A lot of people contact me asking if I’m looking for a job. (I have an unanswered email in my inbox right now.) People are looking desperately for qualified, knowledgeable MySQL professionals. There’s a critical shortage of people who can admin MySQL moderately well, much less at the guru level. If you are one of the many who are trying to hire a MySQL DBA, you should send your employees to the MySQL Conference and Expo.

If you are one of the few strange people who were wondering: yes, Sun made an offer to retain me as part of the MySQL team.  Yes, I accepted.

I like some things (a lot); I dislike some other things (a lot).  We’ll see how it goes.

I’m not sure how I will adapt to a large corporation, nor how a large corporation will adapt to me (not at all, I suspect).  I think I have too much entrepreneur in me to fall in love with them as an employer, but who knows.  They seem to be a generous corporation, at least compared to other large USA-based corporations, and regardless of motivation they are exploring some interesting avenues.

Change Is Stability, I’ve heard, so here’s to change.

Note: An inadvertent draft of this post went out in our RSS feed and was posted for about an hour on Tuesday. It was cloned from Q1 '07 and most of the data and information was wrong.

In this fourth post (one, two and three are found here) on the State of the Computer Book Market, we will look at programming languages and drill in a little on each language area.

Overall the 2007 market for programming languages was down (1.67%) in 2007 when compared with 2006. There were 1,809,695 units sold in 2006 versus 1,779,523 units sold in 2007 which is (30,172) …

Installing the MySQL GUI tools are pretty easy on Linux (Fedora - 2.6.18-1.2798.fc6) but there are a few prerequisites for setting them up. The following listed RPMs are required. I did a google search and then performed a quick download of them. libsigc++20-2.0.6-1.i386.rpmglibmm-2.4.7-1.rhfc3.nr.i386.rpm gtkmm24-2.8.5-1.i386.rpm Load the RPMs. MySQL Administor is loaded in /usr/bin by

Esther Schindler at CIO.com noticed that open-source databases made a poor showing in a recent Evans Data survey. When she asked Evans Data's founder about it, however, he noted that the problem is not in the databases. The problem (with the survey results) is that open-source developers are more critical of their work than, say, Microsoft administrators:

...[W]hen you pay someone else to supply a box of shrink-wrapped software, you're emotionally distant from it. You may rant about its inadequacies, but you're essentially powerless to change them, and you have no expectation that your personal opinion will affect the product's evolution.

...

Matt Asay has the news that IBM has taken the decision to discontinue the development of the solidDB for MySQL database engine following its acquisition of in-memory database specialist Solid Information Technology. The official announcement is here on SourceForge.

As Dhiren Patel, community relations manager writes: “This in-memory technology, and not Solid?s open source offering, was the key driver behind IBM?s acquisition. As a result, I regret to inform you that, effective immediately, we will not be continuing further development on solidDB for MySQL.”

Given the commercial drivers it is not …

I have previously written couple of posts about OSS and China. You can find the posts here and here .

Now, however I have undertaken a challenge to take the understanding of the emerging opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors in the OSS space in China to the next level.

In January Technology Agency of Finland, TEKES and Ministry of Science and Technology from China discussed about undertaking a study tentatively titled Acceleration of Open Source Software Deployment in China, later Linux Foundation also promised its support. Press release of the undertaking can be found from here .

The report will be made freely available both in English and Chinese …

Short and sweet:

CREATE TABLE parts (
   type CHAR(10) NOT NULL,
   id MEDIUMINT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
   description CHAR(30) NOT NULL,
   PRIMARY KEY (type, id)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

INSERT INTO parts (type, description) VALUES
 ('car part', 'brake'),
 ('car part', 'steering wheel'),
 ('furniture', 'table leg'),
 ('printer', 'toner cartridge'),
 ('furniture', 'shelf');

What would be returned by executing:

SELECT DISTINCT id FROM parts;

(more…)

I'm often asked how one can evaluate IO subsystem (Hard drive RAID or SAN) performance for MySQL needs so I've decided to write some simple steps you can take to get a good feeling about it, it is not perfect but usually can tell you quite a lot of what you should expect from the system.

What I usually look for MySQL is performance in random reads and random writes. Sequential reads and writes are rarely the problem for OLTP workloads, so we will not look at them.

I also prefer to look at performance with O_DIRECT flag set to bypass OS cache. This may execute separate code path in kernel and so has a bit different performance pattern compared to buffered IO (even followed by fsync regularly) , but it allows to easily bypass OS cache both for reads and for writes and so does not require creating large working sets for boxes with significant amounts of memory (or reducing amount of usable memory).

The system I'm testing …

[Updated: 2008-03-05 Jeremy writes to tell that I left out the provenscaling.com contact form submission on the 21st and the blank email with a pdf on the 27th]
[Updated: 2008-03-26 Rob Young from MySQL AB sent me an email on the 17th saying, "We are currently working to implement PayPal to cut down on the email interactions we have in place around our manual fulfillment process. Testing is going well and we should have this implemented in the next few weeks."]

Recently Proven Scaling decided to purchase a MySQL Enterprise subscription. We will be evaluating Enterprise to see if it’s knowledge base is valuable to our customers as a supplement to Proven Scaling’s consulting services.

The subscription process seems remarkably manual on MySQL’s part. It involves them sending us five emails (not counting the mysql.com registration), all of which are from different senders. Some are from people others are automated. Here is a …