A little over a year since the project to write this book began, the MySQL 5.1 Cluster Certification Study Guide is now at long last available. It covers everything you’ll need to know to pass the Certified MySQL Cluster 5.1 Database Administrator exam, including MySQL Cluster Concepts, Architecture, Configuration, Deployment, NDB Internals basics, High Availability techniques, Security Issues, and more.

(It does not cover MySQL Cluster 5.1 Carrier Grade Edition, for the simple reason that MCCGE features are not part of the official mainline MySQL 5.1 release. However, those features will be part of MySQL 6.0 [yes, MySQL 6.0 is already starting to happen, and there are already some cool new Cluster, Replication, …

CouchDB got its own TCP port assignment from the IANA. Yeah! The latest release (0.7.2) already configures your default installation to use this port and the accompanying documentation and the wiki should be up to date as well. A big thanks to Noah Slater for taking care of the procedure.

Oh, and it is 5984.

I've been working with various databases for a number of years. In that time I've found there is plenty of documentation on various features but not much on how database modeling impacts performance. Some people say one should use a fully normalized data model with a few denormalizations that are required for performance reasons, but those denormalizations are never discussed. And Ralph Kimball has many articles and a book concentrating on the physical data modeling, but they are more of the "here is how you solve the problem" and they don't detail why his method works better.

I've always found this odd as the physical data model has a major impact on database performance. I want this to be more of the whys behind various physical data modeling options with some examples showing the magnitude of the performance differences.

The first goal of this blog (over a few articles) will be to show cases where a denormalized dimensional data …

Woo-hoo!

The words were written, reviewed, re-written, put aside while figuring out how to get them published, then taken up once again and finally delivered to the publisher.

Today, we finally got word of the happy news:

Starting immediately, you can pick up your own copy of the MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA Certification Study Guide and get started polishing your skills for the Cluster DBA certification exam.

From the cover blurb:

Covering the Certified MySQL 5.1 Cluster Database Administrator exam, this study guide is the one authority to look to when you?re preparing for the test. The book teaches you all the concepts, principles, and techniques that you?ll need to know for the exam, with many practice questions and real-world examples to help you prepare for test day. The book is also an excellent reference guide for your …

I have complained about this IP protection blabla put forth by CLA protected projects previously. But I keep hearing the same (imho false) arguments that CLA's are a non issue. I was kind of shocked that neither the Zend nor the eZ Systems representative at the PHP Conference in Frankfurt was unable to display that he actually knows what is in their respective CLAs. One issue is the one-way OSS, where due to the explicit copyright grant required, it becomes hard to cherry pick OSS code. While thats annoying, the bigger issue imho is the problem of the patent grant clause found in all CLA's I have seen (which all seem to be derived from the apache CLA). I keep bringing up this point until people who push CLA's will finally stop repeating lies about them. Saying that single developers do not need to worry about getting sued over patent infringements is simply wrong.

Anyways, we …

Trying to make a good first few implementation iterations is hard and is sometimes made harder by specifications which are not minutely detailed. When the specification is vague, organic development sometimes seems to excel, partly because there is little or no worries about refactoring or redesigning as necessary. Trying to make something absolutely perfect on the first iteration is difficult,

Today I finally had some time to go back and work on refactoring the patch Milos did for his Google Summer of Code project for MySQL. I started doing this about a month ago but hit a snag with my time and wasn't able to get back to it.

Well...

[brian@zim client]$ ./mysql --protocol=tcp --host=::1 --user=root
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 10
Server version: 5.2.6-alpha-debug-log Source distribution

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql>

So now it is just a matter of a few more cleanups to make it work. I fixed the localhost hack to handle issues with ipv6 having a different scheme for 127.0.01.
I've dropped a source tarball here:
…

Following up on the release of the Japanese versions of the certification exams, our Japan office has decided to run a campaign with a 20% discount off the exam price.

You gotta be quick, though… this is only for the first 100 takers!

One thing about this campaign that’s pretty cool is that you get a choice: You can either take a straight discount, reducing the exam price by 20% up-front. Or you can pick another option and get a gift card to Amazon for the same value.

More information (in Japanese, of course) available here.

MySQL Workbench has a beta out! No idea why its version 5.0.9, but its highly exciting. This software existed before, but this is quite unlike its predecessor. One snag for me is that it is Windows-only at the moment, with Linux and OS X versions to follow suit.

However, due to excitement, I decided to try running it on Linux, anyway.

Seeing that it is a .NET application, I thought I’d pass it through MoMA (the migration analyser). Everything passed, so I got excited. Running mono MySQLWorkbench.exe however, led me to a failure:
** ERROR **: Method ‘<Module>:<CrtImplementationDetails>.DoDllLanguageSupportValidation ()’ in assembly ‘/home/byte/Downloads/MySQL Workbench 5.0.9 OSS …

I get questions on how to build mysql application from time to time, and I wanted to share the response to the question below.



In the beginning, should a developer try and stay away from complex JOINS? Is it better to use many smaller queries and cache the results (using something like memcached) rather than 1 larger query requiring multiple table JOINS?

Needing to scale for millions of users is a great problem to have, but should I worry about it in the beginning? Whats the best approach to db design for day 1?



Well IMHO build the application, build it to spec. When the scope changes (and this will always happen) flow with it. This is in no means a knock against Product-I actually look forward to this, because things are being discussed and if something needs to change lets do it!

Now how to build the application to scale: Look at the scope of a page …