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All in Melbourne, keep the evening of Thursday, 20 March 2008, free. Why? We’re having a Meetup Mashup, right here in Melbourne, Australia. This is the Sun and MySQL tour around the world!

Details:
Date: 20th March
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: RMIT University (Swanston St)
Room: 10.08.04

Contact Tristan on 0422 501 726 for directions to the venue. (or me, at 0412 593 292 if you have any questions, etc.)

After we’re done at RMIT, discussing the recent acquisition (you’re guaranteed to see Support Engineer Gary Pendergast, and me speak, and answer questions), we’ll head over to the bar nearby, and grab some grub. Its a great opportunity to come and get your questions answered!

Are you already part of the MySQL Meetup in Melbourne? If not, check out the …

We’ve been running into a problem with one client:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tbl;

takes 0.25 seconds on one db, and 0.06 seconds on another.

Consistently. That’s a fourfold difference.

There aren’t any significant configuration differences (like query cache, etc.), the software versions are the same, and the table fits into memory. This has been looked at by at least 3 in-house MySQL experts, and the only thing we can determine is that it’s a hardware difference.

The table fits into memory so it’s not a disk issue, and the only other difference among the hardware is that the slower machine has Solaris virtualization in place in the form of “containers” (cpu is the same, etc). Is this something that’s known to cause issues with speed? The “tbl” in question is an InnoDB table, if that means anything. Is there something like the “speed” of RAM?

Note that Sun has already been …

I have created a MySQL Professionals Group for networking with others in the space, in the tradition of the Oracle Professionals group and the SQL Server Professionals groups that I already participate in.

This is a great way to network with other professionals in your field of work. I hope you join us.

To join, please follow this invitation link.

Paul

So, this past week I was in Montreal attending the annual PHP-Quebec conference. It was my first time up in Montreal and I have to say, it's a fun place! It was great meeting so many interesting folks and my session was jam-packed and a lot of fun.

One of the most interesting conversations at the conference was regarding PDOv2 and what, if anything, is going on with it. Lukas Smith raised the spectre of PDOv2 (after a tiny little prod from me. ) at the Database Panel discussion with me, Kitman Cheung from IBM, Kuassi Mensah from Oracle, and Bob Bernier from PostgreSQL. It seems that …

The MySQL Users Conference is coming up — April 14-17 in Santa Clara, California, USA.

This was forwarded to me from a colleague:

Are you interested in attending the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo? I’m happy to announce that LinuxQuestions.org is able to give away one pass to the event. Visit this link for additional information. Good luck.

And I as well wish you good luck! If you would rather get a surefire deal instead of taking a chance, e-mail me and I can send you a 20% speaker’s discount code — I am speaking, so you get a discount!

We’re proud to announce that Release Candidate 1 is waiting on our Mirrors to be downloaded. More than 50 bugs were fixed and some additional improvements were incorporated into this build.  The connections drawing has been reworked. Now relationship-lines are evenly spaced along the sides of the table-figures. For SE version we also added a new relationship-notation where lines are connected directly from/to corresponding columns. DDL-Syntax of views is now parsed while editing - this also automates naming of the view-objects to the name used in DDL. Workbench-Overview-Page has been cleaned up and improved. And another SE feature - new pages for validation in SQL export plugins were added.
So please fetch our latest version and give it a try.

Recently I have been asked by my company to make a case for open-source ETL-data integration tools as an alternative for the commercial data integration tool, Informatica PowerCenter.
So I did a lot of research and I'm going to try my best, considering I have never used the open-source tools nor the commercial one.

I found plenty of information about comparisons between Pentaho Kettle and Talend, which were 2 of the open-source tools I was supposed to research.
Now, without getting in a big arguement (or matt casters posting on my blog), I'd like to attempt to compare the two, very briefly.
And again, this is ONLY from the research I did online and not based on my experience using the tools (since I dont really have any).


…

Here is the video of “Database Basics”, which I presented at the February 2008 Boston MySQL User Group meeting. The presentation goes over the basics of relations, data, the Entity-Relationship Model, how to choose data types, and how to do basic CREATE statements.

You can download:

the video (Large, 500 MB, or Small, 100 MB)
and
the slides (PDF, 171 Kb).

Or just watch the video:

Snappy Interviews: 100 Questions to Ask Oracle DBAs is one of those valuable books that you need to have in your library if you interview Oracle talent or are a technical recruiter.

I am neither right now, but author Christopher Lawson has some great advice for interviewers. There is an art to asking questions and this book is skillfully written to show this art.

Niche questions seeking very arcane knowledge do not test the breath of skills and knowledge of a interviewer. A few questions on minutia are fair game. But you want to quickly access what is in the candidate's skull as relates to the job at hand and not ascertain if they would be a good partner for Trivial Pursuit.

Question the understanding of concepts. The ability to recite rote memorized lists usually fails at three o'clock in the morning. And ask about the entire breadth of the position, just not one small segment. …