Jim Starkey, Senior Software Architect at MySQL, is featured in an online interview over at Dr Dobb's Journal. It's a short interview, but every question reveals insight into the Jim's thoughts on the relational model, SQL, security, standards and more. For those who don't know Jim, he is one of the pionneers of the database industry and has implemented several relational databases in his career. Jim has always been an innovator, inventing the widely accepted notion of Blobs (binary large objects) and multi-generational versioning, a key innovation of InterBase. Jim and Ann Harrison joined MySQL from Netfrastructure, the company they... READ MORE

So, I have been putting it off a lot and I decided to do something about it.
This whole blog is supposed to in one part, describe the steps and progress of my project and write some things about my progress with MySQL (and other databases).
I actually did plan to use stored procedures very much when doing my project so the 2 areas are very much connected to one another.


Main Idea

I wanted to make a web-based text game called Shadow People. Shadow people will be a game to do with government agencies and spy organizations.
There will be two different groups of agencies: Government owned/regulated ones and Terrorists/Freelance ones.
If it helps you imagining how it will look like, if anyone saw the series ?"La Femme Nikita" with the actress Peta Wilson.
The game revolves round the cool and secret world of small yet highly effective organizations that either try to keep order in …

By Jesse Robbins

Jonathan Schwartz is treating NetApp's lawsuit over ZFS as an attack on free software. He posted his position and plan for counter-attack to his blog:

Their objectives were clear - number one, they'd like us to unfree ZFS, to retract it from the free software community. Which reflects a common misconception among proprietary companies - that you can unfree, free. You cannot.

Second, they want us to limit ZFS's allowable field of use to computers - and to forbid its use in storage devices. Which is quizzical to say the least - in our view, computers are storage devices, and vice versa [...] . So that, too, is an impractical solution.

We're left with …

Here is a simple configuration file (XML) for MySQL Administrator client.
In addition to the the default graphs I added some new pages containing the most important status variables to monitoring and evaluate the performance of InnoDB.

The new pages are:
idb storage: reads, writes, doublewrites and fsync activity
idb logs:writes to innodb logs and file system activity
idb buffer pool: buffer pool activity
idb disk: pages and rows activity

Just download the file mysqladmin_health.xml.gz then
gunzip it and copy it in the following (default) directory:
(Windows) C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\MySQL
(Linux) ~/.mysqlgui

I hope this could be …

A short time ago I found this very well done podcast: Hanselminutes by Scott Hanselman. In one of the latest episodes he was talking to Jonathan Zuck of ACT Online about Software Licensing. It’s great to get a quick overview about existing licenses and how to best use them. Since this is a huge topic you only get a short overview, but very understandable imho!
Especially interesting was what Jonathan said about the MySQL licensing model, which I had not properly understood all the way until now neither :-). He said since MySQL owns the rights of the software they can decide what license to sell a software under to a customer and

relief them of the burden of a GPL based license, by simply selling it to them …

XAware, Inc., provider of the industry's first comprehensive, real-time open source data integration solution, today announced it has become a Gold Partner in the MySQL Enterprise Connection Alliance program. MySQL AB is the developer of the world's most popular open source database software ? and offers MySQL Enterprise, a premium subscription offering for database developers and DBAs. XAware's data integration solution, XAware 5, is available for download at the community site: www.xaware.org.

This article contains my notes and detailed instructions on setting up a MySQL cluster. After reading it, you should have a good understanding of what a MySQL cluster is capable of, how and why it works, and how to set one of these bad boys up. Note that I'm primarily a developer, with an interest in systems administration but I think that every developer should be able to understand and set up a MySQL cluster, at least to make the dev environment more robust.

Notes

• High availability. If one or some of the machines go down, the cluster will stay up, as long as there is at least one copy of all data still present. The more redundant copies of data there are, the more machines you can afford to lose.
• Scalability. Distributed architecture allows for load balancing. If your MySQL …

Yep, it’s true. “MySQL Toolkit” technically infringes on MySQL’s trademark. I haven’t been given a mandate or cease-and-desist order or anything, but as Marten Mickos (MySQL’s CEO) told me, anything that starts with the word “MySQL” sounds like it comes from the company, and this project doesn’t come from MySQL. Suggestions are welcome. I’m totally uninspired. “Toolkit” was the best I could do when I named the project to begin with.

We have fixed the issue with the PHP dtrace extension not working in Cool Stack 1.2. As I mentioned in my announcement post, we had already identified the issue but didn't have time to fix it before the release. The issue was that /usr/ccs/bin/ld was being used to do the linking but this doesn't work for dtrace as some initialization code needs to be called from the .init section and this is not setup correctly if we don't use 'cc' to do the linking (rather than 'ld'). 

So a simple addition to the configure line:
LD="cc"

did the trick.

We now have two files : dtrace_1.2_sparc.so and dtrace_1.2_x86.so posted. Download the one for …

I try my best to get things right the first time. So often, correcting a mistake or bad choice is costly: more costly than it would have been to take the time to do it right the first time. However, as SQL Server MVP Andy Leonard points out, sometimes you can't correct an issue.

He starts with the example of a camera and taking a picture out of focus and then brings it around to development. His example is great: you can't provide up to the second updates to a system than only collects data every five seconds. Well, you can, but the data is only going to change ever five seconds. This raises the question often asked by learning styles expert, …