Even as MySQL and PosgreSQL yank the carpet out from under Oracle and Microsoft, Microsoft is turning the other cheek by cutting Oracle off at the knees on price, as Mary Jo Foley reports:

Microsoft officials announced on September 19 that they have no plans to increase the price of SQL Server 2008 beyond what the company already charges for SQL Server 2005. Microsoft execs also announced that, starting today, ...

So, here is an Alpha quality port of the MySQL Cluster management server to Win32 based on the current MySQL 5.0 tree.

This isn’t going into 5.0, so don’t expect to ever have that.

This isn’t going into 5.1 either, so don’t expect it there.

It’ll go into some future release at some level of general “supported” status that has yet to be decided.

ONLY USE THIS FOR EXPERIMENTAL PURPOSES.
IT IS EARLY RELEASE - IT HARMS PUPPIES!

But, it would be great for those who may be interested in having a ndb_mgmd on Win32 at some point to grab the binary, have a play and find some bugs.

For any bugs filed, please submit to bugs.mysql.com and explicitly mention that it’s version “5.0.50-ndbwin32r1″ and mention that it’s the specific build (i.e. it shouldn’t go through the normal bug verification procedure and instead end up with me looking at it directly).

…

“MySQL Cluster: We don’t need no stinkin FOREIGN KEYS”

and, of course: “Ban HP-UX Now!”

Any design for a “I’m Highly Available” shirt is pure speculation…. but totally awesome (and a cookie for anybody who a) makes them or b) wears them)

Yes, I really, really really dislike the Microsoft Windows platform. I think you have to approach insanity to even remotely consider using it in a HA environment.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t support it. Switching an entire software stack can be a lot of work. Much better to gradually move to complete freedom and sanity.

Each year I pick a topic to explore for conferences. I look at trends, do some research, and I write a slide deck to give a talk.

Then the learning begins. As I go around the country, and the world, giving the talk, I get to hear from others. Learning from the collective lets me find new ideas and refine my own thoughts on the topic. Some ideas I hear over and over, and these bubble to the top.

This year's topic was scaling. To date I've given the "Scaling" talk as a keynote three times, and as a regular session another four times (and I need to apologize to at least two conferences that I had to skip or I would have delivered it another two times).

At the moment Architects are looking at two forms of scaling, Macro and Micro. The computing clouds, distributed …

This release of MySQL Toolkit adds a new tool, fixes some minor bugs, and adds new functionality to several of the tools. New tool: MySQL Heartbeat This tool was contributed by Proven Scaling’s Jeremy Cole and Six Apart. It measures replication delay on a replica, which can be daisy-chained to any depth. It does not rely on SHOW SLAVE STATUS, and in fact it doesn’t even need the replica processes to be running.

Progress on High Performance MySQL, Second Edition is coming along nicely. You have probably noticed the lack of epic multi-part articles on this blog lately -- that's because I'm spending most of my spare time on the book. At this point, we have significant work done on some of the hardest chapters, like Schema Optimization and Query Optimization. I've been deep in the guts of those hard optimization chapters for a while now, so I decided to venture into lighter territory: Backup and Recovery, which is one of the few chapters we planned to "revise and expand" from the first edition, rather than completely writing from scratch. I'd love to hear your thoughts and wishes -- click through to the full article for more details on the chapter and how it's shaping up.

So with over 1000 crashes in my logs from just one night of simple queries, I have a painful time to find new crashes in the 90MB file. So I'm taking a detour on the rainbow query generator for 2 days. Will be writing an error log analyzer instead :)

step 1: upload the mysqld and the mysqld.sym file for the version you're working with.
step 2: import the binary and symbols into a mysql table
step 3: upload the error log
step 4: parse the error log into seperate crashes
step 5: find the stack traces for each crash, and resolve them using the symbols
step 6: determine if this crash is matching any existing crashes.

With thousands of crashes on various builds of mysqld, the above system can be useful to me. Also, I'd import all the crashes from reports on bugs.mysql.com for searching purposes. This toy will allow me to identify whether a crash is new, or it's been seen before.

The MySQL Developer’s Meeting has started. The weather is pretty moderately okay, there’s occasional rain, so we’ve all been given rain coats/rain jackets. The hotel is fully packed, and the lobby is generally filled with folk hacking away at things. Plenty of meetings, plenty of sessions, it is highly interesting, and it looks like there’s some team interoperability and we can better understand how to deliver things now.

This meeting has encouraged blogging, but I have a feeling most are too busy to write stuff. There will be meeting notes, and at some stage we should publish them externally. There should be heaps of pictures because I see everyone walking around with cameras (so I’ve conveniently left mine at the hotel).

Oh, and did I mention, its a great way to meet other MySQLers? So many names and nicknames, are now put to faces. So yes, Heidelberg is proving to be fun.

Current sticker theme: “We need …

A good training is not just running through course materials, otherwise you might as well get them sent to you for a read... it's about interaction, discussion, questioning, exploring, breaking, baffling the teacher, and also anecdotes and background that make it easier to remember otherwise possibly dry information and apply it in the real world when appropriate.

Funny... I just browsed by the MySQL Training Testimonials page, and noticed that 5 of the entries are actually from courses I taught (I was the trainer). Cool."I particularly liked the challenge of solving some problems with the exercises, to put the lessons to practical use."
?Neil Silvester, Heat and Control Pty Ltd, Brisbane QLD

"Thanks for a very interesting and informative training course, I have been able to put what I learned on the course to good use already, …