Reading Mike Zinner's What Does a Workbench SE Subscription Include?, I noticed something other may not fuss about... for $99/seat you get a year of updates, and the basic license does not expire at all.

Workbench has an interesting history... Mike originally wrote DB Designer 4. I first met Mike years ago at a LinuxTag (2003). The program rocked. I introduced Mike to Kaj and said "you two should talk". And thus Mike got hired. He's since been in charge of the MySQL GUI tools, but the successors of DB Designer kept being put off and restarted from scratch: different/changing development priorities and lack of people resources....

I'm still interested in Workbench, although I am concerned that this is like the 3rd iteration of the product, and it now has .Net dependencies. Will it work under Mono? Yes, so we're told; the roadmap says the other platforms …

MySQL 5.1 and up supports a plugin interface that allows the loading and unloading of server components at runtime, without restarting the server. Today I started working on a mysql-storage-engines package for MySQL 5.1 in Debian, which includes the PrimeBase XT and Sphinx storage engines. I currently do not plan to create separate binary packages (like mysql-engine-pbxt and mysql-engine-sphinx) for every single plugin.

Suggestions for additional plugins which should be added are welcome.

MySQL 5.1 and up supports a plugin interface that allows the loading and unloading of server components at runtime, without restarting the server. Today I started working on a mysql-storage-engines package for MySQL 5.1 in Debian, which includes the PrimeBase XT and Sphinx storage engines. I currently do not plan to create separate binary packages (like mysql-engine-pbxt and mysql-engine-sphinx) for every single plugin.

Suggestions for additional plugins which should be added are welcome.

MySQL Sandbox 1.18 was released today. The changes log has mostly bug fixes, but also two major additions:

• The ability of creating a group of unrelated servers. Previously, there was only the set_replication.pl command, to create a set of master+slaves. Now the set_many.pl command will create unrelated servers;
• The creation of a start_proxy script with replication installations. This script starts MySQL Proxy using as backends all the servers in the group.

If you missed the previous episodes, MySQL Sandbox is a tool used to install an isolated MySQL server, independently from existing instances in the host. It can also install a replicated system of 1 master + N slaves. All the …

I was asked on Sun Tech Days whether it is possible to use more than 64 indexes in MySQL. I've asked my colleague, Ingo Strüwing, and found out the following: yes, it is possible to have more than 64 indexes, and no additional patches are required. You can get 5.0 source tarball, ./configure it with --with-max-indexes=128 and you'll get a server that can use up to 128 indexes. One needs to be cautious though:

• --with-max-indexes=N option looks like you could configure server with arbitrary maximum number of indexes. That's not true, if you use N>128 then the server will compile but it will not even be able to start.
• 128-indexes build of server is not widely used, so potentially it can be less stable than the regular build. My experience: I compiled current 5.0 source with --with-max-indexes=128 and it has passed all bundled tests (good) but I don't see any …

I had need to show my new employer the official MySQL business shirt, so I did a Google Search on “mysql conference photos” (without the quotes) as I know I’ve seen photos of staff at the conference online before. Google Search Link

To my utter surprise, Google provided 3 image search results. Two of them were of Paul McCUllagh, colleague of my new company PrimeBase Technologies. Not only was this unexpected, the first image of Paul was actually from my own Blog. Go figure how we managed that Search Engine Optimization.

Here I am at my desk sporting the PrimeBase supporters t-shirt that will be available at the exhibitors booth at the 2008 MySQL Conference. The front is rather uneventful with the official logo, but the back will be worth the experience. So everybody interested in supporting PBXT as the transactional storage engine for MySQL developed by the community and for the community, please come and see us and mention the secret password.

We have been placed way back in the right hand side of the exhibitors hall at booth 518, in front of the Open Source and OEM providers.

So it looks like these days Kickfire welcomed everyone to tell they've been working with Kickfire - Baron Keith Frank is writing about KickFire. Good Job Kickfire PR team you really energized community.
We also were working with Kickfire for quite a while and are also very excited to give it a try.

Enough have been written about technical basics by other people so I would not waste my time retelling.

I also prefer us to write about results of real testing rather than speculating on PR communications. Finding what products are good for, what are their sweet spots and limits is our mission. I will be playing hands on with …

I'm still working on getting all of my tools and apps onto my new laptop, which is running Vista Ultimate. I downloaded the latest version of MySQL Community Edition and proceeded to install it. I didn't consider the effects of User Account Control (UAC) on the installation. I should have, considering this is one of the gotchas when installing SQL Server Reporting Services on Vista. The installation looked successful until the point where I was prompted to configure the MySQL service. No error message, nothing. So I rooted through, found and ran the MySQL Server Instance Config Wizard, but received an error I hadn't seen before. I did a Google search and came across this blog post which links to a document on …

Recall that I’ve claimed that it takes 28 years to fill a disk with random insertions, given a set of reasonable assumptions.  Recall what they are:

We are focusing on the storage engine (a la MySQL) level, and we are looking at a database on a single disk—the one we are using for illustration is the 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.  It has a disk seek time 14ms and transfer rate of around 69MB/s. [See tomshardware.com] We insert random pairs, each 8 bytes.  So that’s 62.5 billion pairs to fill the disk, and at 4KB-size blocks, that 2^28 leaves (= 2^40 bytes / 2^12 bytes/leaf).

Now, my analysis requires each insertion to induce a disk seek.  Suppose we do something clever with main memory.  After all, we have this main memory hanging around.  It should be possible to buffer up some insertions, and once we fill up main memory, insert key/value pairs that belong on the same leaf.  Thus, fetching a …