My collagues Anders and even Ivan sometimes blog about the grandeur of being a Sales Engineer. And I agree, it is a great job, probably the best I ever had, so far. But let me share a secret: It's not as technical as you'd think. Sure, they call me a "pre-sales consultant" alright, but I would be ashamed of comparing my own work with those of the real consultants. I sometimes jokingly say that the most amazing technical things in my job are airplanes (they fly in the air!) and how to make a nice slideshow. (OpenOffice Impress sucks btw, and I always envy my OS X + Keynote using friends on this one point.) What I mean is, I mostly meet with customers and talk about the …

Zmanda is now offering to back-up MySQL databases to your choice of cloud locations. It's a good move and a great cloud use-case.

Reporter of bug #44604 pointed to common problem: "Why don't backport bugfix to previous major version?" Especially if this version is GA.

This particular bug seems to be fixed by redesign of MySQL Optimizer which was dramatically improved in version 6.0

At the same time while some feature is improved in new version backport this improvement or even part of it into older one is not easy and can lead to instability or affect other applications. There is always balance between risk and effort to fix.

Same reasons apply for other bugs in similar state.

Of course this applies only to bugs with good workaround or to rare cases and should never apply to crashing bugs. While sometime is not easy to properly fix crashing bug in stable version. Example of such a bug were …

In this post we’ll describe a query that accrued significant performance advantages from using a relatively long index key.  (This posting is by Zardosht and Bradley.)

We ran across this query recently when interacting with a customer (who gave us permission to post this sanitized version of the story):

SELECT name,
       Count(e2) AS CountOfe2
 FROM (SELECT distinct name, e2
        FROM (SELECT atable.NAME AS name,
                     pd1.NAME AS e2
               FROM atable INNER JOIN atable AS pd1
               ON  (atable.id = pd1.id)
               AND (atable.off = pd1.off)
               AND (atable.len = pd1.len)) ent
 WHERE ((ent.name<>ent.e2))) outside
 GROUP BY outside.name order by CountOfe2 desc;

With a table defined as

CREATE TABLE `atable` (
   `id` varchar(25) DEFAULT NULL,
   `off` bigint(20) DEFAULT NULL,
   `len` bigint(20) DEFAULT NULL,
   `name` …

"New Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping!" - Chevy Chase, Saturday Night Live

On a Saturday Night Live comedy skit, a husband is arguing that Shimmer is a dessert topping, while his wife insists that it’s a floor wax. Then the Shimmer spokesman-Chevy Chase-explains that it is both. While this juxtaposition is humorous, in many respects this is what databases have been doing for years. Instead of specializing on one specific task, most mainstream databases provide an acceptable combination of performance and capabilities across all use cases. The pluggable storage engine architecture is now changing this, ushering in an era of on-demand specialization.

MySQL allows you to select the storage engine not just for the application, but for each table used by the application. Let me use an analogy to describe how powerful this is. Consider an automobile that enables you to simply switch from one engine to another. You …

Infoworld has an article "The fight over open source 'leeches', about the failure of enterprises to contribute the changes they make to open source software back upstream to the project. "When it comes to open source communities, individuals are much better citizens than institutions. The enlightened self-interest that causes individuals to send back bug fixes, contribute ideas for new features, and write documentation is much harder to find in institutions," Dan Woods, CTO of Evolved Media, wrote in Forbes earlier this year. I have a very old article in my german language blog about Open Source Software and companies, and the infoworld article triggered me now to translate it:

Many companies do use open source, and that is a good thing. Most of …

We are pleased to announce the release of High Availability Cluster software for OpenSolaris 2009.06! If you've been following along, this release is the fruit of project Colorado. Open HA Cluster 2009.06 is based on Solaris Cluster 3.2, including many of the features from the most recent update. Additionally, Open HA Cluster 2009.06 contains the following new features:

• The ability to use Crossbow VNICs as …

Attendance is free. Please follow the instructions given in the …

We are pleased to announce the release of High Availability Cluster software for OpenSolaris 2009.06! If you've been following along, this release is the fruit of project Colorado. Open HA Cluster 2009.06 is based on Solaris Cluster 3.2, including many of the features from the most recent update. Additionally, Open HA Cluster 2009.06 contains the following new features:

• The ability to use Crossbow VNICs as …

We are pleased to announce the release of High Availability Cluster software for OpenSolaris 2009.06! If you've been following along, this release is the fruit of project Colorado. Open HA Cluster 2009.06 is based on Solaris Cluster 3.2, including many of the features from the most recent update. Additionally, Open HA Cluster 2009.06 contains the following new features:

• The ability to use Crossbow VNICs as …