Virtualisation is all the rage today, however there are still a few cases where good old-fashioned Unix chroot is still applicable, and testing MySQL across multiple platforms and architectures is one of those cases.

At Oracle we do full automated package verification testing of our MySQL server binaries prior to release, which attempts to install the package, start the server, run some functionality testing, then uninstall. It is of course highly desirable that the testing environment this is performed in is as close to a clean install of the target operating system as possible, to avoid problems such as our packages depending upon some local changes or packages we may have installed which won’t be available on a customer system.

Given the large number of platforms and architectures that MySQL supports, going the virtualisation route would mean having to use many different products: VirtualBox for x86, zones for SPARC, qemu for …

Lee Margulin, Database Administrator at Zappos.com, talks about how Zappos uses Tungsten to replicate data between Oracle and MySQL. Tungsten Replicator is a high performance, open source, data replication engine for MySQL. It offers a set of features that surpass any open source replicator available today: global transaction IDs to support failover, flexible transaction filtering, extensible

A few days ago we announced the availability of our new MySQL Installer for Windows.  While it’s a great first edition we know that you are going to have questions and we wanted the community to be able to help.  So we have created a new forum for the community to be able to discuss questions and issues with the new installer.

You can access the new forum here.

So, go forth and post!

Stanford University is offering a free course on databases. Introduction to Databases — ‘From October-December 2011 this online course will be offered in a structured fashion free of charge to students worldwide. The public offering will include scored assignments and exams, online discussions with the instructor, and a statement of accomplishment for those who complete the course.’ Sign up here!

The class starts October 10th (right after Oracle Open World) and does not require any prior knowledge on the subject. The professor teaching the class has been teaching databases for 18 years and she will be covering a wide variety of topics such as design, cloud storage, and NoSQL too! …

We have been accepted to nosql-database.org listing today.

Intro
The open source Tungsten Replicator is very powerful. It's exciting to see how a flexible initial design allows to push the boundaries of replication with each new release. The recently published System of Record approach for multi-master databases does exactly this for multi-master databases.

Nevertheless, in today's database environments it is often not enough to move data, however well it is done, between the nodes of a single DBMS vendor like MySQL.  There is an entirely new set of challenges that appear when Oracle joins the Enterprise room.

This week, ten years ago, I was in London for MySQL AB‘s first “train the trainer” course, also meeting (for the first time) my first boss at MySQL Kaj. I’d been hired mid August as employee#25, also doing training but actually primarily as tech-writer for the MySQL documentation (taking over from Jeremy Cole, and essentially I was the documentation team for quite some time . So from this you can deduce that yes, I was hired without meeting either Kaj or anyone in-person! I don’t think we even had a phone call, only email. Oh the days

The training week itself was of course disrupted quite a bit by the events in New York. We had Jeremy who had come on a UA flight from the US, and others from all over the place… it also taught …

It has arrived, a little over a month from the last beta release, is MariaDB 5.3.1. It is a bug-fix update and as always the changelog lists everything that has been fixed. The release notes list all the changes present in the 5.3-series.

Many fixes are in the optimizer updates that showed itself in MariaDB 5.3.0-beta, plus backports from the MySQL 5.6 feature preview trees. Microsoft Windows is also important to the MariaDB project so there are plenty of updates for that platform. What are you waiting for, download it now.

In July I wrote a blog post MySQL community counseling: talking about your feelings. It was triggered by an earlier blog post and followup threads on Google plus by Monty Taylor, Andrew Hutchings, etc... (everyone involved in that outburst have apologized and moved on long ago). I wanted to use that opportunity to highlight what I call our hidden trauma related to the Oracle acquisition of Sun, things that I still hear being discussed today, 2 years later, and things that I consider unresolved or unsolved that I see causing friction and misunderstandings - the kind of which that outburst too represented. Both before and after writing it I wondered if it was a good idea to publish it - I wondered whether I would be seen as helping to solve the problem or just contributing to it. I actually got some positive feedback about it, …

Installing MySQL Administrator Tool To Connect To Remote Databases

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install MySQL Admin tool on an Ubuntu 11.04 system and how to connect to a remote host with it. This should also work on most Debian based operating systems.