Today I spent the larger part of the afternoon at the Sun office in Amersfoort. And, Yes, I signed ;-) and joined the now largest open source company in the world.

I was lucky enough to attend the JasperSoft Seminar held at their headquarters in San Francisco yesterday (March 19, 2008). There were basically 3 sessions and I personally did not get much from the seminar.

What I found interesting was that I was able to talk to Guilio Toffoli who created the iReport which is basically the GUI software to create JasperReport xml files. We talked about performance limits of the software, problems that I had with designing the queries using SQLeonardo, and other stuff.

Apologies to those on the MySQL Certification Mailing list but I am posting here what went out today to that list. But I wanted to make sure the information was available to all who may be interested. You may consider adding yourself to the list and a link is provided at the end of this entry to help. It is a very LOW bandwidth and heavily moderated list.

MySQL Certification News -- March 2008

2007 was a great year: MySQL Certifications had a great year last year. Over 45% more exams were delivered than in 2006 and certifications earned were up by almost a third! The new Associate Certification is proving to be very popular. Thank you on behalf of The Certification Team and MySQL.

Users Conference: Once again you can take a MySQL Certification Exam at the Users Conference for $25. We will have six exam sessions over the three days of the conference. This is in addition to the tutorials, sessions, and great …

As I mentioned a couple of entries ago, last weekend I was in Boston to attend the Free Software Foundation's annual members  meeting. 

It kicked off early Saturday morning amidst a flurry of wet snow.

It was 95 degrees in Austin on this day. 

The event was a day long affair held on the MIT campus and featured a dinner that evening at the Middle East.

 
The crowd mills about waiting for the event to start.  There was a very impressive buffet of fruit, juice, danishes etc to get things started right  -- Can't talk Free Software on an empty stomach.

Matt and Josh campaign to eliminate both DRM and yellow …

In Spotting the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, Frank Mash writes about a specific person who is spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about MySQL.

Now, this always gets me, especially with MySQL. For how long will MySQL be the bastard stepchild of the database world? Because really, it’s been a full-fledged DBMS for at least 5 years. 10 years ago there were no transactions, but….that was 10 years ago! 10 years ago everyone made $100,000 per year, took 3 hour lunch breaks, played foosball in the office, coveting their IT stock and sat in massage chairs with Apple Cinema displays.

How much have *you* changed in 10 years? Your digital world? 10 years ago we paid for text messages by the character, which is why we came up with rlly abbr …

Commenting on my previous post on MySQL Query Cache Gerry pokes me as I'm all wrong and both comments and whitespace are fixed in MySQL 5.0. This was not what I remember seeing in production so I decided to do some tests on the matter:

I did the test two ways. First using command line client and second using little PHP script which just does the same query. I did this as command line client is known to optimize queries sometimes by skipping "unnecessary" comments.

So here is the command line run:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> SELECT /* my little comment */ count(*) FROM fact WHERE val LIKE "%c%";
2. +----------+
3. | count(*) |
4. +----------+
5. |        0 |
6. +----------+
7. 1 row IN SET (8.77 sec)
8.   …

This post is incomplete without mentioning the previous one about development tools, so make sure you read it before/after this.
In this post, I'd like to mention two monitoring tools, and one knowledge base.

Two of the tools are made by Quest Software/ToadSoft that make Toad for MySQL. Both of them are Freeware.
A side note: TOAD was born as "Tool for Oracle Application Developers". Because "Tool for Oracle Application Developers for MySQL" sounds weird, TOAD is known officially as "Tool For Application Developers".

Spotlight for MySQL
Spotlight is a tool perhaps more known among SQL Server and Oracle users. It shows …

MySQL Cluster CGE exists in two different versions (6.2 and 6.3). Read here about the feature differences between the two.

In order to deploy it you have to do a couple of things:

• download the source - CGE currently only exists in source distributions
  
• build the source and generate a tarball
  
• copy the tarball to the target hosts
• install the tarball
  

Downloading the source
The entire ftp directory can be found here.
You should pick the latest version of either 6.2 or 6.3, and if you should use 6.2 (Production Ready) or 6.3 (RC) depends on your feature …

I have my own idea for a Summer of Code Project; an implementation of mysqldump, but in Python. I see it as a good choice because the spec is already there for you - you just have to make it work. There's also a lot of concepts to learn in writing it (consistent snapshots, dealing with a potential combination of character sets).

My intention of proposing this isn't as a replacement to the existing mysqldump, but rather as a community maintained alternative. There are some features missing in mysqldump that I could add myself if it was in a language I am friendlier with. Two of these would be --slave-data, and parallel dumping[1], but that is not a complete list.

[1] Yes, I'm aware of maatkit. I want to use the mysqldump interface though.