MySQL has placed itself in the middle of a rising furor over its allegedly diminished commitment to open source. To be fair, it has only itself to blame.

It all started with a disgruntled ex-MySQL employee, Jeremy Cole. Cole declared that MySQL's sky was falling because it was to be releasing certain parts of the next version of its database as closed-source software. Marten Mickos responded that he had misunderstood (when, in fact, he had understood very well), it went to Slashdot (where it was of course misconstrued even further), and we're left with a …

Since the recovery from my recent outage, I’ve noticed that none of the normal feed sites where my posts normally show up caught the last post, so this is a test post to see what’s going on, if it was a temporary glitch, or what.

If you didn’t see the post linked above, please read it if you’re happy with your web host. I’m looking for a new one :-/

Hopefully you can’t get enough of the UC08 videos (and thanks to Sheeri for the link with the full Jonathan keynote video), so Zack has managed to get some most posted.

This morning, we learned what it meant to be a pirate in terms of patents, copyright and now politics with the Pirate Party. Don’t let the scary name put you off - these guys are about making all of us consumers (of software, video, audio, books, etc.) more in control of information. Please support these guys by visiting Piratpartiet.se.

Next we had the Scalability Panel with representatives from Facebook, Fotolog, Sun, YouTube, …

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. …

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. …

Liveblogging: Extending MySQL by Brian “Krow” Aker

Brian wins the award for “most frequent great quotes during a talk”.

Before MySQL 5.1 a UDF was the only way to extend MySQL.

All you need in a UDF is: init() execute() deinit()

my_bool id3_parse_init(UDF_INIT *initid UDF_ARGS *args, char *message)

UDF_ARGS tell you about incoming args
char *message is the output that might return
args->arg_count is the # of args

WARNING: use STRICT mode in MySQL, otherwise there are tons of silent failures.

“When you work on databases you start to put everything in databases. Tip, don’t put a DVD into a database, because really long BLOBs aren’t actually supported….”

In MySQL 5.1, you can now install plugins (example is memcache_servers plugin):

mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN memcache_servers SONAME …

• Tom Hanlon of MySQL presents
• monitoring tool basics
  • SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST
  • SHOW GLOBAL STATUS
  • SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES
• basic tools
  • mysqladmin is provided with the server
    • mysqladmin -i 10 extended status: will repeat the same command every 10 seconds. Pipe through grep "and smoke it" (bad pun, hah hah)
    • -r: show only changed values
  • MySQL Administrator
• cacti
  • rrdtool based network graphing tool
  • uses snmp
  • PHP apache and MySQL based solution
  • MySQL plugins, download and install
  • "poller" gathers data and populates the graphs
  • someone offers …

At the MySQL Conference and Expo this week, we've seen new storage engines popping out of the woodwork and it caused me to wonder at what point MySQL went from being a product to a platform. From a technical perspective, you could argue that MySQL has always (e.g. for at least 5 years!) been a platform, since it's enabled plug-in features and storage engines since the early days. Heck, Arjen wrote about it back in 2004! The pluggable storage engine API become increasingly important in recent years as people began extending MySQL in many different directions. The virtue of the... READ MORE

In 3 words:

They already do.

MySQL Enterprise is more than just a binary. http://mysql.com/products/enterprise/ has the details on the other features MySQL Enterprise includes.

One of these features is the MySQL Enterprise Monitor, which is closed source, proprietary alerting software.

So when bloggers make statements such as:

MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise. This represents a substantive change to their development model ? previously they have been developing features in both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. However, with a shift to offering some features only in MySQL Enterprise, this means a shift to development of those features occurring (and thus code being …