Searching for MySQL with WolframAlpha, the latest entry in the search engines arena, I had a surprise:

Interpreting "mysql" as "mycil"
Input interpretation:
 chlorphenesin

A further search for chlorphenesin, explains that it is a drug pertaining to the "central muscle relaxants" category.

• Introduction
• The Problem with the Relational Database (Part 2) – Predictability

This is the first detail post in a series I am doing focusing on the issues that exist today with the Relational Database.  This first post is on the deployment model.  It could be argued that this isn’t directly related to the “relational database” but rather is an implementation model problem.  I disagree with this as many characteristics of the relational database lead to the deployment model …

Looks like there is hope yet for the owners of the MySQL copyright to bring around their development. There is a proposal (actually it seems its already decided to ahead with it) up on their public wiki that details a development approach that could finally become compatible with the real world, rather than managers checking off feature lists. Maybe its too late already, but maybe its just in time to "fend off" the increasing competition for who provides the best MySQL distribution.

The term “data warehouse” was coined some 20 years ago to represent the process and technologies used to maintain a copy of operational data for decision support purposes.  That is, as companies processed more and more transactions (eg, retail point-of-sales, banking withdrawals / deposits, airline reservations, etc) it made sense to store and maintain a copy of the data to allow people to analyze and optimize the business.

Today, data warehousing is a $20B+ industry and growing.  The market can be segmented by size into “high-end data warehouses” with 10’s to 100’s of terabytes of information, and “mass-market data warehouses” with less than 10 terabytes.  The high end of the data warehouse market accounts for over half of the spend, but only 10% of the potential deployments.

Predictably, most of the competition …

We are happy to announce that MySQL Proxy 0.7.1 is available in a source and binary release for many popular platforms.

This release contains a few minor bugfixes and changes in directory layout over the previous 0.7.0 release.

• moved plugins to lib/mysql-proxy/plugins
• moved lua modules to lib/mysql-proxy/lua
• moved libs to lib/

Please report any problems on http://bugs.mysql.com, our Launchpad discussion mailing list at https://launchpad.net/~mysql-proxy-discuss or on IRC: #mysql-proxy on irc.freenode.net.

Please note that the binary for Windows is currently still the old 0.6.1 release and will be updated …

We are happy to announce that MySQL Proxy 0.7.1 is available in a source and binary release for many popular platforms.

This release contains a few minor bugfixes and changes in directory layout over the previous 0.7.0 release.

• moved plugins to lib/mysql-proxy/plugins
• moved lua modules to lib/mysql-proxy/lua
• moved libs to lib/

Please report any problems on http://bugs.mysql.com, our Launchpad discussion mailing list at https://launchpad.net/~mysql-proxy-discuss or on IRC: #mysql-proxy on irc.freenode.net.

Please note that the binary for Windows is currently still the old 0.6.1 release and will be updated …

We’re proud to announce the availability of the 2nd alpha-version of MSQL Workbench 5.2. As you may already know, this is the youngest member of the workbench-family and also the version that adds another role - the one of the database-querying-tool - to the application. There have been major enhancements - not only to the querying part - since we released the first alpha version. Please keep in mind that this is still an alpha version and it’s not recommended for use in a production environment. While most parts of the final application are already in place there are still a few things left to implement or details subject to change. Please download the program, take it for a test-drive and tell us what you think.

Source code and binary packages of MySQL Workbench 5.2.1 OSS for Windows, Mac OS X Leopard and some Linux distributions are freely available for download at:

…

The MySQL May conference keynote videos and presentations files are all posted so you can download the ones you're interested in now. Embedded below is the video and slide deck for my keynote on Thursday.

The gist of this presentation is that business intelligence and analytics are the #1 IT spending priority, BI technology is becoming a commodity, open source BI and DW tools are maturing, and the supporting stats about open source BI and DW adoption.

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Since writing and speaking a bit more about the “relax! a failure is not an emergency” concept, more and more people approach me with interesting horror stories. I’m scribbling a few backup-related ones here for your enjoyment - and naturally there are important lessons.

Story 1: A place makes backups that get shipped off-site, interstate even. One day a couple of files are lost, and so someone files a request to retrieve said files from the archive. Well, apparently that’s something that should be done as it creates some very stressed responses and a quoted timeline of a few weeks. In the end the issue is resolved through other means and the request stopped - unfortunate, since it would have been very interesting if the requested files would actually ever arrive… clearly a retrieval was not part of the expected process. One also wonders how long a full dataset retrieval would take, or if  it’s even possible!