While the MySQL 5.1 feature list looks quite tasty to me, the MySQL 5 feature list has not really won me over. Aside from the fact that most new MYSQL 5 features have been quite bug plagued (though this is now mostly resolved side from the performance issues with VIEW's and INFORMATION_SCHEMA). So Arjen is doing some courses on MySQL 5 features, which got me thinking which are the features I regularly use? Uhm .. I think there is only one, which are VIEW's. Actually I always end up using them for the same thing: Computing a status field that changes given the CURRENT_DATE. I tend to try and avoid cron jobs for these tasks whenever I can. Of course it would be more performant to update the status once, but replying on the status update cron job to actually work right at the expected time is …

The RarestNews developer considers InnoDB and CouchDB for a re-architection of his high volume news site. He did his homework researching, but I couldn’t help but comment on a few things he wrote. The comment turned into a blog post and since this is my blog it should be posted here as well.

I am specifically referring to the paragraphs about InnoDB and CouchDB:

MySQL problems

So, to be technical here I’ve used MyISAM tables (never really liked InnoDB because of it’s slow writes and at 100k new articles a day with lots of meta-data to write about them, like tags, dates, snippets, word frequencies, etc) - it seemed like a good decision. The bad part was that on write …

The RarestNews developer considers InnoDB and CouchDB for a re-architection of his high volume news site. He did his homework researching, but I couldn’t help but comment on a few things he wrote. The comment turned into a blog post and since this is my blog it should be posted here as well.

I am specifically referring to the paragraphs about InnoDB and CouchDB:

MySQL problems

So, to be technical here I’ve used MyISAM tables (never really liked InnoDB because of it’s slow writes and at 100k new articles a day with lots of meta-data to write about them, like tags, dates, snippets, word frequencies, etc) - it seemed like a good decision. The bad part was that on write …

If only your database would just tell you that replication had failed or that the disk was full…
Ok some database servers do but MySQL doesn’t (yet). Another excuse to write a script

In my pursuit for total database visibility I have been searching for a tool that would tell me when something went wrong, that would simulate regular usage, and let me know if anything failed. After all SNMP can only probe so far and if your database is secure the last thing you want to do is open up another port on your server.

Don’t get me wrong there are tools out there that do a decent job of monitoring MySQL. MySQL Entperprise Monitor is one such tool. But if you want to look under the hood or add some functionality specific to your environment things start to get …

The RarestNews developer considers InnoDB and CouchDB for a re-architection of his high volume news site. He did his homework researching, but I couldn’t help but comment on a few things he wrote. The comment turned into a blog post and since this is my blog it should be posted here as well.

I am specifically referring to the paragraphs about InnoDB and CouchDB:

MySQL problems

So, to be technical here I’ve used MyISAM tables (never really liked InnoDB because of it’s slow writes and at 100k new articles a day with lots of meta-data to write about them, like tags, dates, snippets, word frequencies, etc) - it seemed like a good decision. The bad part was that on write …

I am writing this blog post up on Friday morning, to post on Monday Tuesday morning at OScon.

The big news in the MySQL and the open source database worlds right now is Drizzle.

This is the "secret project" that I have occationally mentioned here. For the past few weeks, when I was done giving my PS client their daily 8 hours, I would flip VMs and start hacking on Drizzle, focusing mainly on the plugin system. I've ripped out a lot of junk and useless code, changed the plugin interface structures, converted UDFs into plugins, and am currently working on making logging and authentication into plugins.

The bzr tree is rapidly changing, and getting leaner, cleaner, better, and faster, with each passing day. The email list and the freenode IRC channel have been clear and focused.

It's been very exciting.

For the last 2-3 years, Brian Aker and I have had many discussions about how to refactor MySQL. Brian has been the one driving these discussions by asking why some things in MySQL were done in a certain way and in a true "what if" manner asked what would happen if we would do things in another way.

Being tired of not being able to get critically needed reconstruction work done in the MySQL server, Brian started to work on Drizzle to search for answers to these questions.

So what is Drizzle?

• Drizzle is what MySQL would be with a more interactive community involvement in the design of the software itself, and had targeted website deployments.

• Drizzle is a version of MySQL that is driven by Brian and the community, attempting to solve practical problems that a large group of MySQL users are facing.
  

• Drizzle is a smaller, slimmer and (hopefully) faster …

Can a panel of so-called experts make sense of open source? READ MORE

I can't be at OSCON this year.  But my colleague Rob is and he just posted a usability post about, of all things, the Double Tree hotel where I am sure a lot of you are staying.  Great stuff.

"What if"

Have you ever wanted to know what would happen if you had taken a different direction?

A number of months ago I was on the phone with the Rackspace CTO talking about Memcached and Gearman, and the work I am doing there. He had asked me if I had ever thought about creating a slimmed down version of MySQL to work with them.

The answer?

Of course!

This is something I get asked with some regularity. People will want MySQL done in some fashion other then what it does by default (aka what serves most of the user base). Taking the code and cutting out the one thing the requester dislikes is a pretty boring task. I keep a notebook of these requests. I consider it valuable feedback, not as single items, but as a whole.

After I got off the phone the idea stuck in the back of my mind. The next day I woke up and started playing with the idea of seeing what a …