I was happily snowboarding and skiing (the latter for the first time in two decades) last week, so here comes the year-end review a week late. Last year, I harped on Facebook's closed nature, and over the the year they've tried to open more of the users' data over to the Internet. Still, there are no decent APIs for a user to pull out everything they've posted to Facebook to have their own copy, though. That doesn't seem to stop them from dominating the Internet for the time being, though, so good for them.

I'm trying to think of what would have surprised me over the year, but given I failed to make many accurate predictions myself, things just seemed to happen in pretty natural direction. …

There is no denying that MySQL has a huge amount of momentum behind it. 10+ years as the leading free SQL database kinda does that. It has successfully changed the perception of databases - where people used to visualise big-iron mainframes in specially cooled rooms to where anyone can install it for free within 15 minutes.That is not what this blog post is about. The topic of today is the "Save

It's been interesting watching the MySQL drama unfold, but I have to take issue when people start trying to drag Postgres into it again by spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). Rather than simply rebut the FUD, I thought this was a good opportunity to examine the strength of the Postgres project.

Monty recently espoused the following in a blog comment:

Florian Mueller began 2010 by demonstrating why he was named EU Campaigner of the Year by the Economist magazine five years ago. While most of us were prepping for New Year's Eve celebrations or contemplating New Year's resolutions, Mueller and MySQL co-founder and creator Michael "Monty" Widenius spent Dec. 28 launching an online Save MySQL petition against the Oracle acquisition of MySQL via Sun. Mueller reports via e-mail:

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In part two of our article on DRBD and High Availability, we take you step-by-step through setting up Sun’s Virtualbox software, creating a couple of VMs, and then installing CentOS on those.  These two virtual Linux boxes then serve as two nodes in our DRBD mirrored disk setup which we use as a platform to install MySQL.

DRBD, MySQL and the Virtualbox Setup – Database Journal

Keep on the lookout for our third part in the series next month.  In that issue we’ll explain how the Linux Heartbeat project can be used to control the whole setup, and provide automatic failover in the event that one node goes down.

My colleagues Luca Olivari and Anders Karlsson mentioned the importance of an ecosystem, open source or not. I could not agree more. One of the fastest growing open source ecosystem is currently the Android ecosystem. Android also has a market place. Semantically, by the way there is a difference between a store (like Apple App Store) and a [...]

Since the European Commission announced it was opening an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle with a focus on MySQL there has been no shortage of opinion written about Oracle’s impending ownership of MySQL and its impact on MySQL users and commercial partners, as well as MySQL’s business model, dual licensing and the GPL.

In order to try and bring some order to the conversation, we have brought together some of the most referenced blog posts and news stories in chronological order.

Part one took us from the announcement of the EC’s in-depth investigation up to the eve of the communication of the EC’s Statement of Objections.

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Other day I noticed a case where loading the same set of data to InnoDB took only 10 minutes where as loading it to MyISAM took ~2 hours.

Digging it further found that it is all because of well known Repair with keycache issue. But for some reason, it took me a while to get to the root cause of the issue as it was working fine until few days. When MyISAM needs to repair the table (REPAIR, ALTER or LOAD or ENABLE KEYS); it uses two modes for repair:

• repair by sorting
• repair using keycache (falls to this mode by default if repair by sort fails for any reason)

first it tests if the table can be repaired by sorting provided it meets the following requirements:

• table at least has one key
• total size needed for individual key is less than myisam_max_sort_file_size

If it meets the above requirements, then …

My colleague Luca Olivari wrote about the excellent site GetApp.com, where you can find loads of good Open SOurce applications. Where Luca goes wrong though is when he compares this to AppStore for iPhone. Apple does encourage iPhone application development, but it is not Open Source, which is why one crucial Web component is missing: a Flash plug-in. Yes, for those of you without an iPhone, you can NOT view Flash-based pages with an iPhone. The reason? Apple will not allow one, at least not yet, and Adobe has not announced a player for the iPhone.

Although the Flash player in and of itself is not Open Source, this still shows what an active eco-system can do for you, it will encourage and promote more and innovative development. Looking at the competing Android platform (I'm on an Acer Liquid myself), a Flash player has been announced, but is not yet released. The eco-system around …

A few days ago MySQL 5.1.42 got released and it is now available with builds for MacOS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)! The download website doesn't show it yet, but if you are burning to try, you can get it from the mirror-picking-website.

As usual, don't forget to checkout the changelog before upgrading!

If you want to compile it yourself, and need a universal binary, you could try my previous blog entry «Building MySQL universal binaries using MacOS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)». …