yeah, it is all odbc, all the time here, it seems. that is just because i can’t write about the really exciting stuff. soon!

that is not to say that releasing mysql connector/odbc 5.1.3-rc is not a huge milestone! it took us a while to get there, but we finally have a unicode-aware odbc driver that is, in our opinions, production-ready. now we just need some community feedback to find out if we are right. there are a few minor issues we know about already, but the impact of those is generally small enough that the majority of folks should not have any problems.

I've been working on a very fun and challenging proof of concept / usability project that involves Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle), XUL, SWT, Swing and a very cool, slightly controversial theory: with a lot of work frontloaded, we should be able to port user interfaces to any UI technology, and expect consistent behavior AND look and feel without much, if any, additional code .

The project I'm in the middle of encompasses three different but equally compelling goals:

1. To move Pentaho forward in providing common layers across our core pillars (reporting , analysis, data mining, ETL and dashboards).
2. To provide a proof of concept for the Pentaho XUL Framework, an architecture built to help us support common UIs across all of our applications and tools .
3. To provide a common way of describing and managing the information needed to connect to a database.

So, we began by …

That story via MacWorld UK, very interesting. So first of all this allows people to edit photos (bitmaps) online. Secondly, Adobe doesn't try to reinvent the wheel but instead simply plugs into existing infrastructure like Facebook (and I would hope also Flickr). This is smart, as no one can rule it all, you really can't expect to be the one-stop shop that everybody uses. In addition, Adobe makes some useful graphics/publishing tools, they're not a social networking or photosharing company (perhaps they could be, but that's another issue altogether).

Although I follow this stuff in relation to my developing training courses on MySQL and related topics, I'm more interested in the pattern than in this particular event. But I do believe it's significant. Not that SaaS (software as a service) is the solution to …

I was just reading Matt Asay's post on Open source's "superficial impact" on the database market. I don't think it's a matter of "having to start somewhere".

The assessment/conclusion trail of the 451 Group (and other experts, analyst and even regular people in the industry) is typical of most, and it's adequately covered in "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen which I believe I've mentioned here before.

The assessment is correct (it's based on facts), but the conclusions are simply irrelevant since they presume that there is a single correct objective or market - in the case of databases, "enterprise" or "mission critical" deployments. But just look at the situation: the definition of both is vague and …

I've been working the last few weekends on setting up redundancy and failover for a MySQL server at work. In the process, I've run across various bits of useful information in different places, but nowhere have I seen it all brought together. So, I'm going to attempt to do that here.

The basic idea was to set up a dual-master replication setup with CARP failover. (I've heard of similar setups with Linux-HA heartbeat failover, but we're using FreeBSD, so CARP was a natural fit for us.)

A couple of notes in the examples below:

• Our servers have two network ports, so we have the replication on a separate interface from all of the "real" traffic. This isn't strictly necessary, but since we have the capacity available, we might as well use it.
• The IP addresses for replication in my examples will be 10.0.0.10 for the original server, and 10.0.0.11 for the new failover server.
• The IP addresses for …

Few months ago, I wrote about a faster way to do certain table modifications online. It works well when all you want is to remove auto_increment or change ENUM values. When it comes to changes that really require table to be rebuilt - adding/dropping columns or indexes, changing data type, converting data to different character set - MySQL master-master replication especially accompanied by MMM can be very handy to do the changes with virtually no downtime.

Couple of days ago I worked with one of our MySQL support customers as they were upgrading their application and mysql schema. We deployed and used MySQL Master-Master replication …

mysql-proxy defaults to round-robin load balancing. There are fancy tricks around to get mysql-proxy to balance connections based on how many idle connections there are in a proxy-based connection pool.

But there is no code that I found that would simply load balance based on “always go to one server, go to another server only when the first server is down.”

Well, I spent way too long figuring this out today, again running into the problem where the manual hasn’t been updated. I have indeed made a Forge snippet of this code, but it does not hurt to post it here.

This was in fact taken from …

Continuing on from my lightning visits with Jan Kneschke and Michael Zinner, today I got to spend a day with Paul McCullagh at his home in Hamburg Germany.

Paul is the architect of the PBXT Pluggable Storage Engine for MySQL 5.1, and also the Blob Streaming Storage Engine. His work was acknowledged with the MySQL Community contributor for the year in 2007. The successful PrimeBase product for the publishing Industry in Europe and North America also now uses PBXT for underlying data storage which is great …

A few days ago, I wrote how I will be your guide to the Grand Tour of the Information Schema and its Applications which is one of the two talks I will be doing at the upcoming MySQL User's Conference.

In view of the popularity of "Pop Quiz" format so successfully used by Carsten, I feel compelled to imitation, and as a primer to my talk, I'd like to offer you my "Me Too" MySQL Information Schema popquiz. So, here goes...


The MySQL information_schema contains a …

Friday, 28/03/2008, is when the Sun-NUS Open Source Day occurs, from noon-6pm. If you’re in Singapore, I can highly recommend you attending. Pre-register now, if you’d like.

Come see me, talk about how you can contribute to MySQL. Especially in a time when students in Singapore will find it useful, to learn, seeing that the Summer of Code applications are in its last lap.

Its at the National University of Singapore. I understand that there might be a DTrace User Group meeting sometime in the evening (i.e. post-6pm). I’ll definitely be at that, or other events if necessary.

I’m reachable at +6-012-204-3201, preferring to get an SMS instead of a call (roaming costs a bit).

See you Friday afternoon!

The agenda (which I can’t seem to find easily online, is pasted here for posterity):
12:00pm …