-plus years we’ve built a phenomenal technology platform and team. From two people and three servers to a 70 person team and a 100 instance production environment, …