In a decade, on-demand virtualized utility computing will be an invisible utility, part of the vital infrastructure of the technological economy.

People will mostly have forgotten what an enormous pain in the ass provisioning computation was today. Today, we don't truly feel that pain, because it seems "normal", everyone has to suffer it together.

The situation right now is, if you have a delivery van, you have to make your own gasoline. And you have to hire and pay for your own mechanics. Seems stupid, doesn't it? It's amazing that there are any delivery vans at all …

Think of the internet itself, what it did to telecoms.

Twenty-five years ago, if you wanted a high speed data connection to a computer in San Francisco, it was a pain. You'd have to come up with a pile of money, and wait a couple of months, at best. Hardware would be dedicated and provisioned, and then finally you would have your connection. To …

Here's an interesting problem to have.  What happens when your company starts scaling out in a matter of hours or days to traffic levels that would have normally taken years?  That's the situation that music site www.iLike.com (formerly GarageBand) faced after they launched May 23. They started getting tens of thousands of new users hourly through Facebook and eventually went from a million users to over 6 million in and the space of a few weeks, begging and borrowing more servers from VCs to keep things going.  They reached an audience size in weeks that it took Rhapsody years to achieve.  Now that's a fast pace of scale out!  They announced on June 11 that they are now the …

I’m going and stealing Jay’s idea (who stole it off Brian Duff… but his was for Oracle so obviously doesn’t count :)

So, my five wishes for MySQL Are:

5. Six-monthly release cycles

Getting a release out there takes way too long. There’s a variety of reasons, but seeing the amazing success of other free software projects taking the shorter release cycle, with each release not being too ambitious, I’m pretty convinced.

Although I think our increased use of pushbuild has helped immensely with the general quality of the tree, there’s a lot more that can be done…

4. Much more in depth …

An article in the Seattle Times was posted to MySQL's internal
business mailing list today:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003752014_brier18.html


"Within the next five hours we had another 30,000 users join and then we
started hitting the 10,000-users-an-hour pace, which was 10 times faster
than the first 10 hours," he said. "Then we realized we needed to start
rethinking things."


...


While the engineers rebuilt, the president and chief executive
"shucked" the
150 servers they rounded up - stripping boxes and hooking them up at the
data center.


Just to point this out, if they had built their technology around the
concept of deploying virtual servers, …

Not sure why you would want to but I've had several people ask me about VI emulation under Visual Studio.  Yes, Virginia, it exists.  Check it out here.  Will set you back $70 but if you really need it....

MySQL AB today announced that RightNow Technologies [NASDAQ: RNOW] uses its open source database to help provide customer relationship management (CRM) software solutions to large global enterprises. RightNow has more than 1,800 customers worldwide -- including large, well-known companies such as Black & Decker, Electronic Arts, Nikon and British Airways. The CRM vendor helps these organizations manage all of their customer interactions, enabling them to provide outstanding customer experiences while controlling costs. The RightNow solutions have received numerous awards and industry recognition from publications and research firms such as CRM Magazine, Forrester and Gartner Group.

I've posted a tarball of the latest skeleton engine for MySQL:
http://download.tangent.org/skeleton_engine-0.3.tar.gz

This is just a "skeleton" for an engine. A starting point for writing
or integrating your own engine. I've updated it to reflect the recent
removal of the byte type and have added Paul McCullagh's changes for
different system types.

This is a post I've been thinking about for nearly a week.  It started about the same time I downloaded Safari for Windows.  I've never used Mac OS X for any extended period of time but I've tried to study how they develop their features.  Coming from the Windows camp, I can tell you that neither Tiger nor Leopard really does much of anything that Vista doesn't do.  And I'm not the only one thinking this either.  However, that really is not the point.  It doesn't matter how advanced a piece of software is; it only matters that the software does what the user expects and be easy to use.  Both the designers and developers at Microsoft need to reread that last sentence again.  Want some examples?

1) Take a look at this post …

Note: My views are just that: mine and not employer's
MySQL's new series The 12 Days of Scale Out received some very positive criticism from Jeremy Cole and Kevin Burton. MySQL was very quick to act on the opportunity and launch a section primarily targeted towards CIOs, a move that I applaud.

I wish a certain division to be made in the training courses as well where I felt that quite a lot of time is spent on giving marketing messages rather than provide meaty training. Don't take me wrong, there is stuff to be learned however the content has a lot of room for improvement.

The other thing that kind of surprised …

I prefer to use Integers for joins whenever possible and today I worked with client which used character keys, in my opinion without a big need. I told them this is suboptimal but was challenged with rightful question about the difference. I did not know so I decided to benchmark.

The results below are for MySQL 5.1.18 using MyISAM and Innodb tables. This time unlike other benchmarks I decided to do Join not on primary key and have query to read data for both tables. If the query would be index covering I would expect us to see different ratio. The query I use here is constructed to stress out join code while avoid sending data to the client Do not try to find any good meaning for query or schema. For joins which fetch just few rows difference is likely to be less as the join code itself is likely to be responsible for less portion of response time.

OK. Lets start with first simple MyISAM table and join query performed on INT …