Last week in Prague, I met with Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for version 8.10.

myself, Mark Shuttleworth, Arseniy Kuznetsov (Sun, NetBeans), Matt Zimmermann (Canonical CTO)

As you would expect, we discussed Canonical’s and MySQL’s offerings to the market. And we pondered on possibilities for joint customers to have the best of both worlds: Wouldn’t it be great if MySQL users on Ubuntu could get the “best bits” from MySQL through the software delivery mechanisms of Ubuntu?

Mark drew the above picture on a piece of paper (which I used Omni Graffle to capture in .png form), and we decided to explore how the “curved orange” part of the customer experience could be improved.

A big thank you to all those who attended the memcached webinar today on which I was a panelist. I was told that there were more than 560 registrants.

The feedback I received directly and indirectly shows that there is a lot of interest about memcached. In the future, I hope to work again with MySQL/Sun on more memcached related webinars.

If you attended the webinar and have some suggestions, comments or questions, please contact me at fmashraqi at yahoo dot com or post a comment on this blog.

Special thanks to Jimmy Guerrero, Monty Taylor, Rich Taylor, Edwin DeSouza and Alex Roedling for their hard work in arranging the webinar. Also thanks to Brian Aker, Matt Ingenthron and Trond Norbye for their assistance at various phases.

In case you missed the webinar:

• webinar recording: …

One year ago, we announced that we would open source the entire Solaris Cluster product suite. Today, we are delivering on that promise six months ahead of schedule by releasing over two million lines of source code for the Solaris Cluster framework!

Read the official press release and listen to a podcast with Meenakshi Kaul-Basu, Director of Availability Products at Sun.

This third, and final, source code release follows the initial open sourcing of the Solaris Cluster agents in June, 2007 and Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition in December, 2007. As with the previous releases, the …

Kwik Surveys is the site that's hosting the 2008 MySQL Magazine Survey. The site will be going offline from Friday May 30th at 15:00 GMT through Monday June 1st, 09:00 GMT to upgrade to faster servers.

Hopefully this upgrade will go off without any problems, but just in case, I'll have a backup of all the results and forward them offsite to another location.

Have you surveyed?MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

Kwik Surveys is the site that's hosting the 2008 MySQL Magazine Survey. The site will be going offline from Friday May 30th at 15:00 GMT through Monday June 1st, 09:00 GMT to upgrade to faster servers.

Hopefully this upgrade will go off without any problems, but just in case, I'll have a backup of all the results and forward them offsite to another location.

Have you surveyed?MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

In preparation for the book’s launch next month, I’ve created a website for it: High Performance MySQL. You may notice that the URL isn’t the same as the site for the first edition. It proved to be difficult to transfer that domain. If we accomplish it later on, I’ll set up a redirect. Why an official site? To give you free stuff, of course. Final drafts of the front matter (TOC, preface, foreword), a sample chapter, and the index are there already.

Gained some interesting insight earlier this week at the SUN/MySQL APAC eHorizons event. A key thread in my (business track) session was that a) databases are not interchangable, and b) you plan for growth. If you don't, you can't grow, and your business might end (or at least be in serious pain).

For instance, if you build an application but don't put application logic into place that deals with separate master/slave connections (even if they talk to the same server for starters!) is a bad idea. It's a pain to fix up later, and sometimes it's just impossible (better believe it, I have helped customers who struggle wish exactly this issue). Not all reads should go to slaves, sometimes you need absolute up-to date info from the master. So the logic is not quite as simple as "all selects to the slaves"....

Hardware selection is a result of all kinds of architectural choices, and again has to be geared for the future. …

On the way to

MySQL Proxy: replicating into memcache

I have another small side project:

• translating Row based log-records into Statement ones.

Our support team was asking for it since a while and it was a nice PoC that I can decode RBR events nicely.

Running MySQL 5.1 (with binlog_format = ROW) I issued:

mysql> INSERT INTO cols_pk VALUES \
     ( 3, "varchar", "char" ), ( 4, NULL, NULL );

... and have let mysql-binlog-dump decode the row-based log-events into SQL statements:

$ ./mysql-binlog-dump \
  --binlog-file=/home/jan/datadir/mysql-bin.000010

-- mysql-binlog-dump.c:256: db = test
BEGIN

-- mysql-binlog-dump.c:220:
CREATE TABLE test.cols_pk (
  field_0 INT NOT NULL,
  field_1 VARCHAR(64) DEFAULT NULL,
  field_2 CHAR(64) DEFAULT NULL
)

-- …

Twitter has had many outages recently. On May 17th, 2008 http://blog.twitter.com/2007/05/devils-in-details.html was posted and says:

What went wrong? We checked in code to provide more accurate pagination, to better distribute and optimize our messaging system?basically we just kept tweaking when we should have called it a day. Details are great but getting too caught up in them is a mistake. I’ve been CEO of Twitter for two months now and this an awesome lesson learned. We’re seeing the bigger picture and Twitter is back. Please contact us if something isn’t working right (with Twitter that is).

(in other news, that post was made on May 17th and does not show up on http://blog.twitter.com, which it should, between the May 16th and May 19th posts. I found a reference in other …

As announced by Eduardo, I have started playing with The Aquarium.
That does not mean that I sleep with the fishes, but that I am playing along with the group. And besides, dolphins are not fishes, but nonetheless they should be at ease in an aquarium.

This blogging is part of MySQL integration in Sun. Slowly but surely we are becoming aware of our surroundings and we are engaging the rest of the Sun communities.

We are learning.