We had a little champaign toast in our exec staff meeting when the news came across that Sun's acquisition of MySQL was complete.  Congratulations to all the MySQL and Sun employees who went the extra mile to make this happen in record time.  I especially appreciate the efforts that Sun's legal staff has gone to in order to accomodate the open source philosophy of MySQL.  While there are still a few details to work out, I am very pleased with all of our integration work.  It will be an exciting time and there's great opportunity for MySQL to continue to grow inside of Sun.  We also had a toast to Marten Mickos our CEO who is unfailingly humble and deserves everyone's thanks for building MySQL into such a successful company. 

Note that Sun is very clear that we will continue to support all …

Streaming SQL and OLAP are two of the most interesting and powerful paradigms in data processing. OLAP is a well-established technique for analyzing large databases of historic data. Streaming SQL is a more recent innovation, that applies the declarative power of the SQL language to the problem of managing data in motion.

So, what happens when you combine OLAP with Streaming SQL? The combination is capable of solving some business problems that can't be solved any other way. OLAP is usually hampered by conventional ETL techniques: it is difficult to keep the data warehouse up to date, because batch-based ETL processes are only efficient when dealing with a few hours or days of data. OLAP engines excel at comparisons between time periods (say, this quarter compared to the same quarter last year) or comparable …

Not sure during my vacation which part of the creative brain has taken over, but I’ve become rather obsessed with marketing graphics and associated words being used across the MySQL and Sun MySQL websites, (See previous examples here and here).

Here are a number of more interesting references from the front page of the www.mysql.com site.

• The MySQL website now has a MySQL/Sun logo, noting it starts with the MySQL logo first.
• MySQL & SUN Come together. Freedom & Innovation Fast, innovative, open database solution now with world class service and support (dolphin jumping at sunset)
• Unlimited Possibilities. Deploy an unlimited number of MySQL Enterprise …

Yesterday I mentioned the new The official Sun-MySQL WebSite. It interested me with the navigation, graphics and content used to describe MySQL.

Greg of One Free Voice in a comment raised a very valid question, he could not find the MySQL Reference Manual, see comments. (I should also point out Greg it is no shame to reference the MySQL manual even daily, I’m an expert in the field and I easily reference the manual multiple times a week, and for reference the single most important page for me is Option and Variable Reference. I’ve also forgotten when using multiple languages in MySQL what is OFF/ON, simple solution is in the mysql client go SELECT ON; and see it it’s 1 or 0.)

Well, I …

While catching up on some interesting chat on IRC today, I decided to watch the Alan Cox video series that Red Hat Magazine recently placed online.

In Alan Cox and the state of free software:

• Alan speaks about software patents, as a problem for free software. Lots are starting to understand that they don’t work and they violate international treaties.
• Alan talks about political systems - so you can’t get free software into government or schools, because of certain vendors that they choose. Approved suppliers cause grief, when they only supply proprietary software.
• Alan talks about the OpenDocument Format and OOXML mess, and it confuses people, who want standards (FUD).
• A challenge now, seems to be that there are a large number of free software users now, who are not …

I recently reread the book called ?Execution ? The Art of Getting Things Done? and although its somewhat old, it has surprisingly good and practical advise about putting your focus more on getting things done and less on thinking about strategies.

Or where I read from somewhere recently ?The goal is to work, not think about working? which was in reference to keeping a planning meeting fixed to a certain number of hours.

Of course, you do need strategy, but if you don?t actually make sure that what you planned get done, or alternately, notice that your strategy may not be working then it just won?t work.

Hey! Wait a minute! Don?t you do Theory all the Time

Yes, I am very guilty of it myself about just thinking of things and not doing them. I even wrote about it at the top of one of …

I was finishing up a business trip in Madrid yesterday and heading back to the airport while making sporadic calls into our conference calls that were going on. The Sun acquisition is now closed and we are part of the worlds biggest Open Source company. Mårten Mickos is heading the Sun Database Technology Group the Sun Database Group, which in addition to MySQL includes some happy Norwegians (they are always happy) of the Sun owned Clustra Systems, known as the Database Technology Group, who also sing drinking songs in their own language :-) They also work on the Apache Derby project. However, there was no mention of any Postgres developers falling under Mårten (caveat: I wasn't able to hear everything). I think it might be best so :-)

Here is the funny video of today, it is a documentary of the evolution of the species known as Sun Sales Engineers (I'm a Sales Engineer):

…

This was the idea.

With consistent hashing we have data spread out over servers. A loss of a single server removed 1/N of the available cache.

Not bad, but it is also not perfect for everyone. Some users would rather use more hardware and take an approach of fewer losses.

What needed to be done was to replicate the data to multiple node, and handle node failure. This has been on the list for a while :)

Did I get to it? Nope.

Did someone else? Yep.

I got a patch for this a few days ago from a user using memcached that needed it.

So now:

memcached_return enable_replication(memcached_st *memc)
{
uint64_t value;
value= 2;

memcached_behavior_set(memc, MEMCACHED_BEHAVIOR_REPLICAS, &value);
}


All you now need to do is set the number of servers you want to …

UPDATED - As you can see from the comments on this, the change is not Sun limiting Enterprise Unlimited, but being being more open about the limits. Kudos to Sun for doing so - UPDATED.

Sun Microsystems has announced the completion of its acquisition of MySQL - “the most important acquisition in the modern software industry” according to Jonathan Schwartz - and that MySQL’s open souirce database is now backed by Sun’s “17,000-strong global sales and services organization and its extensive international network of authorized distribution channels”.

The company has also confirmed that MySQL Enterprise Unlimited, the site-wide agreement …

Many CMDBA (Certified MySQL Database Administrator) candidates give away points on their exams that could be remedied with a half hour of exploration. This is not an easy set of exams but there is something you can do to add points to your score. The way to do this is to install MySQL on a Windows system.

Many in the FOSS world may never actually touch a Windows system. But if you look around, you may be able to find an older, unused system sitting around for this exercise. Many folks have older windows systems gathering dust that you can borrow.

Once you have the Windows box, here is a three part exercise to help boost your exam scores.

One: Download and install the Windows binaries. The install features a wizard to guide you through installation. You will now have an instance of MySQL on your system.

Two: Track down the configuration files and add a second instance.

Three: …