So you’ve finally caught on with the hype, and you’re seriously considering using Amazon RDS for your database needs. Here are ten things you ought to know before you take the leap:

10. Amazon RDS uses a patched version of MySQL 5.1.38. While several discussions within MySQL forums allude to a growing concern that Amazon may not have the required expertise for upgrading and maintaining patched versions of MySQL, the fact still remains that Amazon has enough resources to just buy them from other vendors who do. The patch enables MySQL to scale dynamically in the cloud, besides adding other features.

9. EC2, EBS, and RDS: Connecting the dots. Amazon RDS DB instances are basically instances of MySQL running on an EC2 platform. Persistent storage (for back-ups, etc.) is allocated in EBS volumes. However, neither can you access the underlying EC2 instance nor can you use S3 to access your stored …

On the eve of Microsoft’s announcement of the public release of SQL Azure Database, Amazon decides to release RDS. And that, too, after having resisted users’ demands for a relational database service for a very long time. Preemptive action, perhaps? Whatever it may be, I believe that such a healthy competition can do much good to the Cloud marketplace.

RDS brings with it the promise of MySQL on a Cloud. Having been a MySQL fan for quite some time now, I was itching to get my hands on an AWS account and check out what the hype was all about. Imagine my confusion when I signed up for Amazon RDS and all the AWS Management Console showed me was the EC2 dashboard! It was time I downloaded the Getting Started Guide and went through the rigmarole of studying it.

Setting up the Command Line Interface Tools

Apparently, there is no GUI yet for RDS. The only way to go about using it is through the CLI tools. Setting up the tools, …

The sources are available all time - though not per ZIP download between the releases - but via Subversion repository:

* Browse through files: http://code.google.com/p/heidisql/source/browse/#svn/trunk
* Check out with a client like TortoiseSVN: http://code.google.com/p/heidisql/source/checkout

The database layer is located here:
* http://code.google.com/p/heidisql/source/browse/trunk/source/mysql_connection.pas
* …

HeidiSQL now uses a more lightweight database layer to access MySQL servers. This completely new written layer consists of just two units and replaces the big ZeosDBO package - which worked well over the years, but I felt that here and there developping new features regarding the libmysql API was a pain.

Unfortunately there is nothing to show you here, no screenshot available, but in fact that was one of the most critical change over the last year.

* The UPX compressed executable's size has decreased from 1,1M to 900K.
* Should also result in better performance in some cases.

Didn't take too much notice of our download numbers recently, so I saw a nice number today: ~130,000 downloads of the 4.0 release.

Together with
* 230,000 downloads of HeidiSQL 3.2
* 90,000 downloads of source packages, portable and various older releases
* 50,000 downloads from pre-Google-Code times for which I don't have statistics

... we have 500,000 downloads total!

More statistics:
* Average size of one downloaded file is ~2MB
* HeidiSQL development started ~3 years ago in late 2006 (ignoring old MF2.5 times)
* Makes ~900 MB / ~450 files of downloads each day

A big thank to all and each user out there!

Recently we have released Workbench 5.2.4 Alpha. This version has some new features, and amongst them there is Workbench Administrator plugin or WBA plugin for short.

The plugin aims to ease the managing process of server instances. What we offer with WBA is a simple way to check status, configure and control one server instance. Some parts will resemble discontinued MySQL Administrator.

And here is a short summary of what we will have in WBA:

• Start/Stop server
• Edit server configuration (my.cnf)
• Manage user accounts
• Monitor user connections
• Status/Server variables browsing
• Log browsing
• Dump/Restore

In this alpha we have implemented a subset, which targets local usage only. Remote management and administration is upcoming. The subset includes:

• Add new Server Profiles
• Start/Stop the Server
…

Recently I decided to build my own forum software so I'm able to better control spam posts and make posting easier than it ever was.

All user accounts including passwords were imported into my new database. Only the name of the permanent cookie has changed so you might have to login once before posting now.

Email addresses are nowhere displayed, except for the settings page where you only see the more compact options, including a checkbox to turn email notification on replies on and off.

I'm going to add some formatting buttons to the posting form, and maybe some pulldown for smilies. Currently you can only post plain text messages, which is sufficient in many cases.

I'm also going to add support for creating Subversion revision URLs, automatically created if you type

r1234

. Same goes for issue ids when you want to refer to a bug report.

I hope you like …

Ever wanted to find a text string in a whole database? Using a nightly build, now you are able to do that, even your whole server can be selected. Just press Ctrl+Shift+F to call the "table tools" dialog.

The maintenance dialog was refactored recently to allow different tabs and actions. Probably you have ideas for further tabs here - please post them in our feature tracker!

So, it turned out fixing the Workbench crash on Snow Leopard wasn’t very hard. Took a little time to find out what was causing the crash but, once that was found, the fix was quick.

The next releases of both branches — MySQL Workbench 5.1.18 this week and 5.2.3 alpha later on — will have proper support for Mac OS X 10.6

For whoever might be interested, the bug was caused by what seems to be a slight change in how object/NSView copies are handed in Cocoa. NSCollectionView items are populated by copying a “prototype” object. It seems that somehow, duplication of that object included the fields of child objects as well in Leopard, but not in Snow Leopard. The object copies were incomplete and when they were accessed, it ended up attempting to create a C++ string out of nil.

Things are growing yet again at work and with it the number of people needed to keep things flowing smoothly. This time it’s the Sales Engineer team that needs a new person, working in the Baltimore/Washington area (our home office):

Responsibilities

• Provide exemplary pre-sales technical expertise through technical and product presentations, product demonstrations, pilot implementations, beta program administration, consistent communication, and on-going technical consultation.
• Translate complex technical problems for non-technical clients as well as translating non-technical specifications into precise technical requirements.
• Meet with clients to evaluate their current systems and needs and make recommendations for software and hardware and integration.
• Travel approximately 30% in support of sales and customer activities.
• Respond to RFIs, RFPs and serve as …