Now, relax. This is not haircut blogging. There is actually a true relationship between MySQL Community and sushi. Just bear with me for a while.
I went to meet Drew in front of a quiet sushi restaurant in Santa Clara, CA. In his latest email, he said "we will meet you there", implying that there was more than one person. He mentioned a wife in one of his email, and so I expected at least two people.
Curious thing, this meeting. It all started in 2006, when I published an article about replication techniques. In answer to that article, I received dozens of email messages, with comments, congratulations, requests for help, job offers. Drew's message started as a praise, than he asked some questions, and we exchanged some more emails in the …

I thought it would be nice to share some data on database size from the open source business intelligence / data warehouse adoption survey we've been running. Database size is a popular topic so some real data on size might be helpful if you're planning a deployment.

The question we asked was "How much raw data (in gigabytes) is being stored or accessed?" The chart below shows the results (with some annotation).



The databases in use are not all open source. This is the size regardless of database type. The restriction is that people are using open source in some part of the data warehouse stack, so an open source BI tool accessing an Oracle database would be included. Even so, the bulk of the respondents are using open source databases like MySQL and Postgres.

The general pattern follows what we see in the commercial data warehouse market, with the bulk of installations (82%) less than …

(Note: Review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion)

I had a chance to take look TokuDB (the name of the Tokutek storage engine), and run some benchmarks. Tuning of TokuDB is much easier than InnoDB, there only few parameters to change, and actually out-of-box things running pretty well.

There are some rumors circulating that TokuDB is ”.. only an in memory or read-only engine, and that's why inserts are so fast”. This is not actually the case, as TokuDB is a disk-based, read-write transactional storage engine that is based on special “fractal tree indexes”. Fractal Trees are a drop-in-replacement for a B-tree (based on current research in data structures by professors at Stony Brook, Rutgers, and MIT). I can't say exactly how it is improved, because the engine itself is closed source.

…

At the MySQL conference, a person who used to hold an important position in an important sales organization told us something like the following: “You know, you guys at Percona are great, but you have a big problem. You don’t have any $500,000 customers who only file one support incident per year. Those customers are where you can really make big money.” We were well aware of the investigations this person did into which customers are the most profitable, and we had decided a long time ago that chasing huge sales without delivering matching services is flawed.

On the Drizzle-discuss mailing list, Baron just pointed out that MySQL has a means to validate its config file (/etc/my.cnf), similar to "apachectl configtest".

mysqld --help --verbose

Somehow, I never knew that...

Oh, and yes, this means I am following Drizzle. In fact, I'm trying to devote at least a few hours each day to reading the source and finding things to fix. In a weird way, it feels good to be writing C++ again!

Schlomi Noach recently wrote a useful primer on the depth of B-trees and how that plays out for point queries—in both clustered indexes, like InnoDB, and in unclustered indexes, like MyISAM.  Here, I’d like to talk about the effect of B-tree depth on insertions and range queries.  And, of course, I’ll talk about alternatives like Fractal Trees, since that’s the basis of Tokutek’s storage engine for MySQL.

Please see Schlomi’s post for details, but I can summarize a few points, partly because I need some vocabulary for the points I’d like to make below.  Scholmi notes that there are two main features determining the depth of a B-tree (or B+-tree):

1. 
   
2. The number of rows in the database.  We’ll call that N.
   
3. The size of the indexed key.  Let’s …

MySQL Connector/Net 6.0.3, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This is the first GA release of the new 6.0 connector and introduces several new features and enhancements.  This release is approved for use in all scenarios and officially supports MySQL servers 4.1 and higher.   We had three major goals with this release:  speed, entity framework support, and a better Visual Studio experience.  I'm happy to report that we have met all three.

It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.0.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

Fixes from 6.0.2

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MySQL Connector/Net 5.2.6, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This release is of GA quality and is suitable for  use in production environments.  We strongly urge you to  review the change log that is shipped with the product for a thorough review of the changes.

We have a ton of fixes in this release so please review the changelog and see if your favorite bug has been fixed.  This version officially supports all versions of MySQL from 4.1 and later.

It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/5.2.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

Changes since …

Over 300 exams were taken at the 2009 MySQL Users Conference. Many more DBAs were certified this year then last and the Developer cert was not as popular.

We had problems with network bandwidth (Thanks to Patrick at O'Reilly for getting us more as soon as he could) and some software glitches with the new software. Some folks asked to take their exam at a location with better bandwidth and their results are still trickling in to the Certification Team.

The new 5.1 DBA exam was offered and the general review is that it is a much more realistic test of a DBA's skills than the older version. There were a few edits that did not make it into the system that cause some confusion but those taking the exam carried on bravely.

Thanks for all who made the journey to the Magnolia room, especially those who made it through the 1,200 teenagers who showed up for the conference after ours!

In a blog post today, Stefan of the MySQL documentation team says that the MySQL documents will not be open sourced. Now, I have to go back and review the MySQL CE Keynote that Karen gave, but I'm pretty sure she said to the audience that it was "going to happen". Why would she even bother bringing it up in the keynote if it was never really being considered anyway? There has been little community input on this, and I for one am outraged that a GPL product would not release the documentation as GPL too.

I'm now totally convinced that MySQL does not understand, and will never understand the MySQL community.

Is this an opportunity for Oracle to try to stall community participation in MySQL? I don't want to be paranoid, but this could just be the hints of bold new changes in MySQL strategy, especially considering Karen's …