After receiving an email about talking with Robert David, Director of Sales at KickFire, I checked out recent news on KickFire, as there had been little written about this company aside from the big splash they made at the MySQL Users Conference back in April 2008.And, lo and behold, there was a piece of news, posted on October 14 - Kickfire Enters Into MySQL Enterprise Agreement With Sun

Matt Asay is pushing his favorite Open Source model again. The model where the majority of developers of a project work for a company and that company is creating a business around the project. There's nothing wrong with that model, but he seems to forget the other models time over time :)

Matt is absolutely right with 2 of the 3 things he wants you to consider.
A SI in the middle of a $50 million dollar project involving Alfresco not talking to Alfresco is just wrong. An SI not offering a support contract is also just wrong. But an SI forcing his customer to buy the commercially supported version from a vendor ? Where's the customer choice ?

The customer should have the option to choose for a commercially supported version or the free version. And preferably that should be an educated option.

Matt seems to forget about situations where …

The work on the next editions of MySQL Certification Exams is going well. My current focus is on the Developer exam. There is a little bit of overlap between the current Developer and DBA exams ('What is MySQL AB?') that need to be pruned. Most MySQL customers seem to have a lot of functional overlap between people titled Developers and DBAs. So what do you ask of an individual that quantifies their ability to develop software that accesses MySQL databases? Not their DBA skills or their joint Developer/DBA skills but just their developer skills.

The book used in the MySQL for Developers class is an amazing document. It covers many subjects in detail from basic SQL to query optimization. I am carefully picking my way through in search of prime exam material. This is what military analysts call a 'target rich environment' where there are so many things …

MySQL is the defacto database of choice for most WebScale and Cloud Computing deployments.

Every day you go to website like Facebook, CraigsList , eBay, Google, PriceGrabber, Yahoo!, and Zappos, you are touching a page that  uses MySQL.
MySQL's popularity is due in large part to its flexibility. MySQL supports over 20 platforms and scales to handle terabytes of data. And, because MySQL is open source, it can be customized to an application's unique specifications. This flexibility has two-fold benefits for ISVs: MySQL is better able to address their applications' specific needs and it won't impose restrictions on their future development.

Through the Sun Partner Advantage Program(SPA) , ISVs can now leverage Sun's entire portfolio of offerings - including MySQL. The SPA Program connects ISVs with free or deeply discounted technology offerings as …

Sorry for the outage, everyone. We’re looking into the causes of the downtime (and sponging the sweat off our keyboards), but for now we’re happy just to be back. Stay tuned for a real blog article soon.

Using SQL to generate SQL is a trick that is used by many DBA's and is a really useful way to achieve certain things. It's not that much used in applications, but for DBA's it is great, as it allows you to do certain things that would otherwise require a script or something like that. The idea is simple enough, you write a SQL statement that in turn will generate another SQL statement or set of statements, the generated SQL is written to a file, and then you run (for example run the mysql "source" command) on the file with the generated SQL.

Simple? Yes, but effective. As an example, using MySQL, lets say you wanted to have a script that would run "OPTIMIZE TABLE" on all tables with 1000 rows or more in the current database? You cannot do this with one SQL statement, right? To begin with, you can only run OPTIMIZE TABLE on one table at the time?
So we need an SQL statement that will generate a bunch of relevant OPTIMIZE TABLE …

VentureBeat and OStatic are among the news source reporting the launch of Cloudera a new vendor set up to provide support for Apache Hadoop and related projects.

Given the current economic outlook it’s great to see a new open source start-up rearing its head, and the list of founders indicates that this one has a good chance of survival. While VentureBeat is focused on the fact that Ex-Google, Yahoo, and Facebook employees are on the team, my eye was caught by the fact that Mike Oslon, Sleepycat Software founder and former CEO has been tempted out of semi-retirement.

It’s like removing the brakes from your car. yes, it will go faster (slightly less weight) but, dude, you just removed the brakes.

Just got home finally from PHP Appalachia.  I enjoyed meeting all the great people.

I presented about what I learned and how we deal with importing large amounts of CSV data into MySQL.  I threw my idea onto the wiki at the last minute, made the slides while everyone ate breakfast and I had planned on researching it all (been a few years since I wrote it), but we had no reliable internet.  Some claims I made and their corrections.

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2. I said our largest file is about 1.8 million lines.  WRONG.  Actually it is about 4.6 million.  I was correct however that it does finish importing and indexing in about 5 minutes.
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4. I claimed I LOAD DATA INFILE to MyISAM first and then "insert into ... select from" into an InnoDB table for speed reasons.  WRONG.  In fact, I do that because I need to merge fields from the file sometimes …

The setup on Launchpad is better organised (Launchpad rocks!), and we already have the first feedback in the form of bugreports - mainly on the packaging and repo information. That’s excellent! Thanks Vladimir Cherednichenko, Steve Walsh, and Peter Lieverdink! Peter actually deserves a special mention as he has put in a lot of work on the debian packaging.

Also, because sometimes instant banter is useful, there’s now a #ourdelta channel on Freenode. Naturally, real discussion should just happen on the ourdelta-developers team and list. It’s really easy to join.

Antony Curtis did just that (join) and already put one of his many patches in: this one fixes issues which occur while a thread …