The latest from the MySQL community

There are only two kinds of storage devices - those that have failed, and those that are about to fail. That's the view most datacenters have about the traditionally mechanical devices pejoratively referred to as "spinning rust." All disk drives fail, cheap drives fail faster.

If the average time to fail is five years, you and your laptop can make do with the occasional backup. But when an average enterprise has 100, or 1,000, or increasingly 10,000 or 100,000 individual disk drives, failure is a daily, if not hourly occurrence. Mechanical devices fail.

And with failure comes the potential for losing data - using commodity disks to save your boss $500,000 does her no good if she's fined $50,000,000 for violating data retention regulations. Stock transactions, medical images or feature length movies - take your pick, some data has to be perfect. Not a decimal point or pixel out of place.

That's exactly why, years …

Sun's Businessweek advertisement for MySQL

(Credit: Businessweek Magazine)

I'm sure there are many benefits for MySQL being a part of a large IT vendor like Sun Microsystems, but the advertising budget probably doesn't hurt. Reading Businessweek today at lunch, I bumped into this MySQL advertisement in ...

Here's my presentation I gave June 9, 2008, at the Twin Cities MySQL and PHP User Group about my highly available cluster using DRBD and Heartbeat.

I added a few slides and cleaned things up a bit. The presentation went well and we had a lot of good questions.

The MySQL and PHP User Group will be taking some time off over the summer. There will be another meetup mid-summer to come up with some ideas for future meetings.

Here's my presentation I gave June 9, 2008, at the Twin Cities MySQL and PHP User Group about my highly available cluster using DRBD and Heartbeat.

I added a few slides and cleaned things up a bit. The presentation went well and we had a lot of good questions.

The MySQL and PHP User Group will be taking some time off over the summer. There will be another meetup mid-summer to come up with some ideas for future meetings.

Last week, I uploaded the first screenshots for opentaps analytics to the opentaps documentation wiki. While this application is still in its early stages, I thought he screenshots should help you see what we've been working on.

What you're looking at is an application that takes operational data from the opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM system and transforms them into an analytical data warehouse using the Kettle ETL tool. Then, from this data warehouse, we have built dashboards, maps, drill downs, and reports.

The goal of opentaps analytics is to help you make better business decisions with your data by providing you with …

When a Forrester Research representative emailed with the following survey highlights, I was more than a little surprised: "Forrester released data today analyzing trend lines in enterprise open source usage in 2007. Among the key findings: Seventy percent of decision-makers responded that they don't have interest or have no plans to adopt open source software; Only 23 percent of respondents said expanding their use of open source software was a priority; Security is the main concern around adopting open source software. Eighty-eight percent of respondents said it was an important or very important concern." The data is from 1,017 decision... READ MORE

We recently moved some databases to different servers, and I altered our mySQL slave configuration files to take into account some of the databases we wanted to replicate (Replicate-do-db) and others that we wanted to ignore (Replicate-ignore-db) -- each of these server cases were mutually exclusive.All went well, until I found a peculiar error:Error 'Table 'db101.table101' doesn't exist' on

Did you notice that Steve Jobs called out SQLite in his announcement about the iPhone 2.0 software?

Now lets say in one year there are 6 million old iPhones plus another 6 or so million new iPhones all running the 2.0 software.

If you toss in all of the other gadgets running SQLite it seems like a pretty big number.

A hundred million installations?

I went and took at look at the SQLite website to see what they think their numbers are.

Looking through the SQLite team's reasoning I suspect they are low balling the number they are publishing

Lets shoot for a billion installations. Most likely anyone who is reading this already has several applications running on their computer using it.

Pretty good numbers for an open source database.

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• Continued with HTML testing report pages modifications, the new HTML pages report all the information collected by the current Skoll Client.
• Began integrating new data collection features into Skoll on the server side, most of these changes are made in our development database.
• Read research papers on reducing testing space.

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• None

KEY CONCERNS

• Future progress of the project depends on having push-build tar balls.

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

• Finish the integration of new data collection features in Skoll on the server side.
• Modify Skoll's upload manager and data processor to handle the separate log files collected by the new Skoll Client. Ideally, Skoll can generate a report page for each step of the testing process (e.g. source download, …

I attended the Boston MySQL meetup today and it was wonderful.
(Thanks to Sheeri Cabral for the invite)
Food, beverages, and swag were provided for free and the presentation was great.
The talk went into great detail about database backups and was one of the most practical talks I have attended.

Coding is going well, just wish I had more time to do so.

I think I might actually submit a report on time today!