It couldn't happen to a better set of people. As BusinessWeek reports, MySQL is well on its way to an IPO. The interesting thing is what it's doing to get there:

...[C]an MySQL keep up the growth without adding hefty sales and marketing costs?and getting squeezed by competitors? The company employs just 30 field sales staff out of a head count of 360 and strives to close deals more quickly than rivals. Most employees work from home. "Managing the cost of sales and marketing in an open-source company is the key to profitability," says Mickos, sitting in a small, spartan office adjacent to a sea of cubes in the company's Silicon Valley digs. "We're not just innovating in software, we're innovating in sales."

Open source, leaving the cave to …

Mysql 5 introduces some nice features, like triggers and stored procedures, which can be very usefull if the clients are not written in the same language.
However, as soon as you get some read load on the mysqld or need to connect from different locations, like USA, France, Germany, replication gets important.

So I´ve tried to setup a simple replication. 1 Master and multiple Slaves. This is more than 8 month ago.
But everytime another bug makes it impossible.
User defined variables aren´t replicated a long time. If one of your procedures/ triggers depend on them, replication breaks.
INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE is also still broken in the most recent enterprise-version. With every release, another problem occurs.
"after update"-trigger got not executed, the query failed if the update-clause was "modifying" a unique key to the same value or innodb assigned another auto_increment value on the …

Jan Kneschke has released a new tool called "MySQL Proxy".
This proxy is between the mysqld and the client and can handle load balancing, fail over, query rewriting and analysis.
It´s also possible to extend the proxy with LUA scripting which opens nice possibilities.
I´m thinking about adding Memcache-Support. But perhaps its better up to the application to decide, if the cache should be used or not.
At least it should be possible to implement load balancing/ failover in an easy way for a slave-farm.

BusinessWeek asks: How much is MySQL worth? MySQL, a fast-growing maker of database software used by some of the Internet's most recognized brands, is preparing to file for an initial public offering, perhaps as soon as late 2007. The offering could value the company at between $600 million and $1 billion, according to sources, and inject some pep into a tech IPO market that's seen only a handful of successful offerings in the past year.... READ MORE

Version 1.2 of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL, a robust and intelligent solution for backup and recovery of MySQL databases is available at Zmanda downloads page.

Changes in this release:

• Code restructured into modules
• Snapshot plugin interface. LVM snapshots implemented as a plugin.
• ZRM should be run as user belonging to mysql group.
• Numerous bug fixes

Documentation is available at ZRM for MySQL wiki. Ask questions and provide feedback in Zmanda forums.

One may think one may use MySQL Slow query log to log all slow queries to catch problematic queries or for audit purposes. In fact however not all the queries are logged. I already mentioned mysql slave queries are not logged to slow query log and it looks like I was wrong connecting it just with replication.

In reality it is not the fact the thread is replication thread causes queries to be omitted from slow query log but the fact thread uses SET TIMESTAMP functionality. If you do this within normal connection result would be the same.

Why is this happening ? I guess it happens because of the way the code is structured. During query start current timestamp is stored to special value which will be used for the query execution by all NOW() calls internal timestamp assignments etc. At certain point …

So, a number of folks wanted more meaty content than was being offered in the CIO-targeted MySQL marketing campaign recently, "The Twelve Days of MySQL Scale-Out". I wanted to write a blog entry which addressed this carnivorous appetite of the MySQL community by going into a discussion on what precisely this term "scale-out" means.

Comparisons of Scaling Out versus Scaling Up

What is scaling anyway? Simply put, it's the ability of an application to address growth in throughput, usage, and capacity. Both scale out and scale up strategies address the ability of a system to address this growth. I think there is a …

It has gotten a bit quiet around the MySQL Proxy over the last weeks, but I can assure you it was worth it.

Here in my hands I hold MySQL Proxy 0.5.0. Not just some binaries, no everything with sources. As always it is dual licensed under the GPL and commercial MySQL license. We worked hard to get everything ready for the release: the wiki, the forums, the public SVN trees ...

The proxy can do magic. Put in your ideas and say the magic words and there ... it works. :)

The proxy is fully scripted now which opens up the proxy to your ideas. The possibilities are endless. I can think of at least of the following features:

• load balancing
• fail over handling
• query analysis
• SQL macros
• query rewriting
• .... much more

The proxy started as side project of me and is now evolved into a full MySQL project maintained by the …

For the curious, the slides for the eLiberatica 2007 presentations are now up at http://eliberatica.ro/2007/ - the slides include presentations from eZ CEO Aleksander Farstad, Brian Behlendorf, FSF Europe President Georg Greve, Ubuntist Kurt von Finck and MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius (and yours truly, but the slides are a bit weak - check out my …

So, now I am working on this project. This project is a part of google SoC. I believe in the end it should be something like mysql workbench, but web-two-zerofied. At current moment there is not much to look into (http://myweber.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/). But I will be very grateful to you for any comments, questions and suggestions.