Going to LCA? We have two days of glory for what is known as The Open Source Databases MiniConf. We have a webpage on the wiki, the announcement went out a few days ago, and the call for participation is open!

Tasmania is a fabulous place to be in January. 19-20 January 2009 is when the OSDB-MiniConf happens… topics on MySQL, PostgreSQL, Derby/JavaDB, Drizzle, CouchDB and many more are to be accepted.

What are you waiting for, submit a talk already!

I’ve released version 1.1.1 of the MySQL Cacti templates I develop. The new templates work around more Cacti limitations, including the limitation on the length of the data returned from the poller script. There’s also a new graph and many other niceties since the last release.

Note that there are TWO incompatible changes with [...]

Build of MySQL 5.0.67.d6 for Debian Etch done and available, simply click to the new Debian page for the info to set up your repo. Thanks to Peter Lieverdink (cafuego on the #ourdelta IRC channel) for the fast work!

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.

Your interest (from 53 different countries according to Google Analytics!) and response has been great! Among the feedback, saw a few bug reports on minor issues in the packaging, most of which have already been addressed for the next build (bug handling progress is all visible on Launchpad). And discussion about various patches that are "around"; …

Build for Debian Etch done and available, simply click to the new Debian page for the info to set up your repo. Thanks to Peter Lieverdink (cafuego on the #ourdelta IRC channel) for the fast work!

Your interest (from 53 different countries according to Google Analytics!) and response has been great! Among the feedback, saw a few bug reports on minor issues in the packaging, most of which have already been addressed for the next build (bug handling progress is all visible on Launchpad). And discussion about various patches that are “around”; some mails came to people directly but we try to encourage using the oursql-developers team mailing list.

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 have been a few problems (Nagios can’t run because it can’t write to its own pid file, etc etc).  Last night there was something new: “too many connections” when trying to connect to MySQL.  As a result the site was down, and it wasn’t possible to log in to MySQL and see why. But the oddest thing happened: mysqld would not shut down.  It was sitting basically idle, doing absolutely nothing, and wouldn’t stop. There was nothing in any log files to show what might be going on.

A MySQL Conference in Europe? Wrong: three MySQL Conferences in Europe!

Yes, this is the plan for next week - 21st of October in Munich and 23rd in London - and for mid November - 19th of November in Paris.

Each venue will host a full day of presentations, news and analysis on MySQL. You can have a look at the official web page for all the details, agenda and registration.

The content can satisfy the appetite of a technical audience and of more business-oriented IT managers at the same time. We will have sessions on performance, on scalability solutions and on Proxy, with hands-on the servers, difference parameters and tools. IT managers will probably find interesting a renewed set of HA solutions and some renewed views on the infrastructures used to power the Web.

Robin Schumacher, Director of …

If you use MySQL Replication, 99% of the times your main concern is to keep the master and the slave fully consistent and in sync. Some applications require exactly the opposite.

Let's take, for example, some reporting solutions. You may want to run reports against a data mart (ok, I can see some BI experts here jumping off their chairs - please forgive the simplification for the sake of this example), that is a subset of the whole historical data within your data warehouse. So, you may have a master server containing only the last 3 months of your sales and a slave containing three years of sales. Sales managers can happily to see current year/previous year rolling comparisons using the slave server and at the same time they can run faster current month/previous month reports on their master.

There are many ways to prepare the data mart and the historical DB. The easiest thing to do is to remove the oldest rows from the …

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 …