I think I’ve been asked a number of times what it is like to suddenly be part of a 34,000 person company after being in a 400 person open-source driven company. Oddly enough, personally, it’s not that much different. I guess that’s what happens when the cultures of the 400 person and the 34,000 person companies match so closely. It could also be I’m drinking some kind of kool-aid that they are passing around at the MySQL Users Conference.

If it’s crazy kool-aid then I’m drinking deeply right now.

Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun delivered a keynote that really resonated with me. It was about Sun’s agenda. Delivered to a couple thousand folks attending an open source conference he started off with the joke of “enough of this free softwareâ€. Well, really, I like to think that I made the choice to …

Pentaho is hosting its first community meet-up in Mainz, Germany, on 13th and 14th June, 2008.

I will be there, and so will the leaders of the other Pentaho projects: Thomas Morgner (Pentaho Reporting), Matt Casters (Kettle), Mark Hall (Weka).

The format of the meeting will be along the lines of a BarCamp: no PowerPoint, lots of demos, audience participation, beer/wine on hand, and fun afterwards in the form of a cruise on the river Rhine. (Mainz is in the heart of Germany's wine country, so it would be difficult not to have fun!)

Are you going to join us? What would you like to see at the meet-up? What application/technology could you demo?

And by the way, if you can't wait until June, I will be giving a …

I’ve been using MySQL now for the better part of this decade. For most of that decade I’ve been writing and storing CREATE statements and organizing my databases in text files. Oh sure we’ve had tools around, even the old MySQL Administrator stuff, but let’s face it, I believe in Free Software and well, I’m cheap and it’s not like I couldn’t live with the textual way of doing things. At one point, I even organized all my documentation on the databases we managed (literally hundreds of tables and schemas) into a wiki with CREATE statements and ALTER statements all documented.

If you are nodding your head while reading the above you have felt my pain. Even worse, you used to work with me and are swearing at how much documentation is/was needed or you’re going “Dups, I know how you document and I want to bludgeon you to deathâ€.

This morning at the first major keynote for the …

As you probably have already heard Innodb Announced new Plugin version for MySQL 5.1 So now you can see Heikki and the Team were not just doing only bug fixes for last two years, but rather kept very quite.

We had access to this code for few weeks and should say we were impressed in quality (we found only one crash bug which was fixed in less than 24 hours) as well as performance improvements to compression and fast index build functionality. As it is now publicly released we'll try to put it to some production slaves to see how well it works.

There are still usability issues with this release (which you can blame both MySQL and Innodb for) - for example neither of standard data load tools (mysqldump import, using LOAD DATA INFILE or ALTER TABLE from other storage engine) would use Fast Innodb Index creation. Keep it in mind if you decide to …

• Speaker: Mikael Ronstrom, PhD, the creator of the Cluster engine
• Explains the cluster structure
• Aspects of performance
  • Response times
  • Throughput
  • Low variation of response times
• Improving performance
  • use low level API (NDB API), expensive, hard
  • use new features in MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition 6.3 (currently 6.3.13), more on this later
  • proper partitioning of tables, minimize communication
  • use of hardware
• NDB API is a C++ record access API
  • supports sending parallel record operations within the same transaction or in different transactions
  • asynchronous and synchronous
  • NDB kernel is programmed entirely asynchronously
  …

Diamond NotesApril 16, 2008Faster, Greener, Cheaper (Why every MySQL server will one day have a SQL chip) (http://www.paragon-cs.com/wordpress/2008/04/16/raj-cherabuddi-faster-greener-cheaper-why-every-mysql-server-will-one-day-have-a-sql-chip-uc/)

I am very excited about the Workbench 5.0 GA release today, the ultimate Database Modeling Tool for MySQL Developers.


Mike calling to get Workbench GA online. (about 15 min before Marten's UC keynote starts)
The team has worked extremely hard for the last months, eagerly awaiting this day. Congratulations to Mike Zinner, Alfredo Kojima, Vladimir Kolesnikov, Mike Lischke, Johannes Taxacher, Sergei Tkachenko and Maksym Yehorov for making this happen.

We invite all in the community to try out the product and provide us with feedback.

• The OSS version is available for download from …

MySQL just gave me an award at this morning’s keynote, along with Sheeri Kritzer Cabral (for the second year in a row!) and Diego Medina, for my code contributions to the MySQL community, specifically Maatkit, which makes it easier to make MySQL reliable, fast, and robust. It’s an honor to be recognized. And while I could leave it at that, I’d like to say a word or two more.

The economy, community, and ecosystem that’s building around Free Software can often be very rewarding financially. This is a great motivation; being rewarded for your efforts is one of the chief virtues of a culture of entrepreneurship, along with the idea that to try and fail is just as noble as to succeed. But I find that isn’t enough. If I were only rewarded financially and with recognitions such as this morning’s, I would quickly become bankrupt at a …

Ahead in the Cloud - The power of Infrastructure as a Service
CTO Amazon.com, Dr. Werner Vogels

Pretty much everyone in the audience uses Amazon!

Announced: Persistent Storage for Amazon EC2.

Hitting one page, might actually go to 250 different services, before the page is generated for you. Shows the use of a tool (Amazon internal), that graphs it.

SaaS: Develop -> Test -> Operate

Hardware costs? Software costs? Maintenance? Load balancing? Scaling? Utilisation? Idle machines? Bandwidth management? Server hosting? Storage management? High availability? All this is the differentiated heavy lifting that Amazon bases their services on.

SaaS comes at a very big cost that you have to address.

70/30 switch: 30% of time, energy and dollars on differentiated value creation; 70% of time, energy and dollars on differentiated heavy lifting.

At Amazon, we …

Marten has opened the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo. This time he started in his opening comments “I have more to say to more people, and given less time to say it”.

His answer to why Sun bought MySQL included slides showing “Alignment in Culture and Vision” and “What’s in it for you - Performance & Scale, Support, Marketplace”.

This year the MySQL Conference has over 2,000 people and 55 exhibitors.

What was funny, was the photo showing the burning of the IPO Prospectus. Marten mentioned now with many Sun lawyers he has to be more careful what to day. I actually have an interesting extension to this at Watching what you say

Some points of note for me:

• The Web Economy continues to have exponential growth and the need for new technology but a goal of linear growth.
• Continuing to mention becoming “Disruptive …