Today we at Monty Program Ab and our dear friends at Percona announced the Open Database Alliance. Click the name for the full press release.

If you are a MySQL hacker, user, documentation writer, or just an interested bystander, we’re ensuring the database software you have come to know and love, and with which you (quite rightly) feel a sense of shared ownership, stays Free and open. Not only are we going to keep the same development and participation model with which you are familiar, but we are going to open the project even wider. Got patches? We want them! Got questions, comments, or other issues? We want to hear them, and we will respond in meaningful ways! Got production deployments of MySQL? We will keep you up and running without labyrinthine …

If you participate at all in the MySQL Meetup circuit, by now it’s likely you’ve heard that the agreement currently in place between Meetup.com and MySQL/Sun is expiring quite soon. Because of that, MySQL Meetups which used to be free for organizers are reverting to paid status very soon (costing the organizer at least $12 per month). MySQL Meetup organizers (like myself) have received an email from Meetup.com giving them 7 days warning. MySQL/Sun have suggested that all MySQL Meetups move to Facebook.

I don’t know all of the details of MySQL and Meetup.com’s prior arrangement for this sponsorship, but from …

I want to show my personal appreciation for Boston by sponsoring the MySQL User Group for one year. I am doing that with my own money, without involving my company.
You can also donate for a MySQL user group, if you want, using the Technocation fund.
You …

Here is the performance graph comparing using
InnoDB Thread Concurrency equal to 0 and
InnoDB Thread Concurrency equal to 24 using
sysbench readwrite with the new InnoDB
Thread concurrency algorithm as introduced
in MySQL 5.4.0.

One of the goals we had originally with the MySQL 5.4
development was to improve scaling from 4 cores to
8 cores. So in my early testing I ran comparisons of
the Google SMP + IO + tcmalloc patches on 4, 8 and 12
cores to see how it behaved compared with a stock
MySQL 5.1.28 version (Note the comparison here was
done on a very early version of 5.4, 5.4.0 have a
set of additional patches applied to it).



What we can see here is that the Google SMP patch and use
of tcmalloc makes a difference already on a 4-core server
using 4 threads. On 1 and 2 threads the difference is only
on the order of 1-2% so not really of smaller significance.

An interesting note in the graph is that 8-core numbers using
the Google …

I really like the idea of Planet MySQL. Lots of good information in one place, for reference and for news and what have you not. But why, in heavens name, can I not search?

It's not that I cannot use Google, if needed (and if you do, search for site:http://planet.mysql.com, not for http://www.planet.mysql.com, although both URLs gets you to Planet MySQL, the latter will find.. Nothing (the first is the "real" URL also).

Maybe, if I could ask for something more, would it be possible to have a means of categorizing all the posts, at times, there is just too much stuff going on. I don't think anyone can keep up with and read all the posts. Even myself I blog on different aspects of MySQL and OSS. This would surely add a level of organization. How this would work, I don't know for sure, but it would be nice.

And also, maybe just a means of looking at the blog overview in some different ways, like showing …

In the wake of Meetup.com changing their sponsorship agreements, Technocation, Inc., an international not-for-profit group, has set up a fund for user group sponsorships. You can use the button below to donate any amount of money in US funds via PayPal:

(all monies sent through that button will be earmarked as a directed donation to the “User Group Fund”. In the interest of not cluttering up this blog post with a Donate button for each currency, you can use PayPal to send funds in *any* currency to “donate@technocation.org”. Just be sure to specify if you want the money to go to specifically to the User Group Fund.*)

Note that meetup.com’s fees are $144 per year ($12 per month).

Four years ago, MySQL and Meetup.com entered into an agreement. I have no idea of the details of this sponsorship, though from reading in between the lines, I believe the sponsorship was an in-kind sponsorship — that is, …

If you can't join us tonight for the Meetup event in London, don't
worry, I am sure you will find lots of info and comments on Twitter.

The official tag is #mysqlldn

I recent visit with old Brisbane friend HiTCHO which I met at the Brisbane MySQL Users Group in 2005, has lead to this cool list of some hardware and software technologies he used that I am now considering or have already implemented or purchased.

Software

1. xmarks.com - Bookmark-Powered Web Discovery
2. Pulse - Smart Pen
3. Quicksilver Mac windows manager
4. MailPlane - Brings Gmail to your Mac desktop
5. Evernote - Remember Everything, with Firefox plugin and iPhone App
6. …

Early on in the MySQL 5.4 development we tried out the
impact of the Google SMP patch and the Google IO patch.
At first we wanted to see which of the patches that
made most of an impact. The Google patches in MySQL 5.4
have 3 components at least that impact the performance.
1) Replace InnoDB memory manager by a malloc variant
2) Replace InnoDB RW-lock implementation
3) Make InnoDB use more IO threads

When disabling the InnoDB one opens up for a whole array
of potential candidates for malloc. Our work concluded
that tcmalloc behaved best on Linux and mtmalloc was
best on Solaris, see blog posts on Solaris below.

Malloc on Solaris investigation

Battle of the …