Today, we officially launched Kickfire. As part of our announcement we published, together with Sun Microsystems, record-breaking TPC-H benchmark numbers (data warehousing industry benchmarks) as well as a series of significant partnerships in the Open Source world.

There has been a lot of work here over the last two years to get us to this point and I am very proud of the team for getting us to where we are today. Two years ago we just had a vision; today that vision became reality – one substantiated by independent industry benchmarks.

For those of you unfamiliar with these benchmarks let me give you a brief overview to explain why we …

I got into San Jose last night around 4:00, picked up my rental car and headed over to the annual pre-conference party at Marten Mickos' house.  The food was amazing and it was great to finally meet the MySQL crowd in person.

It wasn't long however before I was invited by the MySQL Community Team to join them as they headed to the next event on the social calendar.   Armed with a garbage bag full of stuffed dolphins we headed over to Pedro's and the …

Just announced at the MySQL Partner meeting as part of the MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, CA:

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 tested) only in MySQL Enterprise.

As I’ve discussed before, the size of the user base for MySQL Enterprise is much smaller than for MySQL Community. That means these critical features will be tested by only a few of their customers. So, in effect, they will be giving their paying customers real, true, untested code. How is this supposed to work? In addition, this means that they …

"People get real testy with benchmarks"

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced new and enhanced third-party support for the MySQL™ database's unique pluggable storage engine architecture. The MySQL Certified Storage Engine Program (www.mysql.com/engines) enables commercial and community database engine developers to certify that their software has been tested and is compatible with Sun's MySQL Database Server ? helping to assure MySQL users that these certified engines have reached high-level standards of usability, performance and integration.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the pending general availability of MySQL™ 5.1, a new version of the world's most popular open source database, designed to improve performance and simplify management of large database applications. A near-final release candidate of the GPL software is available for download now at dev.mysql.com/downloads/.

Memcached by Brian Aker, Alan Kasindorf (dormando). Here are some quick, somewhat sparse notes. Follow the slides, it will help.

Slides: http://download.tangent.org/talks/Memcached%20Study.pdf

Memcached was actually created for LiveJournal. It has evolved a bit over time. Chaos to user based clustering, and then Brad implemented memcached. LiveJournal has about 30GB of cache available between 8-12 machines. The DB reads were down like 10x the moment they started using memcached (its much better now).

Its not only for simple objects (not just a single row)- you can use it for complex queries, and the result can be stored in memcached. Eins.de, Patrick Lenz, is also the freshmeat.net guy. He put memcached on the same machine as the MySQL database server (he has 32-bit machines, and MySQL can only use a certain amount of RAM, so the rest was …

KSQL Chip Gives MySQL Data Warehouse Boost

MySQL just gave me an award at this morning’s keynote, along with Sheeri Kritzer Cabral (for the second year in a row!) and Diego Medina, for my code contributions to the MySQL community, specifically Maatkit, which makes it easier to make MySQL reliable, fast, and robust. It’s an honor to be recognized. And while I could leave it at that, I’d like to say a word or two more. The economy, community, and ecosystem that’s building around Free Software can often be very rewarding financially.

There are quite a few business angles you might see only if you’re here at the conference, and you won’t get from blogs. For example, let’s take a look at the contents of the shoulder bags they hand out with your registration. (This is only a partial list.) SnapLogic’s flyer gets it right: their system is compatible with “GNU Linux.” Hooray, a commercial company acknowledging the GNU operating system for what it is!