During the last day of the Linux Conference Australia, I and Colin had the choice between joining the crowd for the open day, or meeting a semi-private invitation from Greg Lehey a well known icon in the open source world. He organized a hackers barbecue in his very isolated place, and we could not resist. In his original invitation, Greg said that he lives "down the road", without specifying how long the road is. It turned out that it's a 90 minutes drive, which is an indication of the relative sense of distance that you get in Australia.

In the Australian bush, Greg leads a quiet life with his wife, his horses and dogs, and a few not so distant friends, dealing occasionally with stray kangaroos invading his fields, and brewing open source beer.
The barbecue met everybody's expectations, and so did Greg's famous home brewed beer, thus stimulating that sort of hacker talk …

After some delay we are proud to present MySQL Proxy 0.6.1.

This is a pure bug-fix release and fixes some assert()oins and the win32 support. It was branched off in December and it took a while to clean up the windows package until it passed the tests.

Download it from:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql-proxy/index.html

Changes:

• added new features to run-tests.lua (see README.TESTS)
• fixed error handling for socket functions on win32
• fixed sending fake server-greetings in connect_server()
• fixed assert()ions on write-errors

Sun Microsystems has published a case study, Delivering quality service to eleven million users with MySQL, InnoDB,
and the Solaris 10 Operating System, on Fotolog, the third most active social network according to ComScore and 14th most trafficked site according to Alexa.

Challenges:
? Scale to support eleven* million members and more than 100** million page views a day
? Increase performance without increase in database hardware (significant cost savings)

…

I want to create a log table in 5.1 that is partitioned by day.  I want to roll-off old data and create new partitions for each day automatically.  Without writing a script and a cronjob, it seems like this should be possible with Events.  Let's start with the table:

create table log (
    logged datetime not null,
    id int not null auto_increment,
    text varchar(256),
    PRIMARY KEY ( logged, id )
)
PARTITION BY RANGE( TO_DAYS( logged ) ) (
    PARTITION p20080206 VALUES LESS THAN (733444),
    PARTITION p20080207 VALUES LESS THAN (733445),
    PARTITION p20080208 VALUES LESS THAN (733446)
);

This seems pretty straight-forward:  I take my log entry time and convert it TO_DAYS and partition on that.  I have tomorrow's partition all ready to go, just in case I don't get around to adding it today.  Let's create an Event to do add tomorrow's partition for us automatically each day:

…

It's kind of funny. Whenever I go to conferences, almost invariably I get asked by people, "So, you guys compete a lot with PostgreSQL, right?" My answer is typically, "No, not really", much to the surprise of the inquirer. What's more, I enjoy a pretty friendly relationship with a few folks in the PostgreSQL community. I remember at OSCON last year hanging out drinking beers with the PostgreSQL team members, and I even had Robert Treat take a photo of me at Ohio LinuxFest this past year wearing a little PostgreSQL elephant pin on my bag.

When it comes down to the perceived animosity between the MySQL and PostgreSQL communities, I am sure that in the past there were bitter debates and disagreement. But, from the MySQL AB and my own personal perspective, we welcome the achievements of the PostgreSQL community and developers. Sure, there are licensing and philosophical differences, and certainly there are many areas where each database server …

The latest Version of our beta-candidate 5.0.13 is finally available on our servers. About 70 bugs have been addressed since 5.0.12.Workbench now features a nifty update module (can be found via the help item in the main menu) and additionally the Standard Edition has a new Catalog Diff Report Module that allows you to compare two database-catalogs and creating a text-report. This Diff-Report Module lets you select two catalogs which can be taken from the actual document, a file or a live connection to a database-server. The interface of the new module is likely to go through some changes during the next stages to GA but we decided to introduce the feature in this beta version.Have a look at the Releases Page for detailed Information on the progress of the project.

Royal Pingdom has compiled a list of the seven largest acquisitions in open source's history. Sun's acquisition of MySQL is the biggest ($1 billion), but it's not nearly the outsized acquisition that it originally appeared to be considering that Red Hat paid $674 million for Cygnus Solutions back in 1999.

Indeed, that acquisition offers an interesting commentary on the value derived from open-source acquisitions. Here's why Red Hat bought Cygnus:

...

Luckily, I don’t have personal experience with them. But, based on the 2 to 3 users per week that come to the Phorum support forums and IRC, they have the worst support of any host on the internet.

Example 1

A user comes to the forums having trouble with his Phorum install. In the user’s words, GoDaddy tells him “they couldnt help me costumize my scripts because it wasnt their job”. In this case “customize” meant filling in the MySQL permissions into the Phorum config files. In the end, GoDaddy had to move him to a Linux hosting account. They claimed that the Windows hosting accounts do not support PHP. However, they are clearly wrong about their own hosting as this all started because the user received a PHP error about not connecting to MySQL.

Example 2

This user found that …