Welcome to the 95th edition of the Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs! The number 95 seems to be a popular number, as it's also the outside temperature here near San Diego, so grab something refreshing to drink, edition 95 is taking off.


In the MySQL 'sphere...

Discussions from the MySQL Conference continue. Arjen Lentz starts an email list for community organized conferences named OurSQL-conference. As open source projects go, the discussion turned to source code and to keep the discussion alive, OurSQL-sources was created. Thanks to Sheeri K. Cabral for the OurSQL name. If you …

I just came across this article about Sun’s numbers, and read “Schwartz plans to trim as many as 2,500 workers.” Does anyone know if MySQL will get hit? It seems like they still need help (quite a few job requisitions open), and this obviously won’t help matters much.

Peter has suggested this before, and I think it's a great idea. Basically, Peter's gripe is that currently, there is no way for community members to propose new worklog tasks for either the MySQL engineering team, or more likely, the external contributor community, to work on.

As a little background, the MySQL Forge Worklog system is simply a public-facing, read-only interface which shows our internal development roadmap tasks. We have an internal Worklog system which our engineering teams use to track progress along various milestones and projects. The Forge worklog shows all tasks which have been marked as "public" …

Some successful open-source companies are using a dual-licensing scheme. In short, software is released both through an open source version (e.g. licensed under the GNU GPL) and through a proprietary license usually reserved to paying customers. It?s great for attracting  OEM vendors since they can integrate the dual-licensed software into their proprietary application without fear of contamination. FUD is apparently good for business.

But this approach has important drawbacks (some of them nicely developed by Glyn Moody a few years ago and also discussed  here by Lajos Moczar) that make it question whether a dual-licensing model is really fair to …

Since Heikki Tuuri and Peter Zaitsev‘s presentations at the MySQL User Conference 2008, I really wanted to try MySQL 5.1 with InnoDB plugin in production work to see how it compares to my current setups (MySQL 5.0.48 with integrated InnoDB).

First of all, the upgrade to MySQL 5.1.23-rc went without any particular quirks – I did not have to dump and reload tables, a simple mysql_upgrade script run was sufficient to put my DB to MySQL 5.1-readiness.

When starting a new MySQL instance you know that you have to do some warm-up work before getting any indicators – the buffer pool will be empty of indexes and data so most operations in the first hour of uptime will be IO-bound. You can also use clever …

I've been thinking about this for a while now, sparked by Ronald Bradford's brainstorming about a global hackathon, and I think it's something that is completely doable, and would have great benefit for MySQL and also the external contributor community. The idea is similar to the PEAR Bug Triage event that occurred a few weeks ago. Basically, the idea is to set aside a time period (1 day, 2 days?) in which the global external contributor community and the MySQL developers come together in a virtual setting and tackle a list of fixable, but low priority, outstanding bugs in the MySQL server and client.

Current Roadblocks

So, what needs to happen for this to become a reality? These are the things I see as current barriers to the event, and issues I hope can be addressed in short order so …

The 95th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published by Mark Schoonover on his Mark’s IT Blog.

We can look forward to LB#98 Jeff Smith’s Jeff’s SQL Server Blog on May 23rd. There’s always plenty of room for more editors, so don’t waste another minute — send an email to me, the Log Buffer coordinator, and get started!

Without further ado, here is Mark Schoonover’s Log Buffer #95.

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A study just released by the Chief Marketing Officer Council showed that a large percentage of marketers are unhappy with their CRM systems. Specifically:

• 45% believe CRM systems are not effective enough
• 85% do not think they can integrate disparate customer data sources well
• 94% do not believe they have an excellent knowledge of customer demographics or transaction histories

As a result, even though nearly a third of the companies surveyed have customer churn rates of over 10%, two thirds have no system in place to go after these lost customers. In effect, most companies' marketing efforts resemble a "leaking bucket" -- a lot of effort is spent getting customers in, but not much is done to keep them.

Part of the problem may be cultural. Perhaps we think of …

Last night, I was fortunate enough to give a presentation called "Join-fu: The Art of SQL Tuning" at the local Columbus PHP Meetup group. There were about 14 people there, and it was a great time. Lots of good questions! Anyway, I created a new slide deck with some new material on LEFT-join-fu and managing many-to-many relationships that folks might find handy. Below are the slides in OpenOffice Impress and PDF format. Enjoy.

• Join-fu: The Art of SQL Tuning (OpenOffice Impress)
• Join-fu: The Art of SQL Tuning (PDF)

I couldn’t resist downloading NetBeans 6.1, with GlassFish and the MySQL bundle, the moment I found out it was released. Pulling it down while at the Star Alliance Gold lounge in Singapore was easy enough, and it only took me an hour (its a pretty big bundle - 164MB, as opposed to 6.0.1 where it only weighed in at 143MB for the OS X bundle).

Instead of the 4 packages in 6.0.1, I now only see 2 files - MySQL.prefPane (because we only fixed this in 5.0.51b, which probably didn’t make the release cut-off - the included version is 5.0.51a-community), and NetBeans IDE with MySQL.mpkg. The install is slated to take 526MB and takes a good two minutes.

I noticed that it doesn’t uninstall NetBeans 6.0.1, so my Applications folder now has two versions, including two versions of Glassfish (UR1 from …