Know how to do C/C++ on Win32 and Linux/UNIX? In Melbourne? Want some contract work (we also have permanent positions that you may be suitable for) - email me your resume (in plain text) NOW!

Of course you’ve heard about the fabulous pybots project, where community members have a distributed network of computers continuously testing every change in the development version of python against the development version of many different python applications. This ensures that any compatibility problems are caught early, well before the next version of python is released.

I’ve just about finished getting storm, the newly open sourced python object-relational mapper that we are using with Launchpad and Landscape, added into the pybots test suite. Just need to finish reading through an 18MB test log to figure out what I did wrong in the test script for the psycopg2 installation, and we should be all set, with storm being tested against MySQL, Postgresql, and SQLite. Rumour has it that Firebird support is coming soon (perhaps even …

It will be Sunday, September 23rd at Taste from 1PM to 10PM. I’ll be there, along with the Ubuntu Florida team. Hopefully develpers from MySQL and Pentaho will go also! Possible topics I am considering speaking on include Bazaar, Launchpad, Ubuntu, MySQL, hiring and managing an international development team, how to evolve your database schema without going insane, and using bluetooth PAN networking with laptops. If you are going, what would be most interesting to you?

We’ll be doing a linux install-fest, so bring along your laptops and ubuntu CDs. I’ll also be able to answer questions on how to use Bazaar with a variety of different development workflows. We also need sponsors, so check out the website to learn more.

The great Internet is littered with some really useful MySQL-related articles, that I think you’ll enjoy reading just as much as I did.

• I’ve not given Google Gears too much of a look yet, but its definitely interesting and the tutorials at O’Reilly’s ONLamp site help one play with it: The Power of Google Gears (Part 1) and The Power of Google Gears (Part 2). Looks like the series is complete, and Part 2 concentrates on using Gears for offline data entry, then syncing it with a MySQL server once the application is online. Looks like the future of desktop software might end up being like this…
• While browsing a magazine store, I picked up the SysAdmin magazine that was months …

Kaj writes:We?re happy with the quality [of 5.1]

• More stable than 5.0 was four months after GA
• A better MySQL 5.0 (thousands of small fixes)

This would be because 5.0 was a complete disaster in terms of GA quality. Peruse bugs.mysql.com, it's all there. The number of open bugs around GA time, repeated API breakages (involving leaked symbols, inability to link against SSL, Postfix, and other apps/libraries), the number of (perhaps necessary but incompatible) behaviour changes in later updates, the number of regressions introduced by these may changes.

So, saying the current 5.1 quality is better than the 5.0 shambles is a) bogus and b) pure spin. Unworthy of a community rep. My opinion? Because all these things are public, a MySQL version can be considered stable when people …

Check out  this short demo of Management Console of MySQL backup 

tk

Today at OSCON, MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius and I presented the “State of the Dolphin” lightning talk.

My slides for this preso weren’t too graphic, which makes them all the easier to reuse in this blog:

Use our new software!

• Use MySQL 5.1, it?s soon going RC
• Use Falcon, it?s soon going Beta (new transactional storage engine, faster than InnoDB on large servers)
• Use MySQL Workbench (ER Tool), Now Beta
• Use MySQL Proxy, just released
• PHPers: Use mysqlnd (Native Driver)

Go test MySQL 5.1!

• We?re happy with the quality
  • More stable than 5.0 was four months after GA
  • RC happening very soon, GA within a few versions after that …

I had been wondering this lately, and so have been asking people: who are IBM's software customers? My company sells into a wide range of Global 2000 companies, but we almost never bump into IBM databases or application servers (or hardware, for that matter). I can count the number of times on two hands, yet we often run into Oracle, Microsoft, BEA Weblogic, even Sybase. Rarely IBM.

IBM is doing a ton of revenue in software sales. But to whom does it sell its software?

...

Is your MySQL server doing an extra index scan on queries that need to check a key for matches or NULL? It’s easy for this to happen accidentally, but it’s also easy to fix, especially in MySQL 5.0 and up. Here’s how. If you read the manual page for EXPLAIN, you’ll see the ref_or_null “join type” (I think “access type” is really a better term) mentioned. If you see this in EXPLAIN, it means MySQL has to search the index for matches, then search again for NULLs.

A good three months ago, I had the pleasure of being the referee for seven DB egos. Now, the match has appeared as a Dev Zone article:

One of the most popular keynotes of the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007 was called “The Clash of the DB Egos”. It was a fight amongst seven database luminaries, all playing an important role either within MySQL AB or as providers of Storage Engines that work closely with MySQL. This article attempts at giving a picture of what the fight was about, through reciting the egos and the questions posed to them by the referee.