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.

FrOSCon is a two-day conference on free software and open source, which takes place on August, 23th and 24th 2008 at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near Bonn, Germany.

Focus of the conference is a comprehensive range of talks about current topics in Free Software and Open Source. Furthermore, space will be provided for developers of free software and open source projects to organize their own developer meetings or even their …

Past Tuesday we had our 5th Belgian MySQL meetup with around 12 attendees, and it was great! I hoped for a large audience, but the spirits were good and we had some fun and good chats. I started out giving a brief history of MySQL and ending with Sun buying us. Important was to get the message out which Kaj explained us last week in Munich (Germany).

The main topic was Performance Tuning best practices, but I didn't go intensively deep on it. This is something we should do again in a large group and just that presentation.
After that, we talked about communities and more importantly growing a PHP UserGroup in Belgium. Michelangelo and Felix are really doing great and it's probably going to be a hit. I, and probably the whole MySQL Community team, would definitely like to help out to get it started.

I had some people commenting about doing these meetups during the day, during working hours. Yes, this would be nice, …

It should be available in the 5.0 source tree w/in the next few days.

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=35178

I have been quite vocal at every opportunity about how surrogate keys suck. However I must admit, as vocal as I may be, I have not really been good at working towards not using them myself. So briefly what are surrogate keys? They are usually those meaningless integer identifiers you see everywhere. Yes like in the url to this very blog post. People have come to love them however, especially people that use tools to generate SQL for them. But general wisdom tells people that everything is faster with integers. I keep hearing the same story over and over from self proclaimed MySQL, PostgreSQL or whatever kind of RDBMS they are flying experts. Index reads, joins and of course development since most tools are optimized (or should we rather say oversimplified things) towards integer surrogate keys. Now I …

SFLC settles GPL lawsuit with Verizon. Novell anounces plans for SUSE 11. Sun launches open source initiative for SMB market. (and more)

BusyBox Developers Agree To End GPL Lawsuit Against Verizon, Software Freedom Law Center (Press Release)

Novell Announces Development Plans for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, Novell (Press Release)

Sun Microsystems Launches SMB Initiative; Delivers Complete Open Source Solutions to New Customers, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Open Source Software Gurus Converge in …

Just a quick note to say we have reached the production stage of the book project. Production is the process of transforming our OpenOffice.org files into the final page layout using a professional typesetting program.

As you can probably guess, this is later than we would have wished. This also means we won’t have the book for sale at the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo. We will have a display copy at the O’Reilly booth at the conference, and you will be able to pre-order the book at a discount at that booth. (Several details remain to be worked out — do not trust the Amazon.com information on the book, as it is a weird blend of the first and second editions).

The book is very, very good. You will not be disappointed. I can’t think of a credible way to explain how good this book is — it’s just very, very good. Better than anything else you’ve …