SQL Antipatterns, by Bill Karwin, Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2010. About 300 pages. Here’s a link to the publisher’s site.

I loved this book. (Disclosure: Bill is a colleague of mine.) This is the first book I’ve read from the Pragmatic Bookshelf, and if the rest are like this one, I want to read them. The quality of the writing is way above the average technical book. Techniques that feel gimmicky and forced in other books, such as fake stories to introduce each chapter, actually work here (because they’re real stories, not fake ones). Each topic is named in a memorable way and introduced very …

Virtual and persistent columns are a feature of MariaDB 5.2+, and HeidiSQL's table editor now fully supports them. Just update your HeidiSQL to the latest build to see this in action.



Also, if you are on a MariaDB server, a brown seal icon in the tree and in the status bar now indicates the right server vendor:

The SELF Linux show ramps up to full swing tomorrow. We will have the new MySQL 5.5 shirts as well as Linux shirts. Please stop by say hi and get a shirt while they last!
I was glad to see the support for MySQL on day one, can't wait until tomorrow.
http://www.southeastlinuxfest.org/

Yet more Apache OpenOffice fall-out. Bacula Systems raises $5m. And more.

# As the proposal to incubate OpenOffice.org at Apache went live, controversy about the proposal continued. The Free Software Foundation unsurprisingly voiced its support in favour of the LGPL LibreOffice project,which Keith Curtis outlined his opposition to the plan.

# Bacula Systems raised $5m from KM Capital Partners and from the Swiss Canton of Vaud.

# Joe Brockmeier …

One of the long term testing goals for Drizzle is to move all of our test logic directly in-tree.  Currently, we use a system called drizzle-automation to execute a variety of tests for our staging branch.  This is the final set of tests patches must pass before being allowed to merge into Drizzle trunk and includes things like sysbench, dbt2, the randgen, etc.  With the development of dbqp, we can now move this testing logic directly into the tree (and even move some of the testing tools there as well).  Of course, I’ve rambled on about this before, but I personally think it is cool and useful ; )  However enough of the sales pitch, on to the new modes!

sysbench mode

With but a simple incantation of ./dbqp –mode=sysbench [–suite=readonly|readwrite], you too can invoke the mighty sysbench configurations that we use to ensure …

I was at a conference recently talking with a Major Cloud Hosting Provider and mentioned that for database servers, I really want large instances, quite a bit larger than the largest I can get now. The lack of cloud servers with lots of memory, many fast cores, and fast I/O and network performance leads to premature sharding, which is costly. A large number of applications can currently run on a single real server, but would require sharding to run in any of the popular cloud providers’ environments. And many of those applications aren’t growing rapidly, so by the time they outgrow today’s hardware we can pretty much count on simply upgrading and staying on a single machine.

The person I was talking to actually seemed to become angry at me, and basically called me an idiot. This person’s opinion is that no one should be running on anything larger than 4GB of memory, and anyone who doesn’t build their system to be sharded …

MySQL Connector/Net 6.4.1, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This release is of Beta quality and is intended for testing and exposure to new features.  We strongly urge you to not use this release in a production environment.

Version 6.4.1 is intended for use with versions of MySQL from 5.0 – 5.5

It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.4.html] and mirror
sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time
- if you can’t find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

** New features found in 6.4 include (please see release notes for more information) **

* Windows Authentication*
This release includes our new support for Windows …

A few days ago Oracle offered me a position of Oracle ACE Director, and I accepted it. Thanks Oracle. I'm glad to see that Oracle has evaluated my activities and we can have a good relationships each other. Oracle has been great for MySQL so far and I'd be happy to keep contributions.

Since I live in Tokyo and my native language is Japanese, I usually do community activities in Japanese (speaking at conferences in Tokyo, publishing books written in Japanese, etc). I'd like to do more in English, and my employer DeNA thankfully supports it. Right now it's confirmed that I'll speak at OSCON.Data in July, and at Oracle Open World in October. Personally I haven't traveled to Europe for years so it's great if I have an opportunity to speak at MySQL/Linux conferences in Europe.

We are pleased to announce that MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.3.4 is now available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) and Oracle E-Delivery web sites as our latest GA release.  This is a maintenance release that fixes a number of bugs and contains some new features, including graph export. You can find more information on the contents of this release in the changelog:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-monitor/2.3/en/mem-news-2-3-4.html

You will find binaries for the new release on My Oracle Support:

https://support.oracle.com

Choose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then use the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" feature.

And from Oracle E-Delivery:

…

We are pleased to announce that MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.3.4 is now available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) and Oracle E-Delivery web sites as our latest GA release.  This is a maintenance release that fixes a number of bugs and contains some new features, including graph export. You can find more information on the contents of this release in the changelog:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-monitor/2.3/en/mem-news-2-3-4.html

You will find binaries for the new release on My Oracle Support:

https://support.oracle.com

Choose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then use the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" feature.

And from Oracle E-Delivery:

…