Jeremy Cole’s post “On Falcon and the need to feel wanted” got me thinking…

The MySQL family is gearing up for a new arrival. Falcon is still a baby in the belly, but it seems to already be getting more attention than its older and accomplished siblings (eg InnoDB). Maybe the proud mother-to-be has issues because every time she looks in InnoDB’s eyes she can’t stop thinking about the new stepmother, Oracle.

She seems to think this one will be the best baby ever, and has pinned high hopes on what it will grow up to become. Part of her excitement is because she is rightly taken with the brilliant father, Jim Starkey. If Dad could invent MVCC and BLOBs, what will baby Falcon grow up to accomplish under his care?

Hopefully the proud parents will have a keen eye open to shortcomings as well as strengths. …

MySQL has a new section on their site about MySQL 6.0, which they are now calling “ready for pre-production testing”. I’m not sure when this section appeared, but I don’t spend much time on the MySQL site outside of the manual and downloads sections. Browsing around this new section I found a real gem: “Top Reasons Falcon is Cool” (or, as alternately titled on the page itself, “Top Reasons to use Falcon for Online Applications”1 … did someone forget to rename one or the other?). This page gives a top ten list2 of reasons why one should consider using Falcon, the new “not an InnoDB replacement, not at all!” but “really, you …

One of those projects I have been meaning to do is add dtrace support
to MySQL. Since I have been working with the Sun this has been on my
list to do.

What is DTrace? It is a way to dynamically trace/measure an
application for systems supporting DTrace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dtrace

The project of adding these really was more about research then about
actual code. While there are a number of resources on the web for
adding dtrace probes to C, there are few that exist for C++. Also, C+
+ requires a later version of Solaris then what comes installed on
machines that Sun ships, so you will need to have a fairly recent
install of Solaris Express to make use of this.

First I am going to define a couple of probes in probes.d:

provider mysql {

…

Just came off today's MySQL University session about How to Build MySQL on Windows - Reggie did a great job on explaining how to build the MySQL Server from Source on Windows using the Microsoft development toolchain and some additional required tools. I am glad to hear that we're making progress on making it easier for Windows developers to work with the source code and Reggie and the other members of our Windows Task Force (what a nice acronym this one makes!) have plenty of other ideas for improving that experience.

If you missed his session, the audio file and IRC log will be published from the MySQL University pages shortly.

And in case you haven't heard about MySQL University before, check out the pages on the …

There's a slew of open source conferences coming up this fall in the US and in Europe. Here are a few of the highlights: -Utah Open Source Conference, Sept 6-8, Provo -Rails Conf Europe, Sept 17-19, Berlin -Gartner Open Source Summit, Sept 19-21, Las Vegas -Zend PHP Conference, Oct 8-11, San Francisco -MySQL European Conferences, Oct 16, 18, 23, London, Munich, Paris There's a wide range of choices. If you're a hard core PHP or Rails developer, then hit the technical conferences. If you're a manager looking to figure out a best practices open source strategy, then the Gartner show... READ MORE

I mentioned earlier that I'd blog about progress on the book as we go. It's not only progress on the book itself -- I want to write about the process of writing, because I think it's very interesting and relevant to software engineering. I'm finding a lot of the work in writing a book comes from some of the same things that make software hard: coordinating work, deciding what should go where, and so on.

Thanks to our friends at Meinberg we (the NTP Pool) are giving away some awesome equipment for time keeping.

If you have a reasonably connected server with a static IP address (see the requirements), please join the pool. Literally millions of users are counting on you! Any old server that can keep track of the time can run ntpd too. The cpu requirements are really minimal, so your current MySQL/Apache/whatever load is not going to be affected. If you are able to setup a GPS antenna then you can also go apply for the GPS devices. They are really really cool.

Or in any case, if you are able then please …

Thanks to our friends at Meinberg we (the NTP Pool) are giving away some awesome equipment for time keeping.

If you have a reasonably connected server with a static IP address (see the requirements), please join the pool. Literally millions of users are counting on you! Any old server that can keep track of the time can run ntpd too. The cpu requirements are really minimal, so your current MySQL/Apache/whatever load is not going to be affected. If you are able to setup a GPS antenna then you can also go apply for the GPS devices. They are really really cool.

Or in any case, if you are able then please …

I’m a bit late with that “news” but I have the second article about Oracle 10g Grid Control Extensibility published in Q3 2007 issue of IOUG SELECT Journal magazine. If you are interested in that topic I should reference you back to my presentation from IOUG where I created a sample MySQL monitoring plugin. It wasn’t [...]

Ok, so the week is not over yet - but I have to name these entries somehow ;-)
And it's actually "solo again" as I used to run my own business back when I lived in The Netherlands.
Anyway... the first week at Open Query.

First booked customer?
Training. Multiple people, multiple modules. Good.

First consulting customer?
A referral - thanks Steve!
Environment: Windows (someone up there must hate me ;-), or actually a Microsoft shop (including MS-SQL) that happens to have one app on MySQL. Actually, the fact that this server runs Windows actually matters very little. But it *was* interesting to hear this fellow speak about MS-SQL and compare some things.

Microsoft SQL Server has a nice GUI for maintenance, you set up some stuff and schedule other regular things. MySQL Administrator can do some of that (and looks very …