The latest from the MySQL community

Edward Screven – Chief Corporate Architect of Oracle provided the opening keynote at the 2010 MySQL Users Conference.

Overall I was disappointed. The first half was more an Oracle Sales pitch, we had some product announcements, we had some 5.5 performance buzz. While a few numbers and features were indeed great to hear, there was a clear lack of information to the MySQL ecosystem including employees, alumni and various support services. I hope more is unveiled this week.

Some notes of the session.

• Oracle’s Strategy covers storage, servers, virtual machines, operating system, database, middleware, applications
• We build a complete technology stack that is “open” and “integrated” based on “open standards”
• products talk via open standards with the intention for customers to not feel locked in to any technology
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Brian Aker parted ways with the mainstream MySQL release, and with Sun Microsystems, when Sun was acquired by Oracle. These days, Aker is working on Drizzle, one of several MySQL offshoot projects. In time for next week's MySQL Conference & Expo, Aker discussed a number of topics with us, including Oracle's motivations for buying Sun and the rise of NoSQL.

The key to the Sun acquisition? Hardware:

Brian Aker: I have my opinions, and they're based on what I see happening in the market. IBM has been moving their P Series systems …

There have been a number of April fools jokes today so I thought I’d add my own to the list. While this sounds unexpected it’s actually no joke.

I just accepted a position with Oracle yesterday but I can’t say any more about the details until the MySQL users conference in a few weeks.

A special thanks to Lenz, Kaj & Giuseppe that championed everything to make it all happen, I really didn’t have to do anything other then accept.

A colleague pointed me at More fun with the MySQL Audit Plugin API which looks very interesting.  Analysis of the queries going on inside a msyqld has been something that has been wanted for some time.  Until now it’s only been possible with external addons such as MySQL Enterprise Monitor which do a good job. However, really the place for this functionality is inside the db server itself. If 5.5 m3 provides the hooks to do this that’s great news and while Anders’ first implementation may be simple, this can surely be extended in many ways.

The things I would like to see added to this plugin are the following many of which are safeguards to ensure you can use functionality on a system like this in production without …

As I already wrote, I will be speaking at the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara in two weeks and I am excited to be there again. This year's conference is going to be interesting for a number of reasons, but most importantly I think that the schedule looks great! This is going to be a "drinking from the firehose of MySQL knowledge" event. Afterwards, I'll be on parental leave in May and June, so I likely will miss a lot of great conferences – these months are usually quite packed, as our Open Source Events Calendar can confirm. I just received a notice that my talk submission …

Berkeley DB (BDB) is undoubtedly the workhorse among the opensource embedded database engines. It started as a university project in the mid-eighties and was further developed by Sleepycat Software, until it got acquired by Oracle in February 2006.

I had the impression that BDB had lost a lot of its popularity among opensource developers to SQLite in recent times, which has evolved into becoming the default choice for developers looking for an embedded data store. I'd assume primarily because the code is not released under any particular license, but put in the public domain …

Since the time that I’ve been using MySQL I have filed quite a few bug reports. Some of these have been fixed and many of the bug reports are actually new feature requests. While working with MySQL Enterprise Monitor I’ve probably filed more feature requests than bug reports.

That’s fine of course and my opinion of what is needed in MySQL or Merlin is one thing,  yours or the MySQL developers is something else. We all have our own needs and find things missing which would solve our specific problems.

If I have ten feature requests open and only one could be added to the software I’d also like to be able to say: this feature is the most important one for me.

However, it seems to me that there is no easy way in the mysql bug tracker at the moment to group together different types of new feature requests into groups of related features and then see the different types of …

1. Common MySQL Queries -- a useful reference.
2. MySociety's Next 12 Months -- two new projects, FixMyTransport and "Project Fosbury". The latter is a more general tool to help people organise their own campaigns for change.
3. riak -- scalable key-value store with JSON interface. (via joshua on Delicious)
4. Notes from NoSQL Live Boston -- full of juicy nuggets of info from the NoSQL conference.

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A key differentiator in Drizzle from it’s original MySQL roots is user based authentication. Gone is the host/user and schema/table/column model that was stored in the MyISAM based mysql.user table.

Authentication is now completely pluggable, leveraging existing systems such as PAM, LDAP via PAM and Http authentication.

In this post I’ll talk about HTTP authentication which requires an external http server to implement successfully. You can look at Part 1 for …

A key differentiator in Drizzle from it’s original MySQL roots is user based authentication. Gone is the host/user and schema/table/column model that was stored in the MyISAM based mysql.user table.

Authentication is now completely pluggable, leveraging existing systems such as PAM, LDAP via PAM and Http authentication.

In this post I’ll talk about PAM authentication which is effectively your current Linux based user security.

This information is based on the current …