Dana Blankenhorn asks whether open source is hurt by piracy, prompted by comments made by Louis Suarez-Potts, Sun’s community manager for OpenOffice.org at OSCON.

Dana is unconvinced that open source supporters should necessarily be doing anything about piracy, noting that “There is no direct financial loss to Open Office when someone has a pirated copy of Microsoft Office. To the extent that BSA enforcement actions cause fear in the market, that just benefits open source, so why join it?”

He also notes that “On the other hand if we helped Oracle enforce its license terms we might accelerate the move to MySQL and Ingres.”

However, one need only remember …

Larry Wall, Tim O'Reilly, Brian Aker, Michael Tiemann and more READ MORE

In an internal mail thread, I was asked whether there would be any “objections from an integration perspective” to some Sun initiated plans for a more organised French MySQL community.

My reply was that it’s great, if it’s something related to the self-organisation of the already very active French MySQL community (as witnessed for instance by the huge numbers that Véronique Loquet of Al’x Communication attracted to our Paris meetup in April). But if it’s about a centrally-imposed structure of “marketing towards the user base”, then I want to understand more and we need to discuss a bit further.

Based …

Daniel Nichter, the author of several very useful MySQL tools, has joined with Percona to continue to improve Maatkit -- the "other" toolkit we rely on daily. Daniel is a skilled Perl programmer who understands MySQL. He is in a perfect position to move the project forward on a more regular basis than I've been able to commit time to since I've taken on a leadership role in Percona.

Right now he's working on an unreleased tool we will use to make our performance audits more efficient. As a result, we'll be able to deliver more value to our customers and assess servers more quickly in the event of an emergency. (By the way, if you'd like to sponsor features you need for a Maatkit tool, contact us and we'll be glad to discuss it with you.)

Welcome, Daniel! And a …

I was doing some multi-threaded, multi-transactional testing for the backend of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor. I came across a weird failure, where it appeared I was able to successfully insert a row, and then (in the same transaction), a select from the same table did not return any rows.

Consider the following transactions:


mysql> create table t1 (id integer primary key auto_increment, name varchar(32) unique) engine=innodb;

a> begin;

b> begin;
b> select * from t1;

a> insert into t1 values(null, 'oldag');

b> insert into t1 values(null, 'oldag) on duplicate key update id=LAST_INSERT_ID(id);
(b blocks)

a> commit;

(b is released)
...
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
b> select * from t1;
Empty set (0.00 sec)


what, what, …

This TOTD (Tip Of The Day) shows how to create a Persistence Unit (PU) for a MySQL database using NetBeans IDE. This PU can then be used in any of Java EE artifacts (JSP, Servlet, EJB, ...) for database interaction.

1. In NetBeans IDE, create a new project
   1. Create a new NetBeans Web project and enter the values ("Autocomplete") as shown:
      
      
      
      and click on "Next".
   2. Choose GlassFish v2 as the deployment server and then click on "Finish".
2. Set up the database
   1. Start the database as:
      
      

      ~ >sudo mysqld_safe --user root Password:<YOUR …

Brian Aker was at the Sun booth today, in a premier slot, where there must have been about 50-60 people, huddled around, to listen to him talk about Drizzle. The project motivations, what’s behind it, what its not aimed to be, and so much more. Check the video out (21 minutes long)!

The Birds of a Feather (BoF) session in the night, was well attended, and there was lots of large discussion on what’s next. I think the important message to take away is that Drizzle doesn’t aim to be MySQL, and there are no plans to “merge” things back (fixes where the code-base is shared though, might make sense). Its also important that the design is for the future, i.e. multi-core machines. It was great to see Brian say that this …

Some likely and unlikely candidates snap up SourceForge Community Choice Awards READ MORE

As there were many requests for Debian binary packages in our announcement of MySQL releases with custom patchsets, we decided to play with it and built .deb, which you can find there:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/mysql/debian/

You can also add the following repositories into your sources.list:

deb http://mysqlperformanceblog.com/mysql/debian/5.0/ binary-amd64/
deb http://mysqlperformanceblog.com/mysql/debian/5.0/ source/
deb http://mysqlperformanceblog.com/mysql/debian/5.1/ binary-amd64/
deb http://mysqlperformanceblog.com/mysql/debian/5.1/ source/

Also we have generic RPMs for x86-64 architecture:
…

This DBA course day is in part based on info from Peter Zaitsev's earlier explorations (thanks Peter), and of course new insights from the High Performance MySQL book (there's a lot of Baron in there, all credit to his great work!), wisdom from Mark Callaghan, with my own teach approach and style thrown in to turn it into a good yet fun educational day!

Just like with other topics, extending this to a full day allows the issue to be explored much better rather than getting skimmed over as a small part of a much bigger course. After all, if you understand the tool, how it does things and why, you can utilise it more optimally. The skimming …