I was reading the latest issue of Mac|Life tonight (I liked it better as Mac Addict, by the way), and it struck me how dependent Apple is on Microsoft. For all the cool things that come with Mac hardware and OS X, a large swath of the Mac user population would be crippled or wiped out if Microsoft decided to stop supporting Office for Mac.

The Mac faithful (of which I am part) won't like to hear this, but it's true. OpenOffice is an excellent program (It actually is now--three years ago it was rubbish), but many of us simply couldn't use it "in production." Sure, I could run Office for Windows in Parallels' coherence mode (and almost certainly would), but that's an unnecessarily roundabout way of solving something best done directly.

This is a …

I am planning (and possibly Eric as well) on going to the MySQL Developer’s Meeting in Heidelberg, Germany during the week of September 17th. If you’re in Europe somewhere (in Germany, even better) and are interested in on-site consulting from Proven Scaling in mid September, let me know!

I may also be attending the MySQL Users Conference in Tokyo September 11-12, so if you’re in Japan (or near) and want MySQL consulting on-site in early or mid-September, also do let me know!

Our exprience in solving query optimizer problems shows that a good chunk of optimization problems are incorrect choice of join order. The most frequent causes of the problems are

1. Table engine returns index statistics or records-in-range numbers that are very far from reality;
2. The WHERE clause has high-selectivity conditions for one table and low-selectivity conditions for the other. The optimizer is not aware of this and chooses a poor join order;
3. Bugs or shortcomings in the optimizer or the table engine;

At the moment investigation of those kinds of problems is hard and time-consuming:

• There is no easy way to find out what the storage engine has returned to the optimizer from records-in-range calls. One has to manually repeat the steps taken by equality propagation, constant table detection and other query rewrites, construct the table's condition and run the …

MySQL developes a new driver for PHP, called php-mysqlnd.
This driver is a replacement for libmysql, but offers some new features too.

The result-object now has the method "fetch_all", which (as the name says) returns an array containing all result set rows. This method is much faster than calling fetch_assoc in a loop.
Unfortunately it´s not possible to specify a column that should be used for the array index.
Would be great if something like this is possible:

$res        =       $mysqli->query("SELECT customer_id, last_name FROM customers");
$data       =       $res->fetch_all("customer_id");
print_r($data);

Array
(
    [123] => Array
        (
            [customer_id] => 123
            [last_name] => foo
        )

    [124] => Array
        (
            [customer_id] => 124
            [last_name] …

Coming to OSCON at the end of the month?

If so, I’d be happy to see you on Thursday 26 July 2007 5:20pm - 6:05pm in F150, where I will be talking about The MySQL Architecture of Participation.

Quoting from the O’Reilly session page:

While MySQL has been FOSS from the start and GPL since 2000, the development process at MySQL has been fairly concentrated around the company itself. One of the corporate goals for 2007 is to open up our entire development model:

• ensuring that our already-opened tools are open enough (our bugs system at bugs.mysql.com, and our source control system with BitKeeper)
…

I have been excited about the MySQL native drive (mysqlnd) since I first heard about it.  They are looking for testers now.  The sites I could test on are not really that high traffic.  So, not sure I would be much help to them.

I am not sure how I feel about this bit of news in that post:

“While mysqlnd was originally designed for PHP 6, Andrey Hristov has now finished the backport of mysqlnd to PHP 5 and added support for ext/mysql.“

On one hand, it means I can play with it sooner.  But, on the other, it gives slackers another reason not to upgrade to PHP6 and mysqli.  Its a shame.  I really like mysqli.  I would really like to see an end of life for ext/mysql.  But, this just keeps it going.  Even more scary is this line:

“Given that 60 % of the PHP user base is still on PHP 4, …

I was just taking a look at the Amazon S3 patent mentioned on Slashdot.

I am pretty sure I have prior art on this. Take a look at this project I published back in 2000, though it was written in 1998 on Freshmeat:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/mod_repository/

It implements a REST interface, with Triggers that are used to create replicated servers of itself. It had a large deployment at SCO (yeah, chuckle...) and MySQL back as early as 2001. MySQL used it as the object store behind its Worklog system (and I …

As noted already in March, we have decided to open up the MySQL Developer Meeting for selected members of the MySQL User Community, i.e. for MySQL users who have a need of interacting with our developers. In Sorrento 2006, Prag 2005 or Malta 2004, we had similar developer meetings — but the external representation amounted to one (1) customer presentation.

In Heidelberg (one bus shuttle hour from Frankfurt airport), we’ll do things differently.

Some key points:

1. Community Days are concentrated to Thursday 20.9.2007 and Friday 21.9.2007: While we have very few sessions closed for the community even on the other days (Wed 21.9, Sat 22.9, Mon 24.9), our scheduling started from the insight that few community members can afford to stay for too many days. So meetings that are of most relevance for Community generally …

MySQL welcomes external verification by high-volume LAMP websites of the performance improvements gained by replacing libmysql with mysqlnd.

To recap some basics from the mysqlnd download page at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php-mysqlnd/:

The MySQL native driver for PHP is an additional, alternative way to connect from PHP 5 and PHP 6 to the MySQL Server 4.1 or newer. It is a replacement for the libmysql, the MySQL Client Library. From now on you can use ext/mysqli either together with libmysql as you did in the past or with mysqlnd.

We have no plans to remove libmysql support from ext/mysqli, which would break existing applications. We just add …

Some have pointed out that the 12 Days of Scaleout campaign is a “cheap marketing tactic.”

Why, yes. It’s inexpensive as far as campaigns go. It’s definitely marketing. The grumbling seemed to be that there was no content on how the scaleout happened and worked for these companies.

We have to remember that not everyone is a geek. While we already know and love MySQL, there are people out there who only vaguely understand what a “database” is, much less have even heard of MySQL. Many laypeople I talk to haven’t heard of Oracle!

MySQL needs this kind of marketing. Perhaps it better belongs as an advertisement in a glossy magazine, but I see no problem with MySQL using what they own — lists, forums, PlanetMySQL, its own web page — to do cheap marketing. In fact, “cheap marketing” is one of the main reasons …