About a week ago Marten send me email pointing to his article published on Jays Blog (Come on Marten, it is time for you to get your own blog). I should have replied much earlier but only found time to do that now. So here is my list

1. Be Pluggable

Unlike many OpenSource projects MySQL was single chunk of code and for years the only way you could officially extend it was using UDFs which was very limited. Compare this with other OpenSource projects such as PostgreSQL (plugable indexes etc), Apache, PHP or Linux Kernel. Yes in MySQL 5.1 the situation is changes - now there are plugable storage engines (something even PostgreSQL does not have) as well as Full Text Search parses but there is very long way to go before you could do any significant functionality ourside of storage engines as …

We congratulate the Free Software Foundation on the release of GPLv3 and offer our thanks to the many individuals in the open source community who participated in the process of drafting the license.

It’s good to see overall improvements in GPLv3 over GPLv2, when it comes to compatibility with other Free/Open Source Software licenses, to the compatibility with other legislations than the US legal system, and to strengthened incompatibility with Software Patents. I am also happy if the work of the Committee B ends up contributing to a better adoption of GPLv3. I am in awe as to the patience and skillful diplomacy with which Eben Moglen could tame the group consisting of everything from techies from comparatively small companies (like Trolltech and ourselves) to the seniormost lawyers from the biggest Fortune 500 companies.

MySQL will continue to monitor the industry’s reaction and adoption of the new license, …

We spent a lot of time this month trying to fix Bug#21074 "Large query_cache freezes mysql server sporadically under heavy load".

In a nutshell, invalidation of a table can be dead slow (seconds) when there are tens of thousands of cached queries associated with this table, and, moreover, invalidation
freezes the entire server when it happens.
It's so funny, this thing happens under two singleton mutexes (one instance of the mutex exists in the entire server) both of which are required for every single query that the server gets.

Invalidation is indeed somewhat slow, but making it a bit faster will only shift the threshold when the query cache becomes unusable from tens of thousands of cached results, to, say, hundreds of thousands. So we thought it'll only change the depth of the hole in which people will discover they've shoot themselves in the foot.
Besides, any change of that sort requires quite …

There has been a trend in the blogs for top5 MySQL wishes.
Many people, including Ronald Bradford, Alan Kasindorf, Jim Winstead, Jonathon Coombes, Jeremy Cole, Jay Pipes, Antony Curtis, Stewart Smith coined in.

Here're my 5:

…

Matthew Aslett is highlighting four open source startups to watch: Aptar, GravityZoo, Loopfuse, and Untangle. I've talked about Loopfuse and Untangle before, but Aptar and GravityZoo are news to me.

That's one of the great things about the commercial open source ecosystem right now. People can complain that there aren't enough (public) examples of success yet, but one of the great examples of general commercial open source success is that there are so many new companies getting funded and/or getting traction. This is a vibrant, growing ecosystem.

Growing in breadth, but also growing in depth. My employer, Alfresco, reported strong momentum in our last quarter (we basically double every …

My blog is blocked to those who have a livejournal account. I set it
up this way years ago because I hate dealing with comment bots that
generate SPAM. This means I get a lot of back channel comments on my
posts (aka email, IM, IRC) that you never actually see on the
site... I don't normally post them but this one from email was pretty
interesting:


The challenging design issues about queuing are about locking and
indexing, not about the API. The API to look at queues and message
should be SQL (so you can use SQL to access the message properties,
the message history, and the payload or do auditing and tracking),
but the API to modify the queue must be something else to preserve
the integrity of the queue.

Oracle Streams AQ does not support data manipulation language (DML)
operations on a queue table or an associated …

With all the discussion going on about MySQL Proxy, we may forget that there are alternatives.
Today in the MySQL Dev Zone there is an article about a different proxy. It's more than that, actually. It is a Perl Module implementing the MySQL client/server protocol.
With this tool, you can emulate some of MySQL Proxy features, and you can do something more. For example, you can use Federated tables with non-MySQL database servers. The article features an example where a table from SQLite and a table from PostgreSQL are queried as if they were normal MySQL tables.

The Chinese Academy of Electronics and Information Technology (CAEIT), one of the largest national institutes in China, has selected MySQL Cluster as its database platform for data gathering and analysis.

I was playing with the 5 sample tutorial Lua scripts available here with the MySQL Proxy, but I was doing something a little inefficiently.

I started mysqld, then I started the MySQL Proxy with the lua script, then connected to MySQL via the proxy. To test a different script I was actually killing the MySQL Proxy and restarting with appropriate script, but this is unnecessary. MySQL Proxy will re-read the lua script, as specified with –proxy-lua-script on new connection. All I need to do is copy in the file in question and get a new mysql client connection.

The tech version of the right way:

$ cp tutorial-basic.lua running.lua
$ ./mysql-proxy --proxy-lua-script=running.lua &
$ mysql -uusr -p -P4040 -h127.0.0.1
mysql> # do my stuff
mysql> exit;
$ cp …

A week or so ago I mentioned that I'd be running an "Open Source @" series of posts, and try to capture the work that various large enterprises are doing with open source. Being large enterprises, it has taken a bit longer to collect these than I would have liked, but we now have a critical mass and can move forward.

Today we're profiling Oracle. I have been harshly critical of Oracle in the past, and yet I continue to hold the company in high esteem. Oracle is one of the few winners in the proprietary "battle of the ecosystems." I do business with a wide range of Global 2000 businesses, and I see Oracle all over. I can't say the same of several of Oracle's competitors.

I asked Mike …