The biggest open source news so far this year has been that MySQL was bought by Sun Microsystems for a Billion dollars (disclaimer: I was a seed investor in to MySQL). For good analysis check e.g. Stephen O’Grady’s post as well as Stephen Walli’s thougths and for the inside scoop in Jonathan’s post and Zack Urlocker’s post about the process.

Some reactions have surprised me a quite a bit. I have received questions and comments such as that ‘’we lost yet another European high-tech company to the US’’, ‘’does this destroy the promise of …

My friend Monty (of MySQL fame) has started blogging at http://monty-says.blogspot.com/. After just a day, he already has two posts ? one on the Sun acquisition of MySQL and a longer one on the new Maria engine.

If you are interested in MySQL, you should definitely check the blog out.

Monty has announced on his shiny new blog that Maria is now available.

He says, "No clustered keys on roadmap."

Ah! that's the one thing I would have liked a lot. The benefits we have achieved with clustered keys are so awesome, I can't think of a good reason to reverse them. So as far as I see, Maria won't be a possible future InnoDB replacement until this is added. But other than that, it sounds that Maria is coming along pretty good.

Finally, the wait is over. "The" Monty has started blogging. Welcome, Monty!

As many of you know I am not very fond of the entire CLA idea. However as of late there have been some incorrect assertions around the entire CLA proposal, which I want to correct before people waste more time on the wrong arguments against the CLA proposal. I will have some better arguments against it at the end of this blog post.

It has been unclear to people if the only companies that were approached were big vendors like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft with MySQL AB tacked on. I know that PostgreSQL was asked from the very beginning. While they did not have someone to step up at the beginning of discussions, they did have someone join the discussion later on. Also for all I hear SQLite was also asked. However Richard did not have time to join the debates, which so far have been mainly about legal topics anyways. Now I dont know if Firebird was …

A comment was left for me by Roland and that made me want to write my thoughts.

My thoughts have changed on this topic over time. Primarily, because I now work on a large scale infrastructure where I can see how things would have been if BLOBs were stored in database. Most of the following discussion keeps the size and scale of my work load in mind and is targeted towards those who are interested in evaluating BLOBs for a work load, access patterns, budget and performance requirements similar to ours. The following are my thoughts and opinions.

When I started my current job, we were near 4 million members and just over 100 million photos. There were a lot of performance …

(Source) 3. ... Besides, an Oracle or SQL Server DBA has access to some pretty good remote tools, which let her administer many database servers at once.
Ah, this has been my biggest wish. I wish all MySQL tools will also let me remotely access databases so I don't have to put on my Spider-Man costume and jump from building to building so I can get to my database servers. With all the New York sky scrapers in my way, I can get really hurt, you know.

BTW,Does any one know if MySQL has any plans to allow me to communicate with my database servers via telepathy?

I'm pleased to announce that Tag1 Consulting has partnered up with MySQL AB to offer an online presentation titled "Achieving Optimal MySQL Performance For Drupal". Aiming to provide a better understanding of how to properly monitor and tune your MySQL database, the online Webinar will take place on Thursday, January 31st, 2008, at 16:00 UTC (11:00 am EST). The presentation will last 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes for questions and answers.

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I was so damn proud of myself to stumble upon a cool critical bug in MySQL, only to find it was a duplicate of another bug discovered 3 days earlier by someone else, and not just someone, but Paul DuBois, the author of no less than 3 books about MySQL and the likes.
My test case was simpler though - judge for yourself (#32376 vs #32260).

It goes like this - Find a MySQL 5.1.22 (or less). Connect. Run the next lines of code. Server is down. Simple, eh?

create table test.t(c int) engine = innodb;

select @var := c as c
from t
order by c asc;

This is documented as a casual "Some uses of user variables in a query could result in a server crash." in the …

Long before I first got to know about Sun’s acquisition of MySQL, I had booked this year’s prime skiing holiday. That’s going to be the week right after the Integration Kickoff in Menlo Park, on 3-9 February 2008. And it’s a special type of skiing holiday: It’s Boys Only, i.e. I’m going with my 13 year old son Alexander to Pitztal in Austria.

We’re going to the Ötztaler Gletscher, the glacier where Ötzi the Iceman, a well-preserved natural mummy of a man from about 3300 BC (53 centuries ago) was found in 1991.

Determined not to end up like Ötzi, Alexander and I will get extensive off-piste training under the direction of a certified Austrian mountain guide who according to his web profile has climbed “Cho Oyu, …