So it’s that time of year again when everyone puts out their predictions for the year ahead.  I think predictions are a bit of a waste of time because to be interesting predictions have to be big, but a year really isn’t all that long so actual changes over the course of 2009 are likely to be just small progressions.  So instead I have been thinking about the top issues that we face heading into 2009 and here is my Top 10 list for issues in Data Management.  In this post I avoid offering solutions to these issues, while I have several ideas on solutions these can be the subject of subsequent posts.

10 - Limits on Scalability

While scalability is on my list it is at number 10 because against popular belief, scalability is only an issue for a very small number of data based applications.  Almost all data based applications in use today can be scaled without major issue by increasing the underlying …

« Post 1 | This is the 2nd post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series. | Post 3 »

“When a job went wrong, you went back to the beginning. And this is where we got the job. So it’s the beginning, and I’m staying till Vizzini comes.” — Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride Screenplay by William Goldman

Being a part of Mozilla over the last three years has been a humbling experience.

When I started with the project, I imagined great personal success. Like a happy little worker bee flitting from Free Software flower to Free Software flower, I would cross-pollinate Mozilla with PHP’s community savvy and pragmatism, MySQL’s  disruptive …

What's new, in a nutshell: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-nutshell.html.

Release notes: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/news-5-1-x.html (In the video, it's the page entitled "Changes in release 5.1.x").

And yes, very early on (at about 2 minutes in) I talk about my take on Monty's controversial post at http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2008/11/oops-we-did-it-again-mysql-51-released.html

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I'm a Sales Engineer, I admit it. This blog is mostly about technical stuff, but I felt I should write a not-so-technical post for once. For a techie like myself, and to someone else out there, even the Sales Engineer title may look weird. Frankly Sun doesn't have Sales Engineers, they have System Engineers, which is the same thing. Not. Not at all, it is something different. But I insist on being a Sales Engineer.

I have been an SE (as in Sales Engineer) on and off (mostly on) for a good 20+ years now, more or less always in the database industry (a short term with security software is the exception). I learnt the SE trade at another RDBMS company in the 1980's. I had joined them as Support Engineer, having previously been a developer. I learnt SQL the hard way, by using it. I learnt to use indexes by having not used indexes, realising things were slow, looked at the syntax and found the word INDEX which sounded like something that …

I’ve always been more of a GNOME guy, and when running Linux, I use Rhythmbox to play my music. However, Amarok 2.0 might just change that.

They’ve chosen their database - it is none other than MySQL. The release notes state:

Some features, such as the player window or support for databases other than MySQL, have been removed because either they posed insurmountable programming problems, or they didn’t fit our design decisions about how to distinguish Amarok in a saturated market of music players.

If you want to know why the decision was made, read MySQL in Amarok 2 - The Reality. It has a lot to do with the fact that MySQL can be embedded, and performs well. Its a generally useful read to see …

Come and meet us at the INTED2009 conference in Valencia, Spain in March of 2009. Walter has just been accepted to submit a paper and do an oral presentation during the conference. INTED is a conference about technology and education. From the INTED2009 website: “The general objective of the conference is to promote international collaboration in the fields [...]

The MySQL packages in Debian still do not (and will never) include inofficial feature patches (beside the redirect output of error.log to syslog in MySQL 5.0, which is now part of the official MySQL 5.1 releases) like the ones from Percona or Google. Of course we add important bugfixes from newer (not yet released) versions of MySQL, but no feature patches.

If you are interested in a patched version of the Debian MySQL packages, take a look at OurDelta, their builds include patches (complete list) like mirrored binlog and InnoDB freeze. Upgrading from the official Debian packages of MySQL to the builds from OurDelta should work without problems, but please use …

The MySQL packages in Debian still do not (and will never) include inofficial feature patches (beside the redirect output of error.log to syslog in MySQL 5.0, which is now part of the official MySQL 5.1 releases) like the ones from Percona or Google. Of course we add important bugfixes from newer (not yet released) versions of MySQL, but no feature patches.

If you are interested in a patched version of the Debian MySQL packages, take a look at OurDelta, their builds include patches (complete list) like mirrored binlog and InnoDB freeze. Upgrading from the official Debian packages of MySQL to the builds from OurDelta should work without problems, but please use Launchpad when reporting bugs against …

This week MySQL released version 5.0.75 of their Community Edition. The package in testing is in good shape, so I had time to prepare and upload 5.0.75-1 to unstable, but it should work on testing as well. I also made a rebuild for etch, which is available here.

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who has helped translating messages for Drizzle so far.

Secondly, congratulations to Dutch and French speakers, since you have translations of all translatable strings! (so far, Mark Atwood is working on an overhaul of the error message system, so I imagine we'll find some more strings that need work)

Italian speakers are close - there are only 76 of 1413 messages untranslated.

After the top three, things fall off a bit. German has 744 untranslated, English (UK) has 905 untranslated (although honestly, there probably aren't that many needing translation). Spanish has 1019 untranslated, Norwegian Bokmal has 1049 and Brazillian Portuguese has 1078. Hindi and Polish round out the top ten with 1243 and 1251 untranslated respectively.

So good job everybody, and thanks for all the hard work! For anyone who wants to pitch in who hasn't, you can just head over to …