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MySQL AB is building on its European organisation with a new sales office in Milan, Italy to focus on supporting corporate customers.

On November 8 in Milan, the database vendor's first public event in Italy will take place. The Italian MySQL team invites users and customers to learn about the company, its products and services.

More information about the 'MySQL in Italia' event is available here (in Italian).

Last week I wrote about my efforts to measure MySQL’s replication speed precisely. The most important ingredient in that recipe was the user-defined function to get the system time with microsecond precision. This post is about that function, which turned out to be surprisingly easy to write. The manual section on user-defined functions provides very good instructions on how they work and how to build them. But just for the record, on Ubuntu 7.

In the spirit of the MySQL Pluggable Storage Engines the proxy has a plugin infrastructure now.

The main goal was to cleanup the code so what the admin part and the proxy itself can be loaded at runtime.

The new code-layout looks like

• mysql-proxy.c (codename: the cauldron)
  • takes care of the command line options
  • signal handling
  • win32 service handling (not done yet)
• libmysql-proxy.so
  • provides the mainloop and everything for the socket and protocol handling
• libadmin.so
  • the old admin interface
• libproxy.so
  • the well known proxy itself

Now you can plugin your own modules if you like and only load those modules that you really want.

The next step is making the …

These days everyone is looking for a MySQL DBA or MySQL Architect. I am regularly contacted by recruiters, Proven Scaling customers, and other contacts, and they all have the same question: “Where do we find MySQL people to hire?” Most of them have had requisitions open for 6+ months (I know of a few in the 12+ month range), they haven’t found anyone, and they’re feeling desperate now. Since I get this question so often, I thought I’d consolidate my advice on the subject and post it.

They don’t exist on the market today.

Currently there are many more job openings for MySQL people than there are qualified people to fill them. Many of you reading this and trying to hire someone are working for startups and are probably relatively “unknown”, perhaps you don’t have a lot to offer. This makes it even harder for you, as you must compete …

There was an article this week in InfoWeek entitled How Linux is Testing the Limits of Open Source Development which really hit home. In many ways, it's reflecting some of the issues that our much smaller opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM project is going through as well, and it made me realize that there may be a natural, self-correcting mechanism which limits the growth of open source projects.

Let me give you an example of how I think this works: Imagine a really smart developer sat down and started an open source project. She starts writing code, and pretty soon the software is useful. More and more people download it, and soon some other contributors/developers show up. The rate of development increases, and more features show up, leading (hopefully) to more developers. …

It’s been a long time since we’ve started this project and it is time to make a checkpoint. So, I’ve decided to release final 1.0 version and make 1.X branch stable while all serious development with deep architectural changes will be done 2.X branch (trunk at this moment).

Changes from previous release:

• Perl semaphores implementation caused huge memory leaks (mmmd_mod).
• Now we do not send any commands to hard offline hosts with dead TCP/IP stack to prevent mointoring problems for other hosts.
• Removed legacy StartSlave method from agent code which caused problems on some Perl versions
• Added a few fixes to prevent non-exclusive roles from moving. This caused internal status structures to …

I’m noticing some trends of late, as I go through the proposals for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008.

Rails: has it lost its steam? I’d like to see some talk submissions for Ruby and Ruby on Rails users, clearly. This stuff is still hot on the web (look at Twitter, and Dopplr, for instance) and there’s lots more out there.

I’m recommending a lot of people work on talks together. I don’t know if this will happen, but we have mashups in this web 2.0 world, I don’t see why we don’t have talk mashups with 2 presenters. Having a co-presenter not only keeps your talk real, but keeps the momentum going (especially when your talk is scheduled early in the morning or after …