Microsoft inches closer toward distributing open source software in a big way READ MORE

Today at the Venture Capital Forum in Hilton Arc de Triomphe, Paris, I received the EVCA “Hall of Fame” Award on behalf of MySQL AB. What a timing, to meet with investment bankers and venture capitalists now!

In these times of a deep finance crisis, of no credit handed out by banks and of general doom and gloom, it felt great to be somewhat of an “everybody’s darling”. In the VC community, MySQL is seen as a great success — and in particular, we’re seen by European VCs as a European success story (despite over 50 % of our personnel and most of our Management Team being US-based, at the point of time when the VCs exited).

Side note: I don’t mind MySQL being seen as a European success story. We’re used to portraying ourselves as belonging to whatever geography is relevant for the moment. That …

I'm just done listening to a presentation on MySQL from my esteemed MySQL colleague Robin Schumacher. Robin is director of product management at Sun/MySQL. Not being a database expert, I thoroughly enjoyed Robin's whirlwind tour of MySQL. I want to note of a couple of highlights that caught my attention :

• MySQL Community Edition and MySQL Enterprise Edition are feature identical. Wow, that was a suprise to me. I hate it when the Community Edition is distributed as "crippleware".
• Kickfire offers a SQL chip. If I understood correctly, this is a piece of silicon that speeds up your SQL statements. Wow again. I thought the time for custom built silicon for a specific purpose came and went, and the market has long ago decided to pack the intelligence into software, and to use commodity processor units as base. I guess I was wrong here.
• Lastly, …

DTrace allows you to instrument any live running application in production without the need of extra coding, application recompile or even an application restart. All you need is that the application is running on an OS that supports DTrace. Today Solaris, OpenSolaris, OS X and FreeBSD are a few that have DTrace built in.

For example here is a D-script that instrument MySQL to observe the SQL statements that is being executed in production. Just a 3 line script like this can be extremely useful to observe a live MySQL database

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -qs
pid$1::*dispatch_command*:entry
{
    printf("%d::%s\n",tid,copyinstr(arg2));
}

You need to pass the pid of the mysql process as the first argument to this script.

Here is a sample output from the script. We are observing the SQL statements that are executed to bring up the SugarCRM login screen.

 …

I’ve been working with a client recently who has SELinux on his servers.  It has been quite a struggle sometimes.

My colleages tell me that SELinux has a pretty noticeable performance impact.  I am not sure if we have benchmarks to support this; at any rate, the client said it’s OK, we’ll take the performance hit.

There [...]

I thought it might be interesting to list the books I use as reference while programming for this project. In no particular order:

SQL in a Nutshell - Kevin E. Kline - This book was not what I thought it was, but it is a good reference for SQL and distinguishes between various flavors: DB2, MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server mostly.

High Performance MySQL - Jeremy D. Zawodny & Derek J. Balling - Good book on getting performance out of MySQL

Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment - W. Richard Stevens

Unix Network Programming - W. Richard Stevens

The C Programming Language - Kernighan and Richie

Programming with Posix Threads - David R. Butenhof

I'm sure there's more, but that's all I can think of right now.

Brian Aker delivers the keynote speech at OpenSQL Camp: State of the Open Source Databases.

The presentation begins with:
"There is no way I'm going to tell you exactly where the future of databases go. We have way too many egos in the room to ever even begin a discussion..."

and ends with Aker saying,
"What the hell does that mean?"

My summary: open source databases are already ubiquitous, we need to make them better/faster/consume fewer resources.

Brian's summary: What part of my keynote surprised people? How ubiquitous bot nets are, and how they act as a big decentralized data store.

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I'm just done listening to a presentation on MySQL from my esteemed MySQL colleague Robin Schumacher. Robin is director of product management at Sun/MySQL. Not being a database expert, I thoroughly enjoyed Robin's whirlwind tour of MySQL. I want to note of a couple of highlights that caught my attention :

• MySQL Community Edition and MySQL Enterprise Edition are feature identical. Wow, that was a suprise to me. I hate it when the Community Edition is distributed as "crippleware".
• Kickfire offers a SQL chip. If I understood correctly, this is a piece of silicon that speeds up your SQL statements. Wow again. I thought the time for custom built silicon for a specific purpose came and went, and the market has long ago decided to pack the intelligence into software, and to use commodity processor units as base. I guess I was wrong here.
• Lastly, …

I'm just done listening to a presentation on MySQL from my esteemed MySQL colleague Robin Schumacher. Robin is director of product management at Sun/MySQL. Not being a database expert, I thoroughly enjoyed Robin's whirlwind tour of MySQL. I want to note of a couple of highlights that caught my attention :

• MySQL Community Edition and MySQL Enterprise Edition are feature identical. Wow, that was a suprise to me. I hate it when the Community Edition is distributed as "crippleware".
• Kickfire offers a SQL chip. If I understood correctly, this is a piece of silicon that speeds up your SQL statements. Wow again. I thought the time for custom built silicon for a specific purpose came and went, and the market has long ago decided to pack the intelligence into software, and to use commodity processor units as base. I guess I was wrong here.
• Lastly, …

so far little is happening in this area with MySQL Cluster.
would be interesting to get patches to cluster from a(ny) (huge-web) company...
wonder if that will ever happen...
maybe we don't use enough buzz-words

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it could also be that we add features in a high enough pace ourselves,
preliminary benchmarks of our multi-threaded ndbmtd(4 threads)
shows up to 3.7 times better throughput than singled threaded ndbd.