“… when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” --Tony “Scarface” Montana

In the world of computing, first you get the users, then you get the applications, then you get the power. What do I mean by power? In a word “platform”. If the only way for users to get applications is through you, and the only way for application developers to get to users is through you, then you are a platform. If you continue to nurture and grow your platform, your company is immortal and it is a goose that will continue to lay golden eggs.

To get the users, you need to deliver immediate value. Once you achieve critical mass of users, the developers will start showing up, whether you want them or not. A good example of this was Myspace. They attracted so many users, that developers started providing extensions directly to these users without Myspace’s …

I’ve tallied up the number of downloads since we migrated to the Google Code repository back in April and am pleased to announce that we have crested 550 downloads from unique client IP addresses. Not bad for a new application that doesn’t advertise aside from RSS syndication to Planet MySQL. I’d like to take the [...]

One of the elements that I have wanted to add to the installation chapter for some time has been some flowcharts to make understanding the steps required to successfully complete an installation on various platforms. The Windows one is the most interesting, because not only do we have the installer, but we also have the MySQL Server Instance Config Wizard which has its own sequence of steps to configure an instance of the server. I’m still working out and refining the examples and the graphics, but here is an example of the config wizard output:

Hopefully the full suite of images will be in the documentation shortly – all …

In what is sure to the the most exciting release announcement of the day (ahem), Monty Program and the MariaDB community are happy to announce the immediate availability of a (mostly?) stable beta release of MariaDB 5.1!

This is a beta. It may well have undiscovered bugs or features that are not fully baked. But the expectation is that we have fixed most of the issues like these, and so we’re looking to the broader community to help us get to a state where we can offer a Release Candidate. So start hammering on MariaDB, and be sure to report any bugs.

If you’re curious as to what we have baked into MariaDB 5.1, and what differentiates us from our upstream project, be sure to look over our guide to …

Amazon’s SimpleDB isn’t a relational database, but it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability. Amazon’s recently announced Relational Database Services (RDS) is a relational database, but it doesn’t provide elastic scalability or high-availability. If you are deploying enterprise applications on the cloud (including Amazon Web Services), you might want to look at ScaleDB because it is a relational database and it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability.

Amazon describes SimpleDB by comparing it to a clustered database:

"A traditional, clustered relational database requires a sizable upfront capital outlay, is complex to design, and often requires extensive and repetitive database administration. Amazon SimpleDB is dramatically simpler, requiring no schema, automatically indexing your data and providing a simple API for storage and access. This approach eliminates the administrative burden of …

Amazon’s SimpleDB isn’t a relational database, but it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability. Amazon’s recently announced Relational Database Services (RDS) is a relational database, but it doesn’t provide elastic scalability or high-availability. If you are deploying enterprise applications on the cloud (including Amazon Web Services), you might want to look at ScaleDB because it is a relational database and it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability.

Amazon describes SimpleDB by comparing it to a clustered database:

"A traditional, clustered relational database requires a sizable upfront capital outlay, is complex to design, and often requires extensive and repetitive database administration. Amazon SimpleDB is dramatically simpler, requiring no schema, automatically indexing your data and providing a simple API for storage and access. This approach eliminates the administrative burden of …

As an alternative to another recent blog post that answered the question “how can I truncate all the tables in my database,” I thought I’d show another way to do it, which does not use the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.

$ wget http://www.maatkit.org/get/mk-find
$ perl mk-find --exec 'TRUNCATE TABLE %D.%N'

The other example is how to alter MyISAM tables to be InnoDB. That one’s easy, too. Let’s alter all MyISAM tables in the ‘test’ database:

$ wget http://www.maatkit.org/get/mk-find
$ perl mk-find test --engine MyISAM --exec 'ALTER TABLE %D.%N ENGINE=InnoDB'

If you want to print out the commands instead of executing them, you can just use –printf instead of –exec.

Why would you do it this way instead of through the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database? I don’t think this can be …

If you are trying to contact Kontrollsoft via ICQ to get support please write something useful in the contact message. We’ve been getting lots of spammy nonsense in the contact messages and therefore not adding those users to our contact list. Sorry if you have been dropped by the contact but be smart and write [...]

So you're a small startup company, ready to go live with your product, which you intend to distribute under an Open Source License. Congratulations, you made a wise decision! Your developers have been hacking away frantically, getting the code in good shape for the initial launch. Now it's time to look into what else needs to be built and setup, so you're ready to welcome the first members of your new community and to ensure they are coming back!

Keep the following saying in mind, which especially holds true in the Open Source world: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression!". While the most important thing is of course to have a compelling and useful product, this blog post is an attempt to highlight some other aspects about community building and providing the adequate infrastructure. This insight is based on my own experiences and my …

I'm pleased to announce the release of Spider storage engine version 2.7(beta).
Spider is a Storage Engine for database sharding.
http://spiderformysql.com/

The main changes in this version are following.
- Spider table can load balance using multiple links at searching without locking. Load balance rule is "((server_id + thread_id) % number_of_links)".
  Please write multiple connection informations splitting space characters at "host", "user", "table", "server", "socket", "wrapper", "database" and "password" table parameters.
  Example: "host 'h1 h2 h3'"

I will continue to develop Spider's functions for Active-Active type clustering.

Please see "99_change_logs.txt" in the download documents for checking other changes.

Enjoy!