To Curt Monash, in response to his latest attacks on MySQL, all I have to say is:

"Those who just know how to use a hammer, approach every problem as if it were a nail."

This March you can start earning a vendor-neutral 'certification focuses on universal database design principles and SQL. Aimed at database programmers and administrators alike, the exam helps solve the problem of poorly designed databases and validates foundational knowledge of any database, regardless if it?s Oracle, IBM, DB2, MySQL or others.'

The good folks at at CIW-Certified.com have the details at http://www.ciw-certified.com/exams/1d0541.asp and I wish them luck. It is very hard to stay vendor neutral and cover enough detail. The LPI Linux exams felt stunted to me on areas like backup, software updates, and best practices. My fingers are cross that the CIW folks have all those sort of problems worked out of their exam. I will look into this cert when March rolls around.

I recently got my eyes opened to a lot of things in Oracle world from meeting George Trujillo , one of MySQL's Senior Instructors at the recent …

The world tour proceeds. After Sydney, I am now in Melbourne, to attend the Linux Conf Au, hosted at Melbourne University. I am actually lodged at the charming Trinity College.

I have already met several known people and many more new people. Currently, I am getting ready for my presentation on MySQL Proxy at the MySQL mini-conf, and I have also a surprise presentation that will happen during the lighting talks.
Curious? You should be! See you tomorrow afternoon for the surprise talk!

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 …