Computer Weekly looks at MySQL as a hot skill to have. The full article is at:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/03/22/229539/hot-skills-mysql.htm

We at MySQL hear a constant plea from customers and partners looking for qualified MySQL developers and DBAs. The MySQL exams are the best way to prove your qualifications.

Not certified? Please try the test questions at: http://www.mysql.com/certification/selftest/core/index.php

We are about to release the next Beta version of MySQL Workbench. There are no new additions like in the last release. This will strictly be a bug-fix build. Apart from several smaller fixes this build will see an improved software rendering performance. Alfredo has blogged about the changes in his last post. And the changes are really paying off. Tax tested it on several machines and found the speed to be acceptable even on older machines.

The slow and flickering software rendering has been one of the major points of complain (except from the yet missing Linux and OS X versions that will be released later this year). Now that this is out of the way we are marching towards the RC level, fast.

If there are no new obstacles the release build will happen later today. Markus from the web team will get online on Saturday or early Sunday to update the download pages. Then we will send out the announce emails asap.

Last time I showed where partitioning could negatively impact performance, with one partitioned query being four times slower than a non-partitioned one when the data was partitioned by the same column as it was clustered by.  This time I’m going to show a way to get better performance by selecting a good clustered index. With the InnoDB, the create table primary key syntax encourages one to create the clustered index the same as the primary key. For transaction systems, in many cases, this makes sense.  But there are times, particularly for reporting systems, when this isn't advisable. 

To demonstrate this two similar tables will be created where the only difference is the indexing.  The below SQL shows an one of these tables, a 20 gig, 120 million rows tables, representing one year (about 10 million per month) of data.  This table is clustered by the primary key. 

create table SaleOrderCluster ( …

Brian “Krow” Aker’s Idle Thoughts - Solaris, Linux, it is GNU folks…

Brian hits the nail on the head… The way you get a usable system is install all the GNU tools.

This is how I go from fresh Ubuntu install to building MySQL:

apt-get build-dep mysql-server

apt-get install bison

(now go and build).

(and i could do this graphically if I wasn’t so stuck in my ways)

For Solaris? umm… there was a point where I could get Solaris to apply security updates and Brian could get all the stuff needed to build a MySQL Server. Together we had the knowledge needed… but neither was as trivial as with Ubuntu and combining knowledge was too much - I just gave up and went on to more productive things.

Even on an existing Solaris system… getting your PATH right is a trip into some weird fantasy land seemingly …

Jay Pipes blogged about this earlier this month. I read his post, nodded a knowing nod and finished my cup of coffee. It wasn’t until yesterday when it really struck me. I was looking through the database schema of a popular forum software package (won’t say which) when I came across this column definition in a central table (by ‘central’ I mean one that typically holds a lot of rows):

ip varchar(100),

One hundred characters to store a at-most 15-character IPv4 string? I know what you’re about to say, “But, it’s a varchar so you’re not really using 100 bytes.” Well, you *might* not be. Jay’s discussion on how MySQL uses temporary tables illustrates how you can use all 100 bytes in memory - not a good thing.

So, the minimum number of bytes you will be using is 7 if …

A bzr plugin to assist in developing focused patches. in Launchpad

I use quilt a lot for development. Currently, If I had to choose between BK and quilt - I’d choose quilt.

I use bzr in other development projects like MemberDB. I use git as a frontend for SVN (it is *so* much faster than the svn client and incredibly more space efficient… A copy of the entire history of a tree stored in git is usually less than a single svn checkout). I also use darcs (and quilt) for offlineimap and just about every other revision control tool at some point.

So this is a bit of a discussion about how I work and how bzr-loom would help it… (I’ve wished for a long time that bk had stuff like this… bk collapse is just not what I want, although others use it lots).

The loom plugin to bzr looks like a fantasy world of goodness where the revision control system …

MySQL AB today announced that Yes Loans, the UK's number one provider of specialist unsecured loans, has now processed more than 1.7 million loan applications on top of the MySQL database. Yes Loans credits MySQL with supporting its phenomenal growth, and now operates its entire business on a MySQL Enterprise subscription.

You have only a few more days to sign up for the MySQL Conference and Expo before the early-bird discount goes away. Check out the schedule of speakers and tutorials, and sign up soon! And just in case you didn’t get one from any of the other people blogging about it, you can email me for a code that’s good for a 20% discount. I’m presenting two sessions: one on the query cache, and one on EXPLAIN.

Today I realised that I have been programming for 25 years. Quite an anniversary! Of course, it does not really feel like that long, probably because a bit more than the first half of the time was really 'just for fun', as a kid's hobby and later during University.

I also realised that right from the beginning and through all the years I have had the Open Source mindset, even though I did not learn about Free Software until much later.

I believe there are two reasons:

1. I love reading source code.
2. I hate the wasted effort when code could be reused, but is not.

Right from the start I have been reading code. This was when software was distributed as BASIC listings in magazines that one would manually type into the computer. And I remember reading and modifying the dis-assembly of machine code programs, getting 'infinite lives' in games and learning the techniques they used to produce their …

The MySQL Lifecycle Policy determines which versions are actively supported, and for which platforms such support applies.
The basic principle is that old versions are supported for a quite long, but definitely limited period, once they have been replaced by a newer GA version. For example, since the introduction of this policy, MySQL 3.23 and 4.0 have been retired.
The policy contains also provisions for a different kind of End of Life dismissal. When support for certain platforms has been discontinued by their vendors, of the platform is not widely used, MySQL reserves the right to stop building binaries and testing code on such obsolete platforms.
The reason is simple. While hardware can be bought and stored, time is a commodity in short supply, and there is only a given amount of time that our engineers can devote to testing and supporting multiple …