A week ago, Mike Zinner and his team released the beta version of MySQL Workbench on http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/. MySQL Workbench is a visual database design tool that is developed by MySQL. It is the successor application of the DBDesigner4 project.

There are two different editions of MySQL Workbench at this point in time - an open source edition and a standard edition that is only available for paying customers.

This means that MySQL Workbench introduces a new concept for MySQL. Until now, MySQL products have either been open source or only available through a commercial subscription (such as MySQL Enterprise Monitor).

MySQL Workbench is …

In September, the Developer Zone featured Chapter 6 of Paul DuBois' MySQL, 3rd edition on Writing C Programs with the MySQL C API. This month, we continue in this series on developing MySQL applications in C with a tutorial from Mark Schoonover about using the Eclipse CDT (C Development Toolkit) as an IDE for developing C applications for MySQL.

Maatkit (formerly MySQL Toolkit) contains essential command-line utilities for MySQL, such as a table checksum tool and query profiler. It provides missing features such as checking replicas for data consistency, with emphasis on quality and scriptability. This release fixes several minor bugs. It also renames all the tools to avoid trademark violation, completing the project rename. (Let me know if I missed anything.) Changelog for mk-find: 2007-11-25: version 0.9.7 * Added --sid option.

A while ago I asked for people and/or organizations to sponsor development on Maatkit (formerly MySQL Toolkit) so I could take a week off work and improve the Table Sync tool. I asked for $2500 USD, but several companies have graciously offered to cover that and then some. I’m very happy about this, as it will allow me to dedicate a solid week to fixing bugs and adding features. There’s a lot of demand for the tools, and there are a dozen or so bug reports unresolved for the table-sync tool, which I personally want to fix as much as anyone.

I have now posted slides for the talk I gave in Zurich last week in MySQL Performance Presentations section.

That was fun talk and fun trip in general. Thank you for inviting.

Entry posted by peter | 5 comments

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So I have been talking to a lot of people about my idea for a business rules engine in the database and many of my friends have given really good feedback. Not all of it was good feedback, but it allowed me to re-evaluate and focus my idea on what exactly I want to achieve using this idea.


The Goal

My goal in general is to - cut the crap - out of software developing, shortening and simplifying the process, so that small businesses and people without a lot of means are able to create good applications or websites.

The way I would like to do this, is by allowing the database to use its built in functions and its excellent ways of manipulating data to speed up this process. I would like to direct this at applications or websites that mainly deal with data deliverance.
For example, websites that …

Geo-referencing IPs is, in a nutshell, converting an IP address, perhaps from an incoming web visitor, a log file, a data file, or some other place, into the name of some entity owning that IP address. There are a lot of reasons you may want to geo-reference IP addresses to country, city, etc., such as in simple ad targeting systems, geographic load balancing, web analytics, and many more applications.

This is a very common task, but I have never actually seen it done efficiently in MySQL in the wild. There is a lot of questionable advice on forums, blogs, and other sites out there on this topic. After working with a Proven Scaling customer, I recently did some thinking and some performance testing on this problem, so I thought I would publish some hard data and advice for everyone.

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Marten Mickos emailed to point out the MySQL Workbench offering (a good FAQ here). As I've said before, MySQL gets it. Why? Well, in the eyes of commercial enterprise software vendors, the optimal result is for OSS vendors to stick to their "OSS religious" roots. An incredibly low % of OSS users end up paying for the software/subscription. This means that OSS Vendor A doesn't have the financial resources to close the feature/function gap vs. Enterprise Vendor B. That?s why growing an OSS business beyond $100M is more difficult than getting to $100M. Yes, OSS is already competing with enterprise... READ MORE

As a follow up to my post about Cesar Cerrudo's new whitepaper, earlier this month David Litchfield talked about putting honeypots in the database in his blog post, Database tripwires..., to catch someone snooping around. The basic idea for non-Oracle databases is to create some sort of alerting function (such as one that fires an email) that gets called by a view with an interesting sounding name or interesting sounding column names. Triggers could work for INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE, if the attacker is attempting to alter data. However, if the attacker is simply collecting information, then triggers aren't effective because triggers can't be defined on SELECT operations. This is why he …

(Jumbo) Maple Cream Pie

(Credit: Matt Asay)

In thinking a bit more about my post on MySQL's Workbench product, it's starting to sound to me like a matter of pie. Let me explain.

MySQL isn't really holding back any functionality with Workbench. Not the essential functionality that its users need. It's just holding back some time-saving features from a tool that is otherwise fully functional and enables the same output that its open-source version enables. You pay to get to the end result faster, but you can get the same end result with the open-source version.

MySQL writes:

Everything that is possible in the Standard Edition (commercial version) can also be done with the OSS Edition. You only trade saving time and ease of use for money.... …