Welcome everybody!

Today we have presented the first webinar of the series.
Let me remind you the dates for the all the sessions:

• 27th March: Part 1 - High Availability and Scalability Architectures
  
• 19th April: Part 2 - Advanced Scalability Solutions
  
• 2nd May: Part 3 - MySQL Enterprise To Control Mission Critical Online Services
  
• 23rd May: Part 4 - 99.999% High Availability solutions
  
• 13th June: Part 5 - MySQL Enterprise performance and benchmarking
  
• 27th June: Part 6 - Advanced HA solutions
  

Thanks to all of you who showed up!

-ivan

Today, the time closed to apply for student positions at MySQL Summer of Code. We are very fortunate and thankful to have got 35 applicants fulfilling the formal requirements of an application fully entered and coupled with a task announced on http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/SummerOfCode — thank you!

Our next task is to narrow this group down to the number of projects which can actually start. This will be a much smaller number. Even in the theoretical case that Google would allow us to have 35 projects (and they won’t), we don’t have the internal mentoring resources to guide that many Summer of Code projects.

Colin Charles has already been quite busy replying to the incoming flood of applications, insisting on them being more specific than “I’m in, just …

… is how to get the last day of current quarter.

CREATE FUNCTION last_quarter_date (thedate DATETIME) RETURNS DATE
RETURN last_day(CONCAT(YEAR(thedate) , ‘-’, QUARTER(thedate)*3, ‘-01′));

And I can not find other solutions. It is interesting if it is the only way.

Okay, so one of the disks in a JBOD (well… single LVM) has been on the way out (hopefully can recover some stuff off it… there’s nothing completely important… but still).

I’ve now learnt and desktop has three new 320GB drives in a RAID5.

Currently installing Ubuntu 7.04 on it. I do have to say that the alternate install disk (which uses debian-installer) has a REALLY nice RAID and LVM setup now. If only it also let you pass parameters to mkfs it would be ideal.

Update: It got the bootloader horribly wrong though and I’ve gotten to piss-fart around trying to get LILO to install and boot. Current result? Blinking cursor in top left of screen. Fantastic… fucking fantastic.

OSBC producer InfoWorld to end print publication. Compiere surpasses 1.2 million downloads. Coupa launches open source eProcurement. (and more)

InfoWorld to Focus Exclusively on Online and Events, IDG (Press Release)

Compiere Surpasses Key Milestone with 1.2 Million Downloads, Compiere (Press Release)

Coupa Launches First and Only Freely Downloadable E-Procurement Solution, Coupa Software (Press Release)

Collax Updates Its Entire Product Family, Collax (Press Release)

Codenomicon launches program to …

I received an invitation in my email today for an upcoming CIO-only MySQL webinar. I thought it was interesting because of the audience for MySQL (not to mention the fact that MySQL is clearly cutting into my OSBC territory :-).

Open source is proven in the enterprise. Many of the world's largest organizations, including Yahoo!, Sabre Holdings, Cox Communications, The Associated Press, Google, Nokia, and Nortel, are realizing significant cost savings by using open source products to power web sites, business-critical enterprise applications and packaged software.

But, it’s not just the largest enterprise companies that are implementing open source. Many companies are evaluating an open source stack as an alternative or complement to proprietary solutions from companies like Microsoft, …

The MySQL proxy got some final touches to make it ready for the first release:

• a command-line interface
• some more mode descriptions for the different modes of operation

You can choose between three modes for now:

• pseudo server
• injection proxy

• replication client

For the future we plan:

• connection pooling

• replication filtering and off-loading

The options so far:

$ mysql-proxy --help
  --listen-port=<port>                  port the pseudo mysql-server should listen on in server-mode (default: 4040)
  --server-port=<port>                  port of the remote mysql-server in proxy- and reverse-mode (default: 3306)
  --server-ip=<ip>                      ip-address of the remote mysql-server in proxy- and reverse-mode (default: 127.0.0.1) …

One of the projects I am looking at right now is performance on eight
proc (2 proc/4core) machines that Intel is providing.

An interesting situation I've noticed is the behavior in Innodb in
regards to Innodb and primary key INSERTS. From observing behavior
with GUID vs Autoincrement, Innodb runs into issues around ~75
concurrent acting connections (aka not idle). GUID size aside, using
a different key then an Autoincrement seems to help with scaling
Innodb on multiple CPU's (looking at this with a 4proc machine shows
that this issue show up at a later scaling point).

None of the other MySQL/3rd party engines behaved this way in
testing, so it looks to be a localized problem in Innodb. Blackhole
just gives you a base cost for an INSERT statement with no disk IO.

The test used 100K of rows and inserted them by splitting them across
…

Oh, MySQL. That little database that just isn't quite as good as the Big Important Proprietary Incumbents....

Except that, apparently, enterprises aren't getting this message. In fact, 40% of them strongly disagree with the feeling above, as Stephen Shankland reports:

You now can discard any lingering traces of doubt that the open-source MySQL database competes with the incumbent proprietary products from Oracle, Microsoft and IBM.

Data released Thursday from an Evans Data Group survey of database usage among developers shows MySQL use increased from 32 percent in 2004 to 40 percent last year. The survey tallied real production use in corporate environments, not just tire-kicking or pilot projects

Reality bites if you're DB2 or Oracle. Because while I would think much of MySQL's gains are coming at the expense of no one (meaning, MySQL is …

Working with various projects using MySQL I observe a lot of problems are coming from very simple fact - product is designed containing features which developers do not know how to implement effectively.

In many companies you would see "waterfall" like approach for web application development at least on business-development boundary. Business people would dream up some features for developers to implement which developers simply take and implement as good as they can - unfortunately often not good enough to match performance and scalability requirements for the application.

In the end such approach may have nasty surprises - application gets serve performance problems due to features which might be not critical after all and even Business people would rather make things running fast than having these features working exactly as required.

So what is my point ? Only plan for features which you know how to …