Big insider news on James Governor’s blog. If you don’t know who James Governor and Redmonk are, you should. They are giving the bigwigs (Gartner, IDC, Forrester et alia) a run for their money in technology analysis. Anyway, the news is this, and the details are very sketchy:
MySQL has signed a million euro deal The client is [...]
When I was in the UK last week, I read an article in the Sunday Times called The Good Manager. The article was a summary of management principles written 60 some years ago by WJ King in a book called "The Unwritten Laws of Business." The ideas are basic, but powerful. While it's unlikely that even the most gifted managers follow all the rules all of the time, they are good inspiration. Managing is not rocket science and just doing a good job on the basics can have a lot of impact. Rather than attempt to summarize the ideas, I encourage you to read the article in the Times.
I've been invited to speak at RIT-2007 which stands for "Russian Internet Technologies" conference. It takes place 16-17 April in Moscow, Russia. It looks like this is going to be biggest Russian conference on Internet technologies so far with many large Russian Internet projects sending their delegates. You can check out conference sessions schedule here.
Andrew Aksyonoff, the author of Sphinx Search Engine will also be giving a talk there.
The day following the conference April 18 I'm giving full day "Master Class"/Training on MySQL Performance.
Even though this post is in English the conference and training will be in Russian language
Andy Dustman just blogged referencing his previous posts on last years MySQL User Conference. This years is coming close (April 23-26) and the pressure to have all my presentations all perfect is mounting (err.. by the way, they will be).
Last year was a blast. Long days (and into the evenings) with sessions, BoFs, food and beer discussing all sorts of things that in some way related back to databases (and rather often, surprisingly enough, MySQL).
What was also great was being able to talk to lots of people who are doing real things out in the real world abotu MySQL Cluster and if it’s remotely suitable to their application. Often the answer can be “I think you’re looking for replication”, which is perfectly okay too.
I’m in a few days early (and around a few days after) - so if you’re around …
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Today I was asked about this bit of code that appears in some of
the examples MySQL has for engine designers:
memcpy(record, ptr, table->s->null_bytes);
What is exactly going on here?
Whenever we read a row, or write a row the method looks something
like this:
int ha_example::write_row(byte *record)
"record" is a byte array of data that makes up the row. The first
bytes of it store whether fields are null or not. Values for
columns are then stored in order after the null bytes. Most
engines never look at "record" directly, and instead use Field
objects to look at, or set the current record. To do this you
typically setup a for loop like so:
for (Field **field=table->field ; *field ; field++)
Field has both store and value functions that allow you to
manipulate the data. When storing a field you typically
call:
…
Just for reference, here are some previous posts I did for the
2005 MySQL User Conference:
Not that these are particularly awesome or anything, but there
are a few travels notes which may possibly be useful if you
decide to go this year, since it's in the same location.
If you have the time, and you are from outside The Valley, catch …
On Server and Storage Engines
Q from Alessandro: What about the filesystem for
MyISAM in a small company? Better ReiserFS or
EXT3?
As Anders said, it's a matter of taste. XFS is a good alternative
too. Ext3 is stable, but sometimes slow and a bit outdated. Many
like Reiser, but it is sometimes difficult to manage. XFS often
gives you good performance and reliability out of the box.
Q from Florian: MySQL 5.1 ==
Falcon?
Falcon is available for download today. The current version
refers to 5.2 and it's an alpha version. We may change plans, but
so far Falcon is related to version 5.2
Q from Henk: Will InnoDB ultimately be replaced by
Falcon?
No, it will not. Falcon is an alternative to InnoDB and willl be
especially excellent for online applications, but we will
continue to support InnoDB for many …
Today, FSF released the third GPLv3 draft on http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl3-dd3-guide . It’s great that the entire, complex process now has completed its next milestone, and I can fully understand why the FSF has seen it necessary to proceed at a pace somewhat slower than originally intended.
My thoughts go back well over a year to the Free Software Foundation’s first conference on GPLv3, at the end of January 2006. It was a great meeting, and as a Committee B member and representative of MySQL, I was asked by China Martens of IDG for my input. My reply “I think there was a good balance between different hair and beard lengths” ended up on China’s compilation “2006: The IT …
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Last august, I started wanting a new API for MySQL Cluster that
could solve a few problems. Frist, if you were to use MySQL
Cluster in a LAMP application, you would be turning a two-layer
architecture (Apache and MySQL) into three layers (Apache, MySQL,
and NDB). Adding that extra tier requires more hardware and means
slower response times. Second, the one way around this was to
write native NDB API code in C++, but learning the API and
developing low-level code can require a big commitment of time. I
wanted an easier way to eliminate the extra layer.
My solution is called mod_ndb, and it is an Apache module that
runs inside a web server and connects directly to the MySQL
Cluster data nodes. It supports a "RESTful" API -- applications
make GET, POST, and DELETE requests over HTTP, and mod_ndb
provides appropriate HTTP responses. Because it is HTTP,
responses can be cached by proxies in a well-defined way, and
data can be delivered …
Evans Data Group has recently released the results of their latest developer survey showing that MySQL usage is up by 25%. In fact, 40% of developers surveyed are using MySQL. According to Evans:
"In an increasing number of ratings categories, we're seeing open-source databases meeting or exceeding proprietary databases."
Evans indicated that MySQL was growing in popularity due to its adoption as part of the open source LAMP stack (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP). With more developers using open source (65% in North America) MySQL usage is expected to continue to grow in the future.