There were free copies of the Linux Journal handed out to attendees outside in the hallways here at CommunityOne and I noticed that they just published this year's Readers' Choice Awards - MySQL was voted as the favourite database by 62.7% of their readers!

MySQL is not only the world's most popular open-source database, it's your favorite as well. Although PostreSGL,
SQLite, Firebird and others registered votes, the competition was not fierce. It doesn't hurt that MySQL runs on more than
20 different platforms.

Thanks a lot to the readers of LinuxJournal, we really appreciate the support!

As part of developing HSCALE, a partitioning / sharding solution, I set up a benchmark test suite. I made it scripted and thus repeatable to monitor the progress and performance regressions during the development.

Test Suite

The test suite uses mysqlslap to benchmark the overhead of MySQL Proxy itself in real life scenario as well as the different components of HSCALE – query analyzing and query rewriting. The complete test suite is available in the svn trunk at http://svn.hscale.org under hscale/test/performance/mysqlslap. There you find a build.xml – an Ant buildfile that is used to set up the …

This is a bit surprise when we encountered a case where InnoDB is not releasing its row lock when there is an error condition within the transaction. And I verified with Falcon, Oracle, SQL Server and Sybase; all seemed to work as expected.

For example; just open a transaction in a session and execute a error statement (lets say duplicate key) and on the other new session try to get a row lock on the same record (use where clause with FOR UPDATE) and you will notice that InnoDB blocks on this statement until you issue a explicit rollback or commit. But remember there is nothing happened on the first session other than duplicate error on that row. So, InnoDB should implicitly unlock the row when there is an error; and looks like it is not doing that.

Here is the scenario:

First create a single column table and populate some rows (lets say 20 rows in this case) on any version of MySQL/InnoDB.

mysql> create table …

Lets start at the point where you have just installed OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 and have logged in using your primary userid on the system.

First thing to do is install the packages for PostgreSQL and MySQL on OpenSolaris OS 2008.05. Right click on the desktop and select "Open Terminal" to start a terminal session. Use "su" to assume the root userid. (The primary user already has root role however some programs still explicitly check for userid of root and hence needed to avoid unexpected surprises.)

Verify pkg is able to communicate with the IPS repository.

# pkg search -r postgres …

Savio Rodrigues of InfoWorld tries to parse what makes open-source buyers tick, and how to generate more of them. In so doing, he suggests that the real battleground is over those enterprises with both money and expertise to go it alone with open-source software (so-called "Category B" customers).

Why should they bother buying support when they can self-support?

For me, this isn't the right question. Using his MySQL-derived customer classification system, the real question is, "Can proprietary software serve Category A (companies with more time than money) at all?" and "Can open source more efficiently serve Categories B and C too?"

Implicit in Rodrigues' reasoning is, I think, a belief that if the software is proprietary, A, B, and C companies will all eventually just say, "Aw, shucks. I've got …

Open Query develops its own training materials, rigorously kept up to date, and thus always printed "on demand", i.e. just before an actual training course takes place. They're neatly bound with colour cover and green back board, just looks nice and clean. They also have a special layout that makes note-taking easier.

I'm teaching a custom MySQL training day tomorrow, so I had the stuff ready last week and took it to a friendly local shop for the usual treatment. All seemed perfect. I happened to be out of town on Saturday, so I was just going to pick things up today (Monday). Easy enough, I know the local shop and trust them now to always do a good job and deliver whatever they promise.

Except... today is a public holiday in Queensland: Labour Day. Many years ago I worked for an employer (no longer in business) in the Netherlands who reckoned that labour day was really …

If you've passed your CMA, CMDBA, CMDEV or the Cluster certification, be sure to signup for the MySQL Certified Professionals LinkedIn group. This group is for certified MySQL professionals, recruiters, human resource managers and other technical hiring managers.

This group is not affiliated with Sun or MySQL AB in any way.MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

If you've passed your CMA, CMDBA, CMDEV or the Cluster certification, be sure to signup for the MySQL Certified Professionals LinkedIn group. This group is for certified MySQL professionals, recruiters, human resource managers and other technical hiring managers.

This group is not affiliated with Sun or MySQL AB in any way.MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

Just two weeks after having returned from the MySQL Conference, I just arrived safely in San Francisco again. This time to attend the CommunityOne on Monday and the JavaOne conference from Tuesday till Friday, which should keep me occupied for the rest of the week. I look forward to meeting my fellow MySQL team members (Colin, Giuseppe and Jay will be here, too), as well as many new colleagues from Sun! Shoot me an email, if you would like to meet.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced two new offerings that will significantly expand customer choice by providing users with access to Sun's innovative open source software running on the Amazon Web Services platform. Sun has added premium technical support for its MySQL™ database running on Linux and on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to its global support and services offerings.