ZDNet and its sister sites ran an interesting story yesterday indicating that IBM might be preparing to release its DB2 database under an open source license. If true, it would be a fascinating turn of events that would have a significant impact on the database industry. Unfortunately, it’s not.

I was immediately suspicious when reading the initial story. For a start it quotes a UK IBM executive: IBM’s UK director of information management software, Chris Livesey. With all due respect to him, if IBM was even hinting at open sourcing DB2, it would surely be rolling out the big guns.

Additionally, I’ve had briefings in the last couple of weeks with both IBM’s data management and open source executives, neither of whom thought to mention open sourcing DB2. That didn’t rule it out entirely of course.

Then there was what …

I’m at the Sun Tech Days in beautiful Philippines, and all I can say is the energy is tremendous. I’m hearing there are about 1,400 attendees, and this number might grow tomorrow.

Armed with a video camera, I decided to take a few video snapshots. My first victimguest on my yet to be named videocast is Wen Huang, Product Manager for NetBeans, at Sun Microsystems.

Wen Huang has been a MySQL user since 1999, and had a past life as a web developer in various web shops, some large, some small. One commonality he had at all his jobs though is that they always use MySQL.

He’s an action junkie, preferring to have the latest version of the MySQL database all the time, and can’t wait for MySQL 5.1 when …

This week the first plugin OS_INFO was successfully compiled and build. Soon it will be available on Launchpad and everyone will be able to download the source code using Bazaar VCS client.
For the upcoming week I'm going to implement the next five plugins according to my tables design http://uosis.mif.vu.lt/~much1973/tables_revised_210508.pdf.
And here goes a report on what was done last week.

Report [2008-06-09 - 2008-06-16):

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK
-- Because of my hardware issues had to move to a new one. Reinstalled OS (Windows and Ubuntu dualboot), SAndbox, MySQL servers. So that now everything is building and running cleanly. The main development is going on Ubuntu and I VirtualBox on Windows will be used to test plugin on other OS.
-- Investigated loader plugin crashes and learnt how to use gdb. I was posting to internals about the crashes and from the feedback I …

Now the fun begins compiling all the data and pretty charts made. We've had 432 responses!

I want to thank the community for taking the survey. If you'd like to comment on the survey, please do! You can post your comment on my blog, or email me directly: mark.schoonover@gmail.com

I've learned a few things about creating surveys and I plan on writing up my thoughts once all the tabulation is done....MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

Now the fun begins compiling all the data and pretty charts made. We've had 432 responses!

I want to thank the community for taking the survey. If you'd like to comment on the survey, please do! You can post your comment on my blog, or email me directly: mark.schoonover@gmail.com

I've learned a few things about creating surveys and I plan on writing up my thoughts once all the tabulation is done....MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• Finished the integration of new data collection features in Skoll. The Skoll Client can now collect runtime information about MySQL while running the MySQL tests.
• Collected runtime information for MySQL compiled with different configuration flags and began analyzing the collected runtime data.

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• Had connection problems with BitKeeper (MySQL's source control) servers while testing the new Skoll Client.
• Skoll currently gets MySQL source code from BitKeeper, however, not every revision in the BitKeeper can compile/run perfectly. Right now I have to find a "good" revision and manually request it with the Skoll Client. I need to get access to MySQL push-build tar balls to solve this bad revision problem.

KEY CONCERNS

• More than ever, the future progress of the project depends on having …

If there is one thing that a DBA or data warehouse architect can count on, it is that data volumes will increase while budgets will decrease.

This is why MySQL 5.1 and its partitioning capabilities are so interesting. I’m going to demonstrate how you can build a small/medium-sized data warehouse or data mart (1-10 TB range) on a shoe-string budget.

the mission

I decided to convert a relatively large statistics table (750m rows, 140GB in size in about 10 partitions) on a test machine from MyISAM to the Archive storage engine. After a long conversion process, my data, on disk, ended up being about 21GB, for an impressive compression ratio of 6.7:1.

Prior to MySQL 5.1, one of the drawbacks to the archive storage engine was that you could not index it; however, with partition pruning, you can get yourself a “free” index on a large archive table by splitting it into date-based chunks, whether by …

I am giving a talk titled "An Introduction to MySQL" here in Birmingham, AL on June 21, 2008 at 3PM.

I love living in Alabama.  I was born and raised in Huntsville.  However, Birmingham has always seemed a bit behind in technology compared to what I do for a living.  There is good reason.  The industry here is medical, banking, industrial and utilities.  I don't really want my doctors keeping my medical records in an alpha release of anything.  Same goes for my banking and utilities.  But, as this page shows, the companies here are catching up.  So, I am happy to present MySQL to as many people as I can in this town.  Hopefully I will help some folks that have not been exposed to MySQL or any open source for that matter.
…

And again we're on our mission to keep XAMPP up-to-date and just released the first betas of the upcoming XAMPP version.

In this beta we updated: Apache (2.2.9), MySQL (5.0.51b), PHP (5.2.6), phpMyAdmin (2.11.6), mod_perl (2.0.4), OpenSSL (0.9.8h), and eAccelerator (0.9.5.3).

XAMPP beta versions are always for testing purposes only. There will be no upgrade packages from and to beta versions. To all testers: Many thanks in advance!!

Get the downloads at XAMPP BETA.

I encountered this weird SQL error / anomaly.

I have 5 replication slaves with one master. On the master, an insert statement was issued and it was replicated to all of the slaves except to one which I will call weird_slave. The weird_slave (MyISAM) complained that there was some SQL syntax error. I checked the insert statement and it looks pretty simple.

Also, the weird_slave has already been running for more than a couple of months now and it has received some variation of the insert statement.

I was thinking that the table could be corrupt and issued a check table and everything returned okay.

So, the question is why would the weird_slave complain about an SQL syntax error while the other slaves were okay with it. Sadly, I could not reproduce the error again. Also, I've tried to re-insert the same SQL statement on the weird_slave again and again and it was accepting it without …