I know that you may have read about it before, but I want to summarize some interesting evolutions of MySQL and the Open Source adoption in Europe.
I will reflect on it with a specific focus on Italy, for two reasons: Italy is my home country and is of the territories where I work as a Sales Engineer (together with Iberia and Emerging Markets).

MySQL has just released survey of 637 small and medium-size businesses (less than 500 employees) in Europe documenting open source usage. According to the survey the future will be full of satisfaction for MySQL.

You can read the comments in Zack's post …

If you want to play with Amazon cloud computing stuff, I think using AWS Management Console web interface is the best, easiest, and most intuitive approach, based on my experience so far.

My usage with Amazon Web Services has been only with EC2 up to this point. Prior to AWS Management Console, I had to set up Java, EC2 API tools, various path and environmental variables, certificates, keys, etc., etc.. It is a fairly convoluted process.

AWS Management Console is much easier, except for downloading PuTTY and PuTTYgen on Windows and tsclient on Linux, and a private key pair, everything else is handled inside the browser. Here are a few things I learned:

• Once you are in, create a Key Pair. The web interface will prompt you to save it. Do so, because you will need it to start instances and, depending on what type of instances …

Feels like a long time ago, but my talk at the MySQL User’s Conference back in April 09 on running MySQL Multiple Times to get better performance is now available online at YouTube. The original PDF of the presentation is available here.View it here: YouTube – Improving Performance by Running MySQL Multiple Times

I am speaking at Enterprise LAMP Summit 2009 (and also should be speaking at the Camp the next day, but I see the schedule isn’t quite updated yet). My talk at the Summit will not be on the future landscape of MySQL – that’s a mistake. My talk’s title isn’t finalized yet. This conference is the first weekend in November, in the Nashville area. I hope to see you there!

I’ll be attending and presenting at the 2009 Central Pennsylvania Open-Source Conference. My session is on Maatkit. I see Tom Clark has a session on MySQL performance! I hope to see you there – I’ve really become a fan of these regional conferences. By the way, I’ve also created a speaker badge by adapting a wallpaper someone else made – you can find it on the sidebar of my blog if you’re also a speaker.

I'm pleased to announce the release of Spider storage engine version 2.5(beta) and Vertical Partitioning storage engine version 0.5(alpha).
Spider is a Storage Engine for database sharding.
http://spiderformysql.com/
Vertical Partitioning is a Storage Engine for vertical partitioning for a table.
http://launchpad.net/vpformysql

The main changes in this version are following.
- The standalone compilation with Vertical Partitioning storage engine is now available.

- Vertical Partitioning can be used for multi-step partitioning.
  Example:
    create table a(a int primary key)engine=myisam;
    create table b(a int primary key)engine=vp comment 'tnl "a"';
    create table c(a …

Feels like a long time ago, but my talk at the MySQL User’s Conference back in April 09 on running MySQL Multiple Times to get better performance is now available online at YouTube. The original PDF of the presentation is available here.

View it here: YouTube – Improving Performance by Running MySQL Multiple Times

Fairly often I hear customers say that they plan a table that accumulates millions of rows per day, and they want to keep around, say, the last 30 days worth of data. (For the sake of examples, I'm going to make it the last 3 days.) So this is a kind of round-robin table, with rolling addition of new data and removal of the oldest data.

With a high volume of data, this sounds like a table partitioned on day boundaries (in MySQL 5.1). See Sarah's blog and her links for a quick ramp-up on time-based table partitioning (http://everythingmysql.ning.com/profiles/blogs/partitioning-by-dates-the). One great benefit of table partitioning is that you can drop a partition to lose millions of rows in one quick statement, much faster than deleting millions of rows. Sort of like a partial TRUNCATE TABLE.

First create the table with 4 partitions, and then, once a day, drop the oldest partition and add another partition to store the …

How To Set Up Apache2 With mod_fcgid And PHP5 On Ubuntu 9.04

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on Ubuntu 9.04. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.

Some notes from my recent installation of MySQL 5.4.2-beta on a PPC G5 box running OSX 10.5.8. Hopefully these notes will save someone a bit of time when they begin the “I want to make my mac a development box” process. I’m not going to cover installing/configuring Apache and PHP since the web is full of those articles already.  So, first things first,  I downloaded the pkg file  – not the tarball – from the MySQL downloads site and installed the following files in the following order:

1. mysql-5.4.2-beta-osx10.5-powerpc-64bit.pkg
2. MySQLStartupItem.pkg
3. MySQL.prefPane

CNF File Settings

Here are some interesting settings that you may want to be aware of with 5.4 and OSX

• Do not set innodb_flush_method=fdatasync – it’s not a valid option, and the default after install is actually blank.
• Do not set “nice = …