One of the greatest things about MySQL is the amount of passion that exists inside the company and among our customers and users. People are vocal in the things they love and sometimes hate about MySQL. But it's all good; we love getting input; it helps us refine our products and offerings.

At our users conference this week, Robin Schumacher presented our roadmap going beyond the latest 5.1 release. There's been discussion about the new backup capabilities planned for MySQL 6.0, so let me put all the cards on the table to explain what we're doing and why.

First of all, MySQL 6.0 is currently in alpha and is targeted for GA release at the end of the year if things go well. Online backup has been a long requested item from our customers and we know that the more business-critical the application, the greater the need for better backup facilities …

Wednesday's conference keynote sessions included a presentation by Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party and a panel session on scalability hosted by Kaj "Gaius Baltar" Arno, VP of Community and official Sun Ambassador at MySQL.  The panel included a few of the high-volume websites using MySQL including (from left) Flickr, Fotolog, Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube. (Also, not shown in the photo, more modest web sites MySQL.com and Sun.com.)

I've posted some short video …

After 15 consecutive verified bugs, today I got my first “Not a Bug” (#36141).

Wow - I Don’t know exactly how should I feel.. Maybe it’s time for a holiday!
Consolation: Just errors of youth ;-)

The other important news of the day is the following. With the chart ‘Falcon Cache Hit Ratio’ (thank you Robin for your always interesting articles) I have finished the performance reports to be included in the new MySQL® Performance Tuning Monitor I am developing.

I was not sure whether to add a Falcon Tab in the Performance Tuning Monitor or not, but that article has convinced me. I had already added a Maria Tab.

If I am not mistaken, the ‘Falcon Cache Hit …

Global account - table which has the ff info: id, user_id, cluster_id, first_name, last_name
- show where app will query the data for the user is.

db_query(" select user_id, cluster_id from global_account where user_id = 300 ");
db_query(" select * from $cluster_id where user_id = 300 ");

Innodb - like PK that is very small.

I finally finished my first data warehouse! and it only took me 3 days!

Well, to be fair, the data warehouse design was already planned and it wasn't really that big anyway, but I am still happy about it.

I was asked on Monday to do a data warehouse for my company's head quarters in Germany. I work in Beijing, so its like.... very slow to connect to there. They gave me the database design, some SQL statements to generate a few dimensions and "rough" business rules for the data.

Now, I haven't done anything like this before, but I really wanted to try. So I did it my way.

My way is to use a lot of Views with long SQL statements instead of cursors or stored procedures. I like it this way, because I feel like I can see the data and catch problems instead of programming blindly to …

“Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL” screamed the headline on Slashdot last night. The headline is not entirely accurate (although slightly more accurate than the bizarre statement that “Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything”).

So what is going on at MySQL? To get to the bottom of that you have to weave together a number of posts and comments from a number of sources. First the article behind the Slashdot headline:

“Just announced: MySQL to launch new features only in MySQL Enterprise,” states Jeremy Cole, which is a much more accurate description of the state of affairs. “MySQL …

64-bit -> 'unlimited' addressable memory.

CPU -> MySQL - dual dual core vs. dual quad core don't matter. Because MySQL is not CPU intensive anyway.

Memory -> Semi-ideal situation: RAM size > Database Size. If db size is 30 GB, then get a 32 GB RAM.

Shared storage -> SAN / NAS -> dedicated to MySQL db and not shared with other systems.
-> I/O latency higher compared to RAID
-> RAID -> stored in local server

Vendor -> Dell - cheapest price compared to other brands
-> can go cheaper if you have good relationship with sales rep (~25% discount)

I had to move... Getting bored.

For the first time, MySQL includes Dtrace probes in the 6.0 release. On platforms that support Dtrace you can still find out a lot about what's happening, both in the Operating System kernel and in user processes, even without probes in the application. But carefully placed Dtrace probes inserted into the application code can give you a lot more information about what's going on, because they can be mapped to the application functionality. So far only a few probes have been included, but expect more to be added soon.

I decided to take the new probes for a spin. Oh, and rather than do it on a Solaris system, I figured I'd give it a shot on my Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, since MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) supports Dtrace.

To begin with I pulled down and built MySQL 6.0.5 from Bit Keeper, thanks to some help from Brian Aker. …

The first persons I met at the UC this year were David Minor and his daughter. David told me he was interested in the Certification Exams and bravely took the plunge on his first exam Tuesday morning. I am very happy to announce he has earned his Associate, Developer and DBA Certifications. Congratulations to David and all the others who took exams.

Thursday is the last day for conference attendees to take their exams for only $25. We will open the exam room at 8:30a and let people take exams until 3:00p. So save $175 or wait until the 2009 Users Conference.

Today we still had problems for those who had not set up their account with Pearson VUE BEFORE taking their exams. Since we hang the certification exams off the data from those accounts. The results below do not include the thirty plus exams waiting for this data.

…

After many years where it’s been under debate, Monty now really says he knows what MySQL is named after, and it is after My.