Here are a few key posts from my various blogs from the last year.

From my InfoWorld open sources blog:

• Open Source Trends for 2009
• John Kotter on Urgency
• MySQL 5.1 Released
• Gartner Reports 50% Growth in use of Open Source DBMS
• …

MySQLers share many activities that they take part in during the course of a year. One of them is flying. Another is running. Running is considerably more pleasurable than flying. Case in point: There is a MySQL Runners Club, but no MySQL Frequent Flyer club — although the latter would count a huge number of us working with MySQL at Sun as potential members.

The Dopplr Raumzeitgeist shows where I was 2008

I think I am a fairly eager runner, and a fairly frequent flyer. Thanks to Dopplr (a traveller’s social website that I evaluated last year), I know that I’ve travelled 283 659 km since the first trip I’ve entered into Dopplr (which was early January 2008). If I assume that I’ve flown ten thousand …

This post is more of a personal note than most on the Pythian blog, but over the holidays, I couldn’t help thinking about my turbulent last year.

First, MySQL

In 2008, I worked at three different companies. It was about a year ago (January 15th will be a year) I was at MySQL AB’s first company-wide meeting in a few years with more than 400 of my colleagues, when all of a sudden we get the announcement: “Sun acquired MySQL for 1 billion dollars”. Many thought it was a joke, just in time to watch Jonathan Schwartz come up live on video to greet us. Talk about an intense way of starting a year! For some reason, nobody thought that toasting with a shot of vodka before 9:00am was the oddest thing to happen that morning.

Working for MySQL was, most likely, the wildest ride I will ever have. True Open Source spirit (no matter what the rest of the world says), start-up mentality, and growth equal to one order of magnitude …

The MySQL Cluster product seems to intimidate a lot of folks with its complexity. The North Texas MySQL Meetup had a presentation at the January meeting titled 'A Gentle Introduction to MySQL Cluster' where a cluster was setup on a single laptop. The presentation was full of information that needs to be shared to encourage others to try out this valuable piece of software.

The following covers how to set up a cluster on a single computer. The cluster will consist of two data nodes, a SQL node, and a management node. In this case the SQL node and the management node will be on one system. The data nodes will be virtual systems running on the same host. This is not the optimal performance configuration but it will let those new to MySQL Cluster try out the product with a minimal investment in equipment and time.

You will need two free software products -- …

Changes (as compared to 7.14) include:

Features:
* Added an option to use Base64 encoding for communicating XML data stream with the HTTP tunneller. Using this option can be required to work around this XML-related bug in PHP.
* Improved editor performance with large scripts if Wordwrap was enabled.

Bug fixes:
* On Windows Vista Business edition, SQLyog could crash while closing down. No other Windows OS (and also not any other Vista edition) was affected.
*  Also a ‘hang’ could occur when closing down. It could happen with all systems, but Windows Vista was mostly affected.
* Schema Sync failed with identically named Foreign Key CONSTRAINTs on identically named colums of basically same type (that could still differ in LENGTH, SIGNED/UNSIGNED specification etc.)

This Tip Of The Day answers the following comment on my blog:

How to Configure a MySql database to be able to connect Netbeans6.5.?

I've tried using mysql Server 6 many times, but it fails.
Please, let me know how to fix that problem.

• Download MySQL 6.0 from here.
• Install and start MySQL 6.0 on Mac OSX using the clearly written installation instructions.
  • Basically the download is available in .tar or .dmg format. Using .dmg format is the easiest way, double-click and follow the instructions taking all defaults.
  • MySQL is installed in …

Raj Kissu is in the papers today. He completed a Google Summer of Code 2008 project with MySQL, hacking on blob streaming for phpMyAdmin. In fact, his project was so good, he has commit access to the phpMyAdmin tree :-)

Today, The Star had an article about him (and two other students), titled For the love of code. He said:

But Raj has already heard ­inquiries for his project. “A ­company that has developed a transactional engine using MySQL server have clients who want to test BlobStreaming,” he said.

Kudos Raj. I think we’ll see more great work from Paul McCullagh and Barry Leslie, as more happens with Scalable BLOB Streaming for MySQL happens.

In fact, Barry Leslie …

Time-delayed replication is a useful feature that allows a slave to lag a fixed amount of time behind a master, thus providing a time window to recover from disasters like deleting a 10 million line table by accident. You just run over to the slave, turn off replication, and recover lost data, as the delayed updates mean it has yet to see your deadly mistake. It's a simple way to protect your administrative honor as well as your job.

Time-delayed replication has been on the MySQL to-do list since at least 2001. It's currently scheduled for release 6.0 and the fix is included in recent OurDelta builds. However, there's a very simple way to get the feature with Tungsten Replicator filters. This works for unadulterated MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 releases.

I wrote about filters in a previous post on the …

I spoke with Brian Aker last week about the issues I found with decrement and increment while working on my book "Developing Web Applications with Apache, MySQL, Memcached, and Perl". He suggested I make sure that I was using the latest libmemcached. I checked, and the version of libmemcached that is included with Memcached::libmemcached is 0.21 - this is the version of Memcached::libmemcached I obtained from using CPAN (perhaps CPAN needs a new bundle...). So, I obtained the most recent version of Memcached::libmemcached from the subversion repository at https://perl-libmemcached.googlecode.com/svn, and it includes the lastest libmemcached, version 0.25. To make a long story short, I re-wrote my test script to test each operation individualy and time that, as well as compare the times to Cache::Memcached. The numbers are great and are reason enough to use …

First of all, let me wish all of you a great year 2009! As an old year ends and a new year begins, it's a good time to do some statistics. One of the statistics that web developers are interested in is, which browsers and operating systems visitors use to access their websites. Let me share some of the interesting figures regarding the mysql.com website with you.


(click to enlarge and see more detail)

The spreadsheet contains data for December 2008 (another sheet for November 2008) in a pivot table style. In the columns you see the browsers and operating system and in the rows the continents and regions, with the shares in the respective cells. Fairly self-explanatory as I hope ;).

Usage shares on the mysql.com site generally favor browsers and …