My presentation from the 2008 MySQL Conference on Top 20 Design Tips for Data Architects has been receiving a lot of traffic lately.

Most recently this presentation was featured on the front page of Slideshare, as well as last month I made the top 10 of Hacker News.

FYI, we've now added an Italian section on Planet MySQL: http://it.planetmysql.org

If you are a MySQL enthusiast from Italy and would like to start blogging about it in your native language, please consider submitting your feed for inclusion!

Giuseppe just recently started blogging in Italian as well and has already added his feed there.

As discussed previously in Options using MySQL pairs I have started evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of various open source options. This is an evaluation of Flipper , a product from Proven Scaling a MySQL consulting organization.

In high school, I had a great programmable calculator. I’d program it to solve complicated math and science problems “automatically” for me. Most of my teachers got upset if they found out, but I’ll always remember one especially enlightened teacher who didn’t. He said something to the effect of “Hey, if you managed to write software to solve the equation, you must thoroughly understand the problem. Way to go!”.

George Reese wrote up a blog post over at O’Reilly the other day called On Why I Don’t Like Auto-Scaling in the Cloud. His main argument seems to be that auto-scaling is bad and reflects poor capacity planning. In the comments, he specifically calls SmugMug out, saying we’re “using auto-scaling as a crutch for poor or non-existent capacity planning”.

George is like one of those math teachers who …

My presentation from the 2008 MySQL Conference on Top 20 Design Tips for Data Architects has been receiving a lot of traffic lately. Most recently this presentation was featured on the front page of Slideshare , as well as last month I made the top 10 of Hacker News .

Many users use MySQL Cluster for session management. In MySQL Cluster tables are checkpointed and redo logged to disk.

But for session data, do we really care?
If the Cluster is history then the sessions are most likely to be obsolete when the cluster recovers.

And do we want to use disk space and disk band width for the session data?

If you answer "no" on the questions above, then you can create a table that is not checkpointed nor redo logged, by setting the session variable ndb_table_no_logging:


mysql> use test;
Database changed

#enable no logging
mysql> set ndb_table_no_logging=1;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)

#a grossly simplified structure:
# this table will not be checkpointed or redo logged, because of set ndb_table_no_logging=1;
…

One of the many tasks ahead of me is to help improve the many sites that the Community Team manages for the MySQL Community web presence. I won't get into too much here, but we're looking at a whole host of different things to help make our MySQL community more functional, more interactive and more relevant to all users.

Now this may not seem like much but we've added a "MySQL Buzz" page to PlanetMySQL. It's a small little experiment, bringing some data that we currently don't have anywhere together onto one page. It features some data from our Forums, an addition of Google's Search tool with quick links to certain terms across Google's Blogs, News, Video and Web searches and some fun word frequency analysis.

This is by no means an end, just a quick little experiment, your thoughts are welcome and appreciated.

Hope you enjoy the little …

Linux Defenders formed to protect against patents. Sun adds new board members and officially announces MySQL 5.1. Microsoft releases open source content management system. Google’s secret OS? And more.

Official announcements
Open Invention Network and Partners Unveil Landmark ‘Linux Defenders’ Program to Give the Open Source Community Greater Freedom Open Invention Network

Sun Microsystems and Southeastern Asset Management Agree to Appoint New Independent Members to Sun’s Board of Directors Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems Releases MySQL 5.1 - Boosts Performance & Simplifies Management of Large-Scale Database Applications …

At least, that's the title of one of the talks I'm giving at this year's MySQL User's Conference. I'm not going to spoil it by telling you everything here - but feel free to bring rotten vegetables to throw at me for when I say disagreeable things that make me sound like a kook.

After a discussion with Mark Leith yesterday I decided to modify my import progress patch to have an option to turn it on/off.

This new patch adds a --show-progress parameter to the MySQL client which is disabled by default.  This is because there may be utilities or scripts using the MySQL client and capturing stderr output, the original patch would create some mess in this situation.  To use the new patch you can do:

shell> mysql --show-progress < importfile.sql