There is a big event for the London Meetup Group coming up next week. We will all meet on Wednesday 5 March @ 7pm
The location: The Lamb
4 Lambs Conduit St
Bloomsbury
London
WC1N 3LZ

We will have a very special guest: Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL (now in his new role, due to the Sun acquisition). Marten will join us and he will be happy to answer to questions, to share opinions and spend some good time with MySQL Brits users in front of a nice drink (no surprise which one will be the best seller :) ).

From a technical point of you, I have prepared a short presentation on MySQL Proxy, with a basic intro on the project and with some ideas on how to use it and what to expect from a production version. The slides will be uploaded after the venue.

As usual, I am open to suggestions and topics to …

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about --Oscar Wilde

The table below shows the popularity of the data warehousing tools as determined by the number of the Google search results. There are only a few surprises, and you can easily arrive at your own conclusions. Just keep in mind that popular does not necessarily translate into good1.

At $WORK we typically use Redhat Cluster to make MySQL highly available. We have a number of 2-node clusters (active/passive) and it works nicely, for the most part. One thing I find very annoying is RHCS has no notification framework to notify you when a service is relocated to another node (because of failure or otherwise.)

In a perfect world, the only reason MySQL would pass between nodes is for server maintenance, under the control of a human. In reality, crap happens. Redhat Cluster manages all this, but I still want to know that a failover happened (is hardware going bad? did a software bug cause a failure? etc.)

Most monitoring tools weren’t designed to report on a clustered service. I can add a check that connects to MySQL using the cluster-managed IP - but that only tells me if MySQL has failed completely. The failover between nodes generally takes under a minute so it’s easy for that type of monitoring check to miss a …

Alfresco's CEO, John Powell, wants and expects Alfresco to IPO. He thinks it will show the world that open source offers long-term staying power. John Roberts at SugarCRM is disappointed that MySQL didn't go public to provide evidence that open source is a viable business phenomenon.

Good points. ...

For years, MySQL never supported query cache with prepared statements. When I initially implemented MySQL prepared statements and its associated C API in MySQL 4.1 version; prepared statements were just saving the parsing cost of the query and nothing much. But now, the things are totally different.

Lot of developers stayed away from prepared statements due to this limitation (atleast for select statements). But now the latest MySQL 5.1 server does support the caching of prepared statements with …

Maybe there's still some fight in the PostgreSQL competition, after all. [Update: Or maybe it has more to do with internal changes at MySQL - see below.] According to data compiled by MarkMail, PostgreSQL messaging traffic dwarfs that of MySQL's, suggesting that the Postgres community is more active than MySQL's:

Comparing PostgreSQL and MySQL is kind of interesting. With all the talk about the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP-Perl-Python) architecture you'd think MySQL had a lock on the open source database market, but based on simple message traffic analytics, PostgreSQL has a much higher level of community involvement. Looking at January 2000 onward, the MySQL lists have amassed 340,000 messages with about 3,000 new messages each month. In the same time period, the PostgreSQL lists have hit 583,000 messages with 7,000 new each …

As already reported the deal is done (see Sun Press Release, Kaj - Ambassador to Sun comments). I’ve had a look at the Official Sun-MySQL website.

Here is a review of the interesting words and images on the new site.

• Overview - Ultimate Scalability for the Web Economy (dolphin & sunset)
• Features - It Just works (windsurfer with island view)
• Tech Specs - Celebrate the Possibilities (skydiver on snowboard)
• Perspectives - Open, Fast, and Free Just Got Better (snowboarders viewing the mountain scape)
• Support - Unbeatable Duo - Open Source and Global Support (couple showing the V symbol)
• Training - Get Trained. …

I just need to get some basics off of my chest here, it’s by no means a full list but it’s the most basic list I can think of to start with, and it’s basic because I am surprised by some of the slop I’ve seen in production environments.

1. Highly available server clusters - this is different than load balancing cluster, if confused see here.

2. Disaster recovery

-> this means daily,weekly,monthly backups as well as off site backups, and tertiary backups as well as a plan to get those backups imported and running in production as fast as possible. Backups should have consistency checking when they are created.

3. Security

-> perimeter on the network, VLAN’d databases from the web/app servers, firewall, ACLs, etc

-> system level: strong passwords on OS and database accounts (no blank …

I hope I’ll have the opportunity to meet you in person soon.

A face to face meeting may indeed be possible, if our World Tour celebrating the acquisition of MySQL by Sun has a stop close to you, and if I happen to be lucky to be attending that particular meetup just announced:

To toast the success of the acquisition and engage with customers, employees, community developers and partners, Sun and MySQL executives will kick-off a global tour in March, hitting major cities worldwide leading up to the popular MySQL Conference & Expo in April. Every Sun-MySQL community can participate online, …