Please note this late-breaking news related to this story. Then still please sign our letter! 15 years ago, with the release of Oracle 7.0.12, Oracle gave the world?or at least its customers?something really great: the Oracle Wait Interface (OWI). The OWI is one of the reasons that Oracle?s database product and its customer base are what they [...]

Building on the momentum created by OSS Camp-Mumbai, and having received very positive response from the OSS community -- a second Indian OSS Camp has been scheduled for September 8-9, 2007 in Delhi.

The Free Software Foundation today announced the finalized version of the long awaited GPL3 open software license.  This was pretty long in the making, more than 16 years since the prior release, but the process, led in large part by Eben Moglen, was deliberate with input from a broad range of users, vendors, developers and lawyers.  Pretty much anyone who wanted to comment on the GPL was able to.  MySQL participated in the process, both through David Axmark's early discussions and feedback as well as Kaj Arno's chairing of a subcommittee.  I'm also glad that the FSF took the extra time to address issues …

The other day I was looking for a open source, feature-rich, high performance ETL tool to use in an enterprise environment. I was disappointed nothing really seemed to match my requirements. Have I overlooked something or is this really a niche where there aren’t any viable projects? After looking in the usual places like sourceforge.net and doing a bunch of Google searches. I could not find any products that fit the bill. Here are (some of) my criteria:

• Fast. The candidate tool has to be able to move huge amounts of information between the source and target databases quickly.
• Flexible error handling. Data errors occur all the time, and when errors are encountered, we should be able to stop processing or log the error to a file or push the record into a violations table for subsequent processing. There are probably other popular strategies for handling errors, such as changing the offending data and trying to insert it …

About a week ago Marten send me email pointing to his article published on Jays Blog (Come on Marten, it is time for you to get your own blog). I should have replied much earlier but only found time to do that now. So here is my list

1. Be Pluggable

Unlike many OpenSource projects MySQL was single chunk of code and for years the only way you could officially extend it was using UDFs which was very limited. Compare this with other OpenSource projects such as PostgreSQL (plugable indexes etc), Apache, PHP or Linux Kernel. Yes in MySQL 5.1 the situation is changes - now there are plugable storage engines (something even PostgreSQL does not have) as well as Full Text Search parses but there is very long way to go before you could do any significant functionality ourside of storage engines as …

We congratulate the Free Software Foundation on the release of GPLv3 and offer our thanks to the many individuals in the open source community who participated in the process of drafting the license.

It’s good to see overall improvements in GPLv3 over GPLv2, when it comes to compatibility with other Free/Open Source Software licenses, to the compatibility with other legislations than the US legal system, and to strengthened incompatibility with Software Patents. I am also happy if the work of the Committee B ends up contributing to a better adoption of GPLv3. I am in awe as to the patience and skillful diplomacy with which Eben Moglen could tame the group consisting of everything from techies from comparatively small companies (like Trolltech and ourselves) to the seniormost lawyers from the biggest Fortune 500 companies.

MySQL will continue to monitor the industry’s reaction and adoption of the new license, …

We spent a lot of time this month trying to fix Bug#21074 "Large query_cache freezes mysql server sporadically under heavy load".

In a nutshell, invalidation of a table can be dead slow (seconds) when there are tens of thousands of cached queries associated with this table, and, moreover, invalidation
freezes the entire server when it happens.
It's so funny, this thing happens under two singleton mutexes (one instance of the mutex exists in the entire server) both of which are required for every single query that the server gets.

Invalidation is indeed somewhat slow, but making it a bit faster will only shift the threshold when the query cache becomes unusable from tens of thousands of cached results, to, say, hundreds of thousands. So we thought it'll only change the depth of the hole in which people will discover they've shoot themselves in the foot.
Besides, any change of that sort requires quite …

There has been a trend in the blogs for top5 MySQL wishes.
Many people, including Ronald Bradford, Alan Kasindorf, Jim Winstead, Jonathon Coombes, Jeremy Cole, Jay Pipes, Antony Curtis, Stewart Smith coined in.

Here're my 5:

…

Matthew Aslett is highlighting four open source startups to watch: Aptar, GravityZoo, Loopfuse, and Untangle. I've talked about Loopfuse and Untangle before, but Aptar and GravityZoo are news to me.

That's one of the great things about the commercial open source ecosystem right now. People can complain that there aren't enough (public) examples of success yet, but one of the great examples of general commercial open source success is that there are so many new companies getting funded and/or getting traction. This is a vibrant, growing ecosystem.

Growing in breadth, but also growing in depth. My employer, Alfresco, reported strong momentum in our last quarter (we basically double every …

My blog is blocked to those who have a livejournal account. I set it
up this way years ago because I hate dealing with comment bots that
generate SPAM. This means I get a lot of back channel comments on my
posts (aka email, IM, IRC) that you never actually see on the
site... I don't normally post them but this one from email was pretty
interesting:


The challenging design issues about queuing are about locking and
indexing, not about the API. The API to look at queues and message
should be SQL (so you can use SQL to access the message properties,
the message history, and the payload or do auditing and tracking),
but the API to modify the queue must be something else to preserve
the integrity of the queue.

Oracle Streams AQ does not support data manipulation language (DML)
operations on a queue table or an associated …