The latest from the MySQL community

The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) recently surveyed their members about open source and has now published their findings. A few highlights: -More than one third of the respondents reported that they have deployed an open source database in production, which is a higher rate than for open source tools, frameworks or applications. -Nearly three-quarters of that group have MySQL installed -The availability of "express editions" from Oracle, Microsoft and others has not slowed down adoption of open source databases -Over 50% plan on increasing their use of open source software in the next year -63% of those using open... READ MORE

Saugatuck Technology has some advice for proprietary vendors looking to survive the open-source threat to their businesses. Why? Oh, because enterprises are moving to open source in droves, with Saugatuck reporting that "Open source software's presence will increase from approximately 10% of key enterprise on-premise software in 2007, to between 15% and 20% by 2010."

According to a Saugatuck survey:

• 25% of enterprises "always consider and evaluate open source alternatives when planning to acquire new systems, applications, databases or software tools."
  
• 40% "frequently" consider open source alternatives for the same.
  
• 50% report that open source software is widely used within their enterprises.
  
• 60% state that open source software delivers significant business value to their enterprises. …

(photo by Colin Charles @ the Melbourne MySQL user group meeting last week)

A few weeks ago I held a MySQL University Session about MySQL Proxy. Thanks to our docs team we now have

• the IRC log,
• the slides and
• the voice recording

online.

If you are interested in writing your own scripts for the proxy, check out the Writing LUA Scripts for MySQL …

So… stealing the idea from Peter, does anybody have any suggestions for MySQL Cluster related things to have at the UC next year (April)? Either leave a comment or email me (first name at mysql dot com).

khoi vinh?s piece on the poor user-interface design of enterprise software was my latest forward to the business-intelligence list. this is something that has bothered me about vertical-market software for a long time, and i have mentioned it in passing before.

i think it stems from a certain combination of ignorance and laziness. i say ?ignorance? because vertical-market software often comes from the hands of domain experts who just sort of cobble something together because they don?t really know better. the ?laziness? comes in when they don?t …

This tool allow to deploy large number of MySQL replication Slaves (and Master servers)

It is available on Ruby Forge: http://rubyforge.org/projects/vladenvironment/ The tool is based on Vlad the Deployer and is written on Ruby

The following is a true story:

A few months ago, I wrote my mother-in-law a check. A couple of weeks later, it was returned to me with a letter from the bank which said: "Instrument is not negotiable."

I had absolutely no idea what that meant, so I took it, with the check to the bank. The teller had no idea, and neither did the branch manager.

Finally, a young trainee said "Oh, I know! We went over this last week in training." She then pointed out that a check is a negotiable instrument if it has five things filled in: name, numeric amount, written amount, signature, and date. In my haste to pay my mother-in-law, I forgot to fill in the date on the check.

For all you software developers who want to say "those banks are so #!@@^* !$%*^", let's try to do a better job of explaining what our software does first.

Very fast, as it turns out. While writing the chapter on replication for the upcoming second edition of High Performance MySQL, I decided to do a little test and measure replication speed more accurately than I’ve seen others do before. The first edition of the book measured replication speed by inserting on the master and polling on the replica. Giuseppe Maxia later followed up on that by improving the polling process, and found events typically replicated within a half a millisecond.