My name is Karl Van den Bergh — I do Business Development here at Kickfire. I’ll be joining Raj on our corporate blog adding my comments to what is happening at our company and in our marketplace.

What a great conference (my first) and what a great venue it was to have launched our company and beta product.

Now that I have switched from the dark side of commercial software to the open source world, my eyes have been opened to the power of the community. Specifically, the success of our launch can, to a large degree, be attributed to the community.

Over the last couple of weeks I have heard comments in the blogosphere to the effect that Kickfire has a great marketing machine. One blog noted that Kickfire had “brought Web 2.0 Marketing to the Database World.” Whereas our marketing team will certainly take pride in these comments (and should for all the hard work that went into this launch), the reality is that our …

I’m not sure how I didn’t see this earlier, but it looks like MySQL 5.1 is coming with a load balancer for replicated servers. I’m absolutely pumped about this - we’ve got a few sites running with multiple db slaves and it’s so annoying having to check if they’re behind the master.

It looks like the load balancer will automatically pull slaves out if they fall behind, and route connections to the ones that are the most up to date. It is based on MySQL Proxy, which is currently in Alpha.

MySQL Load Balancer

The new version is avaialble for download.

In this release:

- added: windows port
- added: multitable select star warning
- added: multicolumn IN clause warning
- added: numeration for output messages

- fixed: bug 0000001: Compilation fails
(a compilation problem on 3.x g++ compilers)

The big news coming from Java One is that Sun is removing the last licensing hurdles in Java. What this means is Java is becoming fully Open Source.

Java users can especially thank Sun now. Also this supports Sun's vision of Open Source.

"We've been engaging with the open-source community for Java to finish off the OpenJDK project, and the specific thing that we've been working on with them is clearing the last bits that we didn't have the rights," to distribute, Sands said.

"Over the past year, we have pretty much removed most of those encumbrances," Sands said. Work still needs to be done to offer the Java sound engine and SNMP code via open source; that effort is expected to be completed this year. Developers, though, may be able to proceed without a component like the sound engine, Sands said.
Source: …

The conference that many of us just went to is called the MySQL Conference and Expo, but a lot of people don’t call it that. They call it by the name it had in 2006 and earlier: MySQL User’s Conference. In fact, some people say (or blog) that they dislike the new name and they’re going to call it the old name, because [… insert reason here…].

I call it by the new name that some people dislike so much. Why? Because it is a conference and expo, not a user’s conference. There’s no reason to pretend otherwise. The conference is organized and owned by MySQL, not the users. It isn’t a community event. It isn’t about you and me first and foremost. It’s about a company trying to successfully build a business, and other companies paying to be sponsors and show their products in the expo hall. Times have changed.

I’m not saying any of this is bad. Being successful in …

This article provides a comparison between the MyISAM and InnoDB storage engines for MySQL. InnoDB is commonly considered to perform worse than MyISAM, but this article aims to dispel this myth by describing the differences between these engines and what makes InnoDB a good fit for many database needs.

In addition, a look at when it is better to use MyISAM and a case study of the drupal.org site provide insight for determining which engine is best for a given situation.

read more

I am attending the Web2.0 Expo at San Francisco this week. Today was the first day of the conference and the crowds seemed to be larger than last year. The primary focus seems to be on social networking this year. 

I'll blog more about other aspects of the conference, but I wanted to focus this post on the twitter phenomenon. I'd heard of twitter of course, but I just could never figure out what it was all about. What was the big deal about telling the world what you were doing every second ? Who would even care ?

I attended a panel titled  "Short attention span theater: The birth of micro-blogging and micro-media". It was mediated by Gregarious Narain (he turned out not to be all that gregarious) and included Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Stowe Boyd (consultant) and …

I am attending the Web2.0 Expo at San Francisco this week. Today was the first day of the conference and the crowds seemed to be larger than last year. The primary focus seems to be on social networking this year. 

I'll blog more about other aspects of the conference, but I wanted to focus this post on the twitter phenomenon. I'd heard of twitter of course, but I just could never figure out what it was all about. What was the big deal about telling the world what you were doing every second ? Who would even care ?

I attended a panel titled  "Short attention span theater: The birth of micro-blogging and micro-media". It was mediated by Gregarious Narain (he turned out not to be all that gregarious) and included Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Stowe Boyd (consultant) and …

In one of his recent posts Vadim already gave some information about possible benefits from using new InnoDB file format but in this post I'd like to share some real-life example how compression in InnoDB plugin could be useful for large warehousing tasks.

One of our clients had really many problems with one of his servers. This is pretty powerful server (Intel Xeon E5430 / 8Gb RAM / BBU-enabled RAID10 with fast SAS drives) with really interesting dataset on it. The only table customer has on this server is one huge innodb table with a set of TEXT fields. We've been trying to optimize this server before by playing with various innodb parameters (including page size changes) but at the end of the day server was dying of I/O load because dataset size was 60Gb+ and all reads from this table were pretty random (buffer …