By now you are probably aware that the European Commission has decided to launch an extended investigation into Oracle’s acquisition of Sun based on concerns over MySQL.

The new has prompted a lot of criticism of the EC, much of it suggesting that the delay will do considerable harm to Sun (and therefore Oracle). This argument is valid - Sun’s already declining revenue has been in freefall since the deal was announced and one wonders how far it will fall in another 90 days of stasis.

Other criticism, (such as this from Matt Asay) focuses on the suggestion that the delay will do little to help MySQL or its users, and that the EC fails to understand open source.

This also has some …

Being tired of spending 5-10 hours per week poking things you take for granted to make them work, I recently ditched the Linux on a laptop idea and got a mac. Haven't looked back, although there are some grave annoyances in the interface between the slick OS X and the applications from the Unix world. Clipboard is one of those. No matter how hard I punced Ctrl-V like you're supposed to, I did not get it to work. All my colleagues gave me that look when I asked them about my problem. 'Well - um - you do know that you shouldn't use cmd-V, right?'. Duh! That wasn't problem. After spending hours sifting through discussion boards and blogs telling me exactly that same thing, I finally found a friendly person who would actually acknowledge that there was a problem here. A big hand for D. W. Hoard:
…

Today the European Commission expressed their concern about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, framed in the context of the database market.

What strikes me as particularly funny in the reportage on this story is many analysts’ claims that MySQL has a small market share. I’ll pick on Gartner here:

“MySQL has extremely small market share,” said Andy Butler, an analyst with IT research firm Gartner. “The E.C. is losing sight of the big picture and is bringing about a more anticompetitive situation by focusing on one product at the expense of the other moving parts.”

This quote is pulled from a Wall Street Journal article that posits, “Many analysts believe the commission’s focus on …

I thought I would introduce my hobby project tweet2email.com.

I created Tweet 2 Email because I had certain people I follow in Twitter who do not post very regularly, but whose updates I do not want to miss in the flow of more regular posters. Tweet 2 Email allows you to follow someone via email by sending you hourly digests of a selected user’s updates. I later added the ability to subscribe to a Twitter search, allowing you to keep up with a given subject.

I built it using PHP, MySQL and a PHP-Twitter library I tweaked for my purposes.

I’m still testing and improving it, but if you need to track something in Twitter I invite you to give it a try.

MySQL's compressed protocol is not so widely used, but there are still users that use it. Thus, the need to implement it in mysqlnd.

Unfortunately the compressed protocol is full of landmines, a lot of them, exploding one by one.

We are proud to announce the next service release of MySQL Workbench 5.1.18. We have fixed another set of bugs and made some improvements you people have been asking for. We have optimized the layout of the Columns-section in our table-editor considering the ideas and exeriences you posted in feature requests, bug-reports and on the forums. Now it should provide a smoother more comfortable workflow.
As already reported in previous blog-posts, this version is also compatible with Apples recently released version of OSX – 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Detailed information on the fixes can be found on our Releases Page.

The new files are available on our download page:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/5.1.html

If you encounter problems or have any questions, you …

A quick tip. When placing a VM for an application/app server that connects to a VM running MySQL, you will get bus level (as opposed to network) data transfer rates over their Virtual NICs when installed on the same baremetal hypervisor. Something to consider.

This comes rather quickly as the last revision – 150 was just uploaded a few days ago. This is because there was a new method of checking config options in the bin/ scripts that utilizes the codeigniter config files instead of config.cfg in the base directory, the problem was the all of the required bin/ [...]

The MySQL 5.1.38 release is available today with the InnoDB Plugin (1.0.4) included in the software distribution.  The InnoDB Plugin offers some key features: Improved performance and scalability.

Important management features that will be very helpful to MySQL DBAs.     I recommend you look into the new features available with the InnoDB Plugin. The InnoDB Plugin (1.0.4) is at end of beta

If you are unfamiliar with what to monitor in MySQL, starting with looking at what popular Monitoring products monitor. For example, the following is the list of MySQL Cacti Plugin measurements.

Innodb Buffer Pool Activity

• Pages Created
• Pages Written
• Pages Read

Innodb Buffer Pool Pages

• Pool Size
• Database Pages
• Free Pages
• Modified Pages

Inoodb File I/O

• File Reads
• Files Writes
• Log Writes
• File Fsyncs

Innodb Pending I/O

• Aio Log Ios
• Aio Sync ios
• Buffer Pool Flushes
• Chkp Writes
• Ibuf Aio Reads
• Log Flushes
• Log Writes
• Normal Aio Reads …