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, …

This is a follow-up to part I from last week. You've considered what you want to do, you've looked at your soft skills, and you still want to be a DBA. How then do you get started?

The first thing to do is decide which platform you're going to focus on. Each "flavor" has its own proprietary tools and commands. While all share a basic SQL language foundation, DBCC CHECKDB() doesn't run on MySQL and DESCRIBE doesn't get you anything SQL Server. Likewise, SQL Server Management Objects (SMO) don't help you with Oracle and if you're looking for " …

I do realize that for most of you, there may be nothing new about the dbms_sys_sql package ? knowledge of it has been floating around for quite a while. I myself discovered this package a couple of years ago while playing around with HTMLDB’s (now APEX’s) internals. I’m posting this as a response to a [...]

Is it fair to compare Innodb to MyISAM with innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 and flush=OFF?

Granted different applications have different requirements. But, when you're trying to show a graph comparing the two Engines, isn't it reasonable to try to keep the same settings as close to equal as possible?

I suppose that begs the question of how similar innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit is to flush, and if it's even possible to get a valid comparison.

Innodb tends to be slower (I'm on 4.1 currently, ancient history), but it seems to me that it's doing a whole lot more for the money. What do you think?

[UPDATE] Additionally, I'm running sequential benchmarks back to back, for example loading the table, then turning around and running a read test on the table. For innodb, this often means that a good chunk of the buffer pool is dirty and the read test has to slog through while the dirty buffers are …

Keith: Tomorrow is Tuesday ;)

While we're on the subject, the Montreal MySQL User Group *is* tomorrow. You can RSVP on the Meetup site, or via Facebook. This month's talk is on Performance Tuning.