I have been meaning to blog about this for quite some time but time seems to be the most scarce resource in my life.

This year, I will be presenting three sessions at MySQL Conference:

Disaster Is Inevitable?Are You Prepared?


What?s the worst database disaster you expect to happen? Are you prepared? Does your architecture support quicker recovery or do you have recovery bottlenecks built throughout your architecture? What will happen if InnoDB crashed beyond repair or if you have a massive irrepairable data corruption? What can you do to better prepare for the disaster, when it does happen? Do you have data restoration tools and procedures in place in case you need to resort to extreme measures? Join us in this eye opening, heart-racing, real-life inspired …

Everyone likes pictures and everyone loves pictures of server racks. This is my development environment at the home office. Consisting of top to bottom. Then there’s a pic of my desk. Gotta love the 32″ HDTV. Sun v40z - workstation via VNC / FreeNX SGI 1200 - MySQL master 3com 24port GigE switch Compaq DL360 - nodemaster Compaq DL360 - [...]

As I wrote in a previous post, I’m pretty jazzed about the upcoming MySQL Workbench as I know how nice it is to have a strong modeling tool at your disposal.  I’ve just completed a new paper that discusses the many benefits that both developers and DBAs get when they use a good data modeling tool like Workbench.  If you’ve been wondering whether a modeling tool can make a difference in your worklife, download the doc and give it a read. 

 And don’t forget to check out the latest builds of Workbench as the team is working hard on getting the first GA version out.  Your help and feedback is greatly appreciated!

UPDATE: It turns out my source wasn't as "highly credible" as I'd expected. I apologize to all for the misinformation in my post below, which I would delete except that it's good to have a reminder around about my incompetence.

A highly credible source has revealed today that Oracle made not one, not two, but at least three separate offers for MySQL. The first was apparently in the range of $300 million. The second? $500 million. The last one was in the range of $850 million.

But Sun got the prize. What happened? It has a lot less to do with cash than it does with character. There's a lesson in this.

...

Unless you've been under a rock, you know Sun is buying MySQL AB. That was news, last week. But it was also rather puzzling news, in many ways, and worth taking some time out to consider the implications.

So, for Part One of my coverage of the Sun/MySQL deal, I'm mostly going to offer a bunch of links. For example, the Yahoo! News breaking news story: Sun to buy MySQL for $1 billion. You get the basics of the deal here, but you also get some of the issues spelled out for you: Sun is a "server maker"; meaning, they're a hardware company. Other key points to consider:

• Sun expects to spread MySQL into big corporations, who already buy Sun hardware, as well as bolster existing Sun partnerships such as those with IBM and Dell.
• Sun is a software company, too, and an open source software company at that. They, like IBM, see …

I received the following questions about MySQL Certification today:

I was thinking about getting the Developer and DBA MySQL 5
certifications in short time. But yesterday I received the news that
Sun is buying MySQL and I don´t know how is this going to affect the
certifications. Please could you give me some information about it?
should I try to get the certification now or should I wait until Sun
takes in charge of the MySQL certifications? Please give me some
detailed information about all related issues with the certifications.

Sun's purchase of MySQL still has a lot of details to be worked out but I sincerely doubt their main focus will be on changing MySQL Certification. The major change in the MySQL Certification material will be when MySQL 6.0 is fully released, hopefully late 2008.

BTW MySQL 6.0 will have a lot of features you have dreamed about …

“2008 is starting with a bang for open source,” wrote Mark Radcliffe last week, and he’s not wrong. Not only did we see Sun’s $1bn acquisition of MySQL, but we’ve also seen an extraordinary amount of venture capital funding. Today saw no fewer than three investments announced, with Greenplum landing $27m Series C, Zenoss closing a $11m Series B round, and Alfresco …

I've written before in the big Why not learn MySQL blog post, that comments in Stored Procedures in MySQL are useless.
The reason is simple - the backup/export/dump procedure does dump them into the file correctly, but when loading the file by piping it into the mysql command line client - the comments get stripped. This was a sort of an "optimization" in the client, which is now configurable.

The 5.1.23 change log says so:

mysql stripped comments from statements sent to the server. Now the --comments or --skip-comments option can be used to control whether to retain or strip comments. The default is --skip-comments. ( …

I commented on Jonathan Schwartz's blog on his "Helping Dolphins Fly" post. I was not surprised to find that the blog is moderated. I mean its well worth the manual time to keep the blog of your head honcho clean. I don't remember what I said exactly, but I did voice some concerns about the fact that I have not really seen participate much in the scripting world. Suffice it to say my post was never published. It seems I never have anything nice to say about big cooperations. So I want to try something new for a change: Saying something nice about big cooperations.

First up is MySQL err .. SUN. Since they got scooped up they qualify as a big cooperation (of course). I have really appreciated the bulk of the work that MySQL AB …

Last time I talked about point queries.  The conclusion was that big databases and point queries don’t mix.  It’s ok to do them from time to time, but it’s not how you’re going to use your database, unless you have a lot of time.  Today, I’d like to talk about range queries, which seem much more useful for the analysis of big databases, say in a business intelligence setting.

Recall that the focus is on the storage engine (a la MySQL) level, and a database on a single disk—the one we are using for illustration is the 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.  It has a disk seek time 14ms and transfer rate of around 69MB/s [See tomshardware.com] Now imagine filling the disk with random pairs, each 8 bytes.  So that’s 62.5 billion pairs.

Range Queries

Suppose the above data is stored in a B-tree, and that you’d like to iterate over all the data in order by key.  Further suppose that the …