Just a quick note to let folks know that today I coded up functionality to allow MySQL Forge users to re-vote on something they have already voted on. To re-vote, simply navigate to an item you've previously voted on, and click on the number of stars you wish to change your vote to. All done.

Also, I have corrected the ranking of items in display lists to take into account the number of votes an item has received (you're welcome, Giuseppe.). So, if both Project A and Project B have an average rating of 4 stars, but Project B has ten more votes than Project A, Project B will rank higher than Project A in the display lists.

So, get on to the Forge and start voting for your favourite projects, code …

Hopefully you are attending the MySQL Users Conference and are going to take advantage of the very deeply discounted exam prices. Normally the exams are $200 but we offer them at the UC for $25.

There will be two sessions each day of the three day conference. The session are at 10:30 and 13:40 for ninety minutes. And there is a special Exam Q&A Session will be held in the Magnolia Room, Tuesday from 1:00 pm - 1:30 pm.

We will be offering the Developer I & II, DBA I & II exams, and the Cluster exam. Please remember the Cluster exams is for those who already have the DBA certification.

The website omits mention of the Associate Exam but we will be offering that one also.

All exams will be administered in the Magnolia Room on the lobby level of the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara (adjacent to the …

 Properties:

Description:

This variable determines how many interrupted connections can occur from a host. If the number of interrupted connections from this host surpasses this number, that host is blocked from further connections. All of the …

A year ago, I criticized the under-development Falcon storage engine in MySQL 6.0 of failing to meet the demand of large-scale deployments. Falcon has now reached a beta phase and is included in the MySQL 6.0 alpha versions, most recent release of which is 6.0.4 this February. We're thinking of making an early test of Falcon in place of MyISAM/InnoDB for Habbo to see what to expect later on, so I reviewed the documentation again, and thought to look at my concerns from a year ago.

Falcon now supports multiple tablespaces per database, although the corresponding manual page still begins with the unfortunately misleading sentence of "all data ... is stored within a single file", and goes on to correct itself in the second …

This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job.

What is apparent Red Hat’s no longer exciting. They’ve crossed over to …

As posted here I started to think about possible ways to implement database sharding/partitioning.

I finally found the time to start prototyping a MySQL Proxy based solution that would allow you to analyze and rewrite queries to direct them to different databases. So this would going to be a nearly 100% transparent solution (some queries are impossible to support due to the nature of having multiple tables in different locations).

How does it work?
The main goal is to split up mysql tables and optionally put each of the resulting partitions on different mysql servers.

For now I concentrate on splitting up big tables into smaller ones within the same database. Distribution of these tables (i.e. partitions) over multiple databases would be the final goal and a lot more challenging task (think of …

Yesterday, I set out a little quiz about the TABLE_CONSTRAINTS table in the MySQL information_schema. The task was:

• Specify a minimal set of columns of the information_schema.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS table that is sufficient to reliably identify a single row in the information_schema.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS table.
• Argue why these columns are necessary and sufficient to identify a row, and why a smaller set of columns does not exist

Short Answer
For MySQL there are two such column sets:

• 
  
• CONSTRAINT_SCHEMA, …

Earlier this week at OSBC in San Francisco a new advisory board was announced for Continuent, the leading provider of commercial open source middleware solutions for database high-availability and scalability. I feel priviledged to be able to be part of this group:

Tim Golden, Senior Vice-President, Bank of America. Tim has 20 years IT management experience designing and implementing major infrastructure projects, both as a consultant working for IBM® and currently as a senior vice president at Bank of America working exclusively with Linux® and open source software technologies. He was also named as one of the 15 most influential open source business people recently by eweek story here

Douglas S. Tracy, the EVP for IT (North America) and Chief Technology Officer, Global IT, Rolls-Royce. Doug has over 25 years of management experience in the private …