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 …

At 8AM PST I will be doing a MySQL University session on Amazon's Web Services.

There is an IRC channel up on Freenode, #mysql-university for discussion.

Follow my Twitter stream for more details:
http://twitter.com/brianaker

Audio details will be published on IRC and here:
http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Instructions_for_Attendees

Slides are here:
http://download.tangent.org/talks/AWS.pdf

This is more of an intro talk, so don't expect too much as far as amazing reflections on it :)

Just pondering alphabet soup on the way home...

Linux -> EC2
Mysql/Memcached -> S3/SimpleDB/Queue
Apache/Asterisk -> HTTP/Mechanical Turk
PHP/Perl/Python -> REST

The shift is from a defined technology to mode of operation. I could replace operation with service, but frankly the word is overused at the moment.

The above also focuses the attention on Amazon, when really it is about meeting a need. It just so happens that Amazon at this point has the lead.

Google is skipping the service business and building applications at this point (aka value add).

Why just store data when you could instead turn it into a spreadsheet?

Google Apps is damn sexy for a company just starting out. Once they roll out their Contacts App which eats away SaleForce and then sucker punches QuickBooks they become a one stop shop.

Amazon …

The 451 Group just published a "glass half empty" assessment of the open-source database market. One big takeaway? Open-source databases are widely used, but not yet deeply used.

One of the key findings is that open source software has had a superficial impact on the enterprise database market in that ...