Jim, where are you when we need you?

"Jim," of course, is Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat. The need? To get more enterprises contributing back to open source. Forrester has found that--Surprise! Surprise!--most enterprises consume open source but don't contribute back to it.

This isn't surprising, nor are the reasons and means of adoption:

"...[O]pen source adoption initially focused on the operating system and Web server tiers of the application platform stack, but early success widened the focus to include development tools, infrastructure components such as application servers and databases, and higher-level components such as portal servers and content management systems."

Lower cost was the main driver for open …

Jim, where are you when we need you?

"Jim," of course, is Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat. The need? To get more enterprises contributing back to open source. Forrester has found that--Surprise! Surprise!--most enterprises consume open source but don't contribute back to it.

This isn't surprising, nor are the reasons and means of adoption:

"...[O]pen source adoption initially focused on the operating system and Web server tiers of the application platform stack, but early success widened the focus to include development tools, infrastructure components such as application servers and databases, and higher-level components such as portal servers and content management systems."

Lower cost was the main driver for open …

Andrii Nikitin, one of the MySQL support engineers located in Ukraine, has asked for help from MySQLers and so I'm sharing this information to the community at large.  Andrii's son Ivan, who is 2 1/2, is in need of a bone marrow transplant operation.  This will require going to a clinic in Europe that will not be covered by regular insurance.  So Andrii has aksed to see if we could help raise funds.  The cost is expected to be $150,000 - $250,000.  A huge amount for an engineer from Ukraine to cover.   But a small amount by many people could make a big difference. 

Many MySQLers have kicked in to …

It's no secret that Sun just laid off 1,000 employees, and may lay off up to 2,500, but what is interesting is how Sun is offsetting the headcount loss with a more efficient way of finding leads.

It's called open source. As TechCrunch reports on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's Supernova talk:

His talk was about how Sun leverages open source by allowing its software (such as MySQL and ZFS) to float out and be downloaded for free, from where a small percentage of those users can be converted to customers. So through open source and free, Sun have the benefit of a free lead generation and marketing machine - especially with MySQL which is currently being downloaded over 70,000 times a day.

...

It's no secret that Sun just laid off 1,000 employees, and may lay off up to 2,500, but what is interesting is how Sun is offsetting the headcount loss with a more efficient way of finding leads.

It's called open source. As TechCrunch reports on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's Supernova talk:

His talk was about how Sun leverages open source by allowing its software (such as MySQL and ZFS) to float out and be downloaded for free, from where a small percentage of those users can be converted to customers. So through open source and free, Sun have the benefit of a free lead generation and marketing machine - especially with MySQL which is currently being downloaded over 70,000 times a day.

...

Over the last few weeks I have been doing some work on improving the concurrency performance of PBXT. The last Alpha version (1.0.03) has quite a few problems in this area.

Most of the problems have been with r/w lock and mutex contention but, I soon discovered that MySQL has some serious problems of it's own. In fact, I had to remove some of the bottlenecks in MySQL in order to continue the optimization of PBXT.

The result for simple SELECT performance is shown in the graph below.

Here you can see that the gain is over 60% for 32 or more concurrent threads. Both results show the performance with the newly optimized version of PBXT. The test is running on a 2.16 MHz dual core processor, so I expect an even greater improvement on 4 or 8 cores. The query I ran for this test is …

[HoneyMonitor is a MySQLTM GUI Tool for WindowsTM Systems. Server Administration, Database and Database Objects Administration, Code Development, Server Monitoring, Performance Monitoring, Performance Auditing. Read more on http://www.honeysoftware.com]

We are pleased to announce the availability of HoneyMonitor Pro and HoneyMonitor Audit Pro!

Press Release available at:
http://www.honeysoftware.com/news/pressreleases/20080714-honeymonitor-performance-tuning.php.

The …

Good news, MySQL 5.1.26-rc has been released. From the release notes: “MySQL 5.1.26-rc is slated to be the last release candidate before we declare MySQL 5.1 as “production ready” (GA).”

If I were you, I’d start testing it out in environments that you’re planning to run MySQL in, or upgrade to 5.1 in. Feedback and testing to iron out issues, is important, so if you find a bug that affects you, report it!

In other news, on the Sun Developer Network (SDN) site, there’s a couple of resources such as the Python Developer Center and the Ruby Developer Center. At MySQL, we’ve got the DevZone, focusing on languages such as …

Changes as compared to version 6.56 include:

Features:

* New GRID design (’zebra’ Office 2007 style) for easier navigation.
* Multiple selection in GRIDs with SHIFT+CLICK.
* Improved Data Synchronization. Now typically 2-8 times faster than before depending on data. Option to generate a SQL sync script was added.
*  Drastically improved the speed of exports.
* New more user friendly design for the Schema Synchronisation (renamed from Structure Synchonisation). Various filter (’hide and ignore’) options were added. Also a long-running Schema Sync compare task can now be stopped.
*  Added automatic and manual update check.

Bug fixes:

* A backup script backing up all databases could fail to restore VIEWs referencing another database than the one where the VIEW was.
* Around 50 other small (mostly GUI-related) …

On Thursday, July 17 there will be a web based seminar on MySQL Workbench. 

Seminar will be in Italian and anyone who is interested is invited to join us. You can find details here.

If you are a database architect and you usually work with data models this tool is going to make your life easier and you will learn some interesting features. In the meantime, to better understand the product, take have a look at http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/, where you can download a copy of the community version, read blogs, contribute, discuss and learn.

Happy data-modeling!