An article on PostgreSQL online gives a quick assessment of the difference between MySQL and PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL people look like a gang of geeks and Martin Mickos looks polished

Who's the geek in this picture?

We made some big announcements this week at our annual developer forums, CommunityOne and JavaOne. I thought I'd highlight a couple in particular.

We announced the first commercial release of OpenSolaris - targeting high speed developers and development teams (not consumers...). OpenSolaris focuses on developers wanting to be freed from proprietary software models, who see innovation and automation in operating systems as a source of competitive advantage.

If Solaris 10, OpenSolaris's older brother, is for IT departments prioritizing carrier grade stability over rapid innovation, OpenSolaris targets the exact opposite - developers, from high performance computing to social networking, that prioritize a constantly refreshing repository filled with community innovations (and ZFS-based automated rollback) over an unchanging qualification …

This Saturday, May 10th, is MinneBar, Minnesota's BarCamp. MinneBar is described as an "(un)Conference" which means it's a free, ad-hoc gathering of technology folks where everyone is encouraged to contribute.

There are a lot of great sessions this year. I'll be giving a presentation titled "Memcached & MySQL Sitting in a Tree." The talk is about the new Memcached Functions for MySQL. I'll talk a bit about the what, why, and how about this set of awesome UDFs.

I'm not sure what time I present and I think I have 50 minutes, but I don't know for sure. I'm trying something new this time around; I'll be publishing my presentation on …

This Saturday, May 10th, is MinneBar, Minnesota's BarCamp. MinneBar is described as an "(un)Conference" which means it's a free, ad-hoc gathering of technology folks where everyone is encouraged to contribute.

There are a lot of great sessions this year. I'll be giving a presentation titled "Memcached & MySQL Sitting in a Tree." The talk is about the new Memcached Functions for MySQL. I'll talk a bit about the what, why, and how about this set of awesome UDFs.

I'm not sure what time I present and I think I have 50 minutes, but I don't know for sure. I'm trying something new this time around; I'll be publishing my presentation on …

We haven’t had a MySQL University session in a while (a semi-spring break?), but tomorrow’s session (May 8) should be real interesting. MySQL Cluster developer, Stewart Smith, will host a session titled Getting Started Using NDB. It will happen on May 8, at 13:00 UTC.

One of the most common queries I receive is from people wanting to install or get started with NDB usage (ok, strictly speaking, they want to “cluster” MySQL, and I’m happy Stewart is using the word “NDB” which refers to the storage engine). All in all, it should be a great session, so I encourage you to join in the festivities.

Managing database change is an incredibly important discipline that very few database professionals overtly talk or worry about until they're in the thick of things with a particular database - moving it from development to production, making changes to a newly installed production database, or implementing an updated version of the database (new tables, modifications to existing objects, etc.) in a SaaS application. It's at that point where change management becomes very important because if you don't do things right the first time, you can make a royal mess of things and even (in a small number of cases) reach the point of no return where you've completely torched your database.

A

Kaj tried to explain MySQL's "new" policy of offering closed extensions to its 100 percent open-source core (New? MySQL Monitor has been commercial-only since 2005 or so, as Marten Mickos recently reminded me), but Kaj's clarification clouded things more than it cleared them, such that wild throngs crowded the streets to celebrate their apparent success in browbeating MySQL into giving them all of its software for free, forever.

Put simply, Kaj indicated that one announced closed extension would now be open source, but said nothing about other potential closed extensions. People missed the point (which was not hard given the post's (correct) emphasis on all the open source that MySQL does and will do).

It …

Brian Moon suggest that community provided example my.cnf files would be a great thing to have on MySQLforge in this recent post: http://doughboy.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/example-mycnf-files/

I pulled out the "innodb heavy" config sample file and modified it with the standard settings that I typically start with when setting up a new InnoDB master. I've also modified the comments in the file a bit and have added some of my own too. I removed the sample slave configuration parameters (master-host, etc) because you should be using 'CHANGE MASTER TO'.

He suggested tagging such files with a 'mycnf' tag and very kindly tagged mine after I posted it :)

Feel free to share yours too and please feel free to make any comments about my configuration choices.

You can find it here (along with any other mycnf …

This is a great little sql statement that packs a nice punch for the number crunchers out there...A disclaimer first: make sure you don't do this on a live OLTP table with millions of rows unless you want your customers to wait. Thus, run it on your slave :).Onto business...The Request"I need to know the number of people who made one purchase, two purchases, three purchases, and so on. Right