There are a number of new and enhanced storage engines that promise increased scalability, performance and important new online features. All this competition with storage engines is going to create a win for the MySQL community. This competition is what open source is all about. If you do not continue to innovate and improve you cannot expect to be a leader in the open source world. The nice

What is the future of MySQL? This is a question that interests many.

To be specific: Will there be significant performance improvements? Code contributions? Bug fixes? New features? Open Source licensed documentation? Will the users be happy with the Monthly Rapid Updates now released for the MySQL Community Server?

On another, more competitive level: Will there be successful forks? What will the MySQL AB founders do? What is Percona’s next move?

Julian Cash, known for his visionary photography, extended his scope during a Wednesday session at the MySQL Conference. Hard work during his predictive session gave me insight. I now know the answers.

However, I’m afraid I cannot share the revelations on this blog. What I can do, though, is to point to Julian Cash’s site “The Human Creativity Project”, and to the visible results of his other …

The development model for MySQL Enterprise took a big step forward with the new community process Karen Padir announced in her Tuesday keynote. This is great for both the open source server as well as enterprise customers, because the closer the tie between the community and the development path, the better the quality and faster the progress towards new functionality. I'm not entirely sure everyone at Sun still completely understands why a working community process is a benefit for the enterprise customer base, but I'm happy steps are made in the right direction, and it seems to me that Karen Padir is going to be a good leader for the product.

A big improvement, for sure, and still there's more to improve …

This was an interesting week for sure. Of course, we all know it started with a bit of a shock news, but that's not nearly the most interesting bit about the conference. I'm posting a series of cleaned-up notes and opinions about what I saw there as I finish them. Will also try to link to further information where I've seen good notes. Please leave more links in the comments if you have any!

• My own presentation materials and the extended articles on data domains and log processing
• …

Way back on Monday (at the MySQL Conference and Expo), I gave a full day tutorial on MySQL Cluster. I awoke early in the morning to a “oh ha ha” URL in an IM; but no, it wasn’t jetlag playing tricks with me. Luckily, this didn’t take much (if anything) away from the purpose of the day: teaching people about NDB.

Distracting-and-this-time-really-annoying-thing-of-the-day-2: It seems that O’Reilly had cut back on power this year, and there were no power boards in the room. A full day interactive tutorial, and nowhere to plug in laptops. Hrrm.. Luckily, having over the many years I’ve been speaking at this event, I’ve gotten to …

Special thanks to all those who came out for the MySQL Workbench Tutorial and Workshop sessions, I hope they were of use to you.

The materials are now online. A PDF of the slides is available here and a video of the slides and speaker is available here. These materials are also listed on my Presentations page.

Please note that the video is RTSP streaming MP4, allowing you to jump around the video at will. You’ll need Quicktime, VLC or another appropriate player to view it. I’m trying something new with the built in camera on my laptop, providing a video image of the speaker along with the slides. Let me know what you …

Here is how to install and start MySQL Cluster 7.0.5 in eight steps:

1. Go to the configurator and setup the configuration you wish to have. Make sure you select "MySQL Cluster 7.0.x" in the first drop down.
   
2. Copy the package you either download or receive by email to one of the computers that will run one of the management servers.
3. tar xvfz mysqlcluster-70.tgz
4. cd mysqlcluster-70/scripts/install
   
5. Download MySQL Cluster 7.0 from MySQL website and put it in mysqlcluster-70/scripts/install
6. sh dist-tgz.sh
   
7. sh bootstrap.sh
   
8. cd .. && sh start-cluster-initial.sh

Okay, step 1) …

Cacti is a great tool for collecting information about systems and graphing it. However, it likes to use SNMP, and SNMP is often not desirable. Instead, I often see the need for a method that is:

• Secure. Use trusted, well-known, encrypted communication. Do not open up new ports.
• Zero install on the monitored system.
• As little installation or modification on the monitoring system as possible.

Over the last several years, I’ve slowly created more and more software to create Cacti graphs via standard POSIX command-line utilities over SSH with key-pair authentication. (I’ve also created similar software for Nagios, but that’s another matter.) The major problem with the work I’ve done is that it’s totally un-publicized.

The system works by passing command-line arguments to a local PHP script like any other Cacti script. This …

The MySQL UC 2009 is over and I got bored in the evening before I had to leave Santa Clara and decided to play again with query caching in mysqlnd. I have always said that mysqlnd is ready for it, the infrastructure is there and that we need just few changes to make it work. Well, I decided to bite the bullet and do it. Spent about 4h in the evening and on the next day 2h while waiting on the San Jose (SJC) airport and continued on the flight to Denver, where I am having vacation. On the plane I was almost ready and today I made the final changes to the preliminary patch, that seems to work :)

I did a small benchmark, a microbenchmark.

The slides for my session on Maatkit at the MySQL Conference are uploaded. They should appear on the speaker presentation files page, but I have heard that it can take a few days. Please let me know if they’re not there by May 1, 2009.

I did not have time to plow through everything in the slides. (I deliberately prepared more material than I could cover, and just stopped when I ran out of time.) Alas, I did not remember to take my voice recorder that day, so I have no audio to share with you!