Oracle owns the database world. And this may be precisely its biggest problem.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, customers aren't planning to snap up its newest version of its industry-leading database, 11g. The reason? Oracle is improving its database at a much slower pace, providing fewer reasons to upgrade:

[I]t typically takes at least several months for a company to fully shift to a new version of Oracle's database software -- the larger the company, the longer it takes -- and lately Oracle has made several small, incremental changes in new releases rather than a few large, important ones that would compel a company to switch quickly, customers say....

...highlighting maturation in the database industry. The Independent Oracle Users Group, an independent organization for …

I just downloaded the latest Google Maps for my Treo.

Awesome :)

Why is that? They have added two of the features I have most wanted.
When I go and look for a location, I can select addresses from my
contact database. Looking up friend's addresses on the map is now
just two clicks.

Better? When I find a business via Google Maps I can then select to
have a vCard created for the business (and Google even gives you the
phone number in the vCard). The application also gives me the option
to call the address as well.

So I can now find a business, and add it to my contacts database.

And for the hell of it, I entered "Cuppertino, California" and then
selected "MySQL" as a local business.

What did I get?

Not only the offices address and phone number, but the URL for the
company as well! …

Last time I was in Silicon Valley in April after MySQL Users Conference, this time I’m planning to spend July 30 - August 2nd in Silicon Valley after OSCON visiting friends and customers. If you’re located in Silicon Valley or San Francisco area and interested in some onsite MySQL Consulting I can offer 1 day and half day visits during these days with no added cost (meaning you just pay for consulting time, and Hotel and Travel is on me)

This time could be well spent to have mini-training on MySQL high performance design operations or development practices, to look into your application architecture and check it against growth requirements or simply look into performance challenges you might have.

Just a reminder that a new version of the 5.1 beta has been released, so please download the latest and greatest and keep submitting any bugs that you find. Also please shoot me a mail (rschumacher@mysql.com) and let me know how you’re using 5.1 and what features you find most useful. Thanks!

Hello,

Please help us determine the priorities for MySQL Replication in upcoming releases by taking a few minutes to fill out our comprehensive online survey!

http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB226PA9AV32W

We need your feedback on the following features:

- Event Checksums
- Table Checksums
- Group IDs (Global Transaction IDs)
- C/C++ API to Binlog
- Semi-Synchronous replication
- Multi-source replication
- Multi-threaded replication
- Replication Heartbeat
- Table/Database filtering on Master
- Time delayed replication
- Interleaved transactions in binlog
- Convert SHOW SLAVE HOSTS to a table
- Replication to and from tables with more or less columns
- Replication from old to new version ? new to old version
- Semi Synchronous Replication
- and more...

Thanks,
…

There is a song that keeps popping on my mind when I test something difficult. Usually, when I can't get the result I am seeking with normal operations, and I have to resort to some trick, I hear Joe Cocker singing With a little help from my friends. My best friends when I test are bash, vim, and perl.
Today, I was testing Falcon on my Intel based MacBook. The last Falcon release does not compile on Macs, but it has been recently patched, and today with my delight it built smoothly.
Having got the binaries, I ran the test suite, because that's the fastest way of finding out if something is broken. Soon enough, something nasty popped up. Test "falcon_bug_29040" failed with timeout. Thus, I …

MySQL AB today announced that popular UK dating site mysinglefriend.com has selected the MySQL database server for its fast-growing Web 2.0 site.

MySQL AB today announced a new series of 'MySQL Boot Camps', free one-day technical training classes for senior Oracle database administrators (DBAs) interested in expanding their professional skill-sets by learning advanced MySQL techniques. Qualifying attendees of the in-person classes will also receive a free copy of the 'MySQL Certification Study Guide' and a complimentary pass to sit for a pair of MySQL DBA Certification exams -- a $460 value.

I haven’t been blogging about the things I used to – how-tos and technical hacks – because I’ve been working quite hard on MySQL Toolkit and, believe it or not, innotop. I’ve made it possible to write innotop plugins, which have been very useful to our team at work, and I’m working on documentation. Plugins won’t make it into the upcoming release; it’ll just be bug fixes and documentation. These projects have taken up most of my free time.

This release fixes some bugs and improves the chunking functionality. MySQL Table Checksum had a few minor bugs and one major bug with the chunking functionality. I also rewrote the chunking, though the behavior is backwards compatible. I am very happy with the way it works now, and will probably not make any more incompatible changes to it. The changes enabled me to add support for chunking on float, double and decimal columns.