In a Financial Times report today about RedHat's quarterly earnings, Sam Ramji of Microsoft takes note of MySQL and its influence as a key component in the general move towards open-source software:

Larger deployments of open-source to firms that already run the technology in a small way might be the most that happens, due to the fact that recessions make IT managers worry about risk. For the same reasons, a recession is not the time to switch a workforce to a new technology.

Microsoft is counting on that, while accepting that every leading company will soon be running at least some open-source software.

“It’s a heterogeneous world,” said Microsoft’s Sam Ramji. While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji’s role is to make sure …

Sailfin is the open source implementation of Sun Glassfish Communications Server which basically is Glassfish with support for SIP servlets. It allows you to create converged communication services and has some interesting features that together with MySQL Cluster creates very a nice highly available and high performance service execution environment (a white paper on this at mysql.com). 

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This year I am again giving a MySQL Cluster Tutorial at the MySQL Conference and Expo. As those who have attended before can tell you, this is a hands on tutorial. I don’t just stand up the front and talk at you for a day, that would be very boring (for all of us). While there is a good amount of presented material (there is a decent amount of theory to get through), there is a large component that involves setting up a cluster, putting data in, getting data out, backup, restore.

So if you’re wanting to learn about MySQL Cluster in a nice and friendly hands-on environment, I can recommend coming to my tutorial.

The tutorial isn’t the be-all and end-all tutorial. It does not teach you everything. It does give you a decent introduction though.

Doing QA on the MySQL Proxy and the Enterprise tools, I started writing a Lua script to use with the proxy. The goal was to tell our monitoring agent that the server it was monitoring was very busy. It basically intercepts queries like SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES or SHOW GLOBAL STATUS among others and returns a custom resultset. (More details on a future post)

It is still a work in progress, but I wanted to give the community access to it. After some emails on the MySQL Proxy Discuss mailing list, I created a project on Launchpad that will host this script …

While I’m in Melbourne in a few weeks for training I’m once again visiting my friends at Linux Users of Victoria (LUV). It’s been a while since my schedule coincided with their meeting schedule!

I’ve been invited to do one of the talks (Sandrine Balbo doing the other), and my topic is “Relax! A Failure is NOT an Emergency.” which is although somewhat MySQL-related not actually MySQL-specific.

This will be on Tuesday April 7th. You can find more detailed description and location/time info in the LUV announcement.

While I'm in Melbourne in a few weeks for training I'm once again visiting my friends at Linux Users of Victoria (LUV). It's been a while since my schedule coincided with their meeting schedule!

I've been invited to do one of the talks (Sandrine Balbo doing the other), and my topic is "Relax! A Failure is NOT an Emergency." which is although somewhat MySQL-related not actually MySQL-specific.

This will be on Tuesday April 7th. You can find more detailed description and location/time info in the LUV announcement.

Since we entered FeatureFreeze one and half month ago the Ubuntu developers have shifted their focus on fixing bugs. As such the archive hasn’t seen a lot of new package versions or shiny new features. Here are a few highlights from the archive that happened during last month:

Python 2.6 transition

One of the main focus of the MOTU team has been conducting the python 2.6 transition. Scott Kitterman and other MOTUs have uploaded numerous packages to the archive in order to get ready for python 2.6 in Jaunty.

Loads of bug fixes

Most of the uploads have been fixing bugs: bacula packages can now be installed successfully in Jaunty. The samba package has been updated twice to new upstream versions to fix the broken ‘force group’ option as well as saving files on Samba shares using MS Office 2007.

Karmic is known in …

Reading “Test Center: Slacker databases break all the old rules” has finally inspired me to write this post, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. The title of my post may be bold, but it is just one version of how things may go moving forward (and was meant to grab your attention). :)

First off, a few issues I have with the article mentioned above:

• “…tacking the two letters “db” onto a pile of code that breaks with the traditional relational model.” - Since when does a database need to be relational? Sure, relational databases are the most popular, but they are only a subset of all the possible database types (let’s not forget hierarchical or tuple stores).
• “None of them is right for everyone, and all of them are completely …

A forum for each topic is tiresome. Someone made an improvement, and then you have forums where you can ask pretty much anything.
But also that is not as general purpose as the concept of LazyWeb. When you need help, you just want to stand up and ask.
…

As you might know by now, libmysqld, the deeply embedded version of MySQL, has reapperared in MySQL 5.1, having been gone in version 5.0. If you are curious about libmysqld in general, then feel free to pop by this free live webinar, hosted by noone else but yours truly:
http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/index.html
(Look for the webex with the ISV and OEM ... Deeply embedded blurb, and you''ll find it). You need to preregister for it.

What I was going to say a few words about here though, was on the performance of libmysqld. The code in libmysqld is the same as in the mysqld server, basically, but there are some shortcuts, and above all, there is no overhead of Client / Server communication. I decided to try this out a bit, using a very simple application, doing INSERT, UPDATE and SELECT on a simple MyISAM table. Note that as the overhead of MyISAM itself is so small, the performance benefits here will be …