In response to my previous post, Matt Aslett aptly asks: Does open source have a glass ceiling? In a word, yes. But it doesn't have to be this way. The "OSS business model" is a misnomer as there are many variations. But the business model that the majority of large and leading OSS vendors utilize has one common aspect. These vendors are all selling support and "other stuff" (indemnification, additional testing, better management, and so on) around a product that is indistinguishable from what a user can get freely from the related open source project. Giving away all the value... READ MORE

Today High Performance MySQL, Second Edition went to press. I’ve been working with the production team over the last couple of weeks, proofreading and checking the index and working with the artist who re-drew the illustrations.

I spoke to the production editor this morning and she told me the schedule is for the bound-book date to be the 16th of June. The official in-stock date is June 19th. I don’t know how many copies they’re printing for the first printing. But I think there have been a lot of pre-orders (rumors I’ve heard from my Amazon Affiliate account).

I cannot wait to hold my copy in my hands!

Publishing

After the release of version 1.4 yesterday I was getting a lot of emails with questions so I decided to setup a wiki site for the application. It details the install process, the application design, and some other sections. You can see it here: http://www.monolith-mysql.com

To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

Switzerland is co-hosting EURO 2008 along with Austria and will be kicking off the tournament with a game against the Czech Republic on Saturday. The country is of course famous for its neutrality but has shown itself to be less than neutral when it comes to open source (see what I did there) with the federal government having adopted an open source software strategy as long ago as February 2004.

Key policies:
The …

I've worked on DTrace probes for a while now. It's
a really interesting tool. I've worked on MySQL Cluster
code since 1996 but this is the most advanced tool
I've used to see exactly what's going on inside the
MySQL Server and the data nodes.

I'm still at an early stage of using these DTrace probes
and there is still some work before they are publishable
but one can see very well what's going on inside the
processes in real-time.

My first finding was that I quickly discovered that CPU
percentage that is reported at 1% in prstat in Solaris
actually means that it uses 64% of a CPU thread 1% is the
percentage of the total CPU resources, this is different
to what I'm used to from top.

The benchmark I'm analysing is the same DBT2 I've used in
a fairly long line of analysis on MySQL Cluster performance
over the last 2 years. This …

Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, is 100 editions (and almost two-years) old today! Lewis Cunningham has returned to LB to publish The Big 100th edition of LB on An Expert?s Guide to Oracle Technology.

No speech, but I would like to thank Log Buffer’s readers and especially all of Log Buffer’s editors for making LB a worthwhile and fun stop in the database “blogosphere”. It’s very easy to see why LB editors are successful in what they do — they are consistently enthusiastic, diligent, and adaptable. And I enjoy working with them.

Okay, okay — I can hear the orchestra starting to play me off, so …

According to the manual, FLUSH LOGS is supposed to:

Closes and reopens all log files. If binary logging is enabled, the sequence number of the binary log file is incremented by one relative to the previous file. On Unix, this is the same thing as sending a SIGHUP signal to the mysqld server (except on some Mac OS X 10.3 versions where mysqld ignores SIGHUP and SIGQUIT).

If the server is writing error output to a named file (for example, if it was started with the –log-error option), FLUSH LOGS causes it to rename the current error log file with a suffix of -old and create a new empty log file. No renaming occurs if the server is not writing to a named file (for example, if it is writing errors to the console).

There is a bug, however. In the case when the error log writes to a non-default path, FLUSH LOGS actually does not work as specified …

I've been doing some sales calls to prospects and customers in the midwest the last week or so. I like to do this periodically to make sure I'm not just drinking the open source koolaid, but really hearing from customers, prospects and the sales reps in the field. One advantage of MySQL being a part of Sun is we are now able to get appointments with CIOs and CTOs of Fortune 500 companies more readily than before. These are large accounts that have significant scale and expertise in IT, but are usually more conservative than most of the west coast... READ MORE

As you can see in the MySQL Workbench Edition feature grid, Live Schema Synchronization is a Standard Edition feature only. But that does not mean that you cannot make use of the same functionality in the OSS Edition in an offline scenario - which is even more preferable in some cases.

1. Create an SQL CREATE script from your model
   You might already have the SQL CREATE script if you started your model with an import of an existing schema. If you started designing your model from scratch inside Workbench, you are going to export an SQL CREATE script anyway - in order to create the initial schema on the database server.
2. Update your Workbench model
   At this point your database is already running. But as we all know you always have to make changes to your first design. Do the necessary changes to the model.
3. Export …

How To Repair MySQL Replication

If you have set up MySQL replication, you probably know this problem: sometimes there are invalid MySQL queries which cause the replication to not work anymore. In this short guide I explain how you can repair the replication on the MySQL slave without the need to set it up from scratch again.