Peter makes an interesting post about the MySQL company’s trademarks at http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/10/26/mysql-support-or-support-for-mysql-mysql-trademark-policies/
The point is that Peter is not selling “MySQL Support” — he is selling “Support *for* MySQL”. “MySQL Support” is the name of a product that MySQL offers. Even if some other consulting company used the name before the MySQL company ever did, MySQL still has the rights to the name.  More »

This morning I prepared and uploaded a Debian package of mylvmbackup, which provides a quick way to create backups of MySQL server's data files using an LVM snapshot. While it's waiting in Debians NEW queue for approval by the FTP masters, you can get it from here. It was built on and uploaded to unstable, but the package works fine on stable (etch) as well.

Techcrunch notes that the rumor mill is heating up on an imminent IPO from MySQL:

I am hearing chatter from hedge fund circles that the filing may be imminent. Last I checked, nothing has been filed with the SEC yet.

All quiet on the western front, but with growing market share (...

Recently I had some trouble with the server where all of my websites are hosted.  Business site, various blogs, there is lots of stuff on there, not to mention backups of work, email, and all sorts of things I do not really want to lose.

I first noticed the trouble when I couldn’t login through the command line.  Strangely the websites were still running.  I called the hosting company, and after talking with them for a while, managed to login as root.  That was working.  But it was acting quite odd.  There were some errors in the /var/log/messages about ssh not being able to set uid 10003, the uid of my login, shull.  I pondered.  I thought.  I sat circumspect.

I investigated for a while, and called up 1 & 1 again.  I have a root server, but they’re not really supposed to support maintaining the machine itself.  Then I got to thinking, I could spend hours diagnosing this, …

Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions out of this.

I had added my comments to some of the questions. HT will stand for Heikki Tuuri in the answers and PZ for myself.

Q1: Why did you decide to go with gzip compression instead of implementing "classical" approach of index prefix compression ?

HT: The reason is that index prefix compression prevents one from using a binary search on a B-tree node. We could not compare a search key K to an index record R if we only knew the suffix of …

I just finished installing Leopard on my computer, and my first impressions are that it's very slick and well thought out. One of my necessities as a developer is that I must have a webserver running on my personal computer, so I was dismayed when it wasn't functional after the upgrade. The main reason is that Leopard uses a different version of Apache than 10.4 did, and so some things get wonky. But it's easy to fix. Apache and PHP are included in Leopard, so the only thing missing is MySQL. To install that, go to MySQL's site, and download the latest copy for OS X. It's incredibly simple to install.After that comes setting up Apache. Open up a terminal window, and type in "sudo pico /etc/apache2/httpd.conf". (Note that you must be a computer administrator to access the files in etc/) OS X 10.4 had Apache in /etc/httpd/, and that's part of why it didn't work after the upgrade. Find the line in httpd.conf that looks like "#LoadModule …

What is the difference between "MySQL Support" and "Support for MySQL" ?
In my mind there is not much difference in meaning just first one is shorter and I would use it also because how people would search stuff in Google.

It turns out however there is significant legal differences - first one would be MySQL Trademark violation but not the second one.
I learned it because MySQL contacted me about our consulting company new "corporate" site and rename Services appropriately.

As Monty explained me once MySQL has to protect the trade mark in all instances as otherwise they may loose rights to it. So this is quite understandable. They however are also quite selective - google around and there would be plenty of companies out where which will offer you services named "MySQL Support" or "MySQL …

Try number two. We have moved to the new server yet again, now it is server hosted by ServerBeach as recommended by Kevin Burton and few other guys.

Lets hope this will run stable and we'll not need to move it back in emergency in less than a week as we had to last time.

Up to this point it all was running pretty well, with only minor issues. We got CentOS 5 on the box as we wanted, however we could not request custom partitioning - I really prefer to keep all important data on LVM volume so it is easy to backup.

Entry posted by peter | 4 comments

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Welcome to the 68th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Thanks to Paul and everyone else who contributed comments and links to LB#67 (a.k.a., the Log Buffer of Love) when I was down with the common cold. My rhinoviral guest has not abandoned me just yet , but I’m grimly [...]

Yesterday was spent at SLAC's "Extremely Large Database Workshop". It was a great collection of vendors, scientists, and people from Google, Ebay, Yahoo, etc.

Vertica's Michaell Stonebraker was present. Ever since I read the C-Store that he wrote I have been wanting to ask him about his thoughts on the differences between covering indexes and column store.

In a column store the values are stored separately, and queries are resolved by searching a particular column. This gives you less data to read when you need particular set of columns, and allows your to compress the Indexes very nicely assuming that the data is not entirely random.

MySQL has covering indexes. When you do a …