I blogged some months ago about an article written by Mr Puhakka on how to build a billion dollar business around open source software. Last Friday I attended Mr Puhakka’s presentation where he analyzed MySQL’s possibilities on becoming so (copied from his slides):

1. Find or create a great value proposition. The price vs. quality ratio of MySQL is in place or even superior as MySQL has this with its database offering costing a fraction of competing incumbents.
2. Find a quickly growing market. Rapidly growing markets tend to be much more forgiving of mistakes than …

This is a good read for anyone who has ever tried to pivot data from a table in MySQL using client side code like PHP when you can with some careful query construction do it in MySQL.
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Copyright 2006-2008 Andrew Rose [rose.andrew@gmail.com] [andrewrose.co.uk]

I’ve used OfflineIMAP for quite a while now. On the whole I’m fairly happy with it. Today I sent this to the list:

Forgive the potentially bad python, not my native tongue :)

This patch is motivated by three things:
- offlineimap is extremely slow at syncing lots of locally deleted
messages
- offlineimap uses lots of memory
- LocalStatus files aren’t written safely (a hard crash can cause
corruption)
        - I’ve been bitten by this in the past, causing a complete resync of
the folder… so I get duplicate messages.

I am currently using 4.0.14 (from Debian) with this patch. I used it to
convert the files and everything. Seems quite reliable and quick.

In my tests, execution time for a normal sync is relatively the same.

Execution …

Having taken a look at the 35 MySQL Summer of Code applications, I can now say that we have several very strong applications, such as:

• IPv6: Enabling MySQL to connect over IPv6 internet
• MySQL Based Atom Store (storing Google GDATA in MySQL)
• Test case development / Load testing
• Test suite development
• MySQL Auditing Software
• The “anti-profiler” - a performance analysis tool for database engines

For several of the above, we have multiple good applications. The applicants come from recognised universities across the world, not just the US and Europe. Some have extensive experience from professional software development. Sadly, we will end up having to reject several …

That's right! Today, 2 years ago, I started my job as Support Engineer at MySQL! Ups, and downs along the way, but hey, what love relation doesn't have that! Great Company!

To celebrate it I was given the opportunity today to give an online web presentation about MySQL Performance Tuning Best Practices. I'm used to give such seminars, getting better each time. But with this one, there were 2 problems: I was nervous because I couldn't see the people, and second: it was in Dutch! Although my mother tongue, I don't talk it everyday. And surely no technical terms. I put some German words in there as well I think, hehe..

That's right! Today, 2 years ago, I started my job as Support Engineer at MySQL! Ups, and downs along the way, but hey, what love relation doesn't have that! Great Company!

To celebrate it I was given the opportunity today to give an online web presentation about MySQL Performance Tuning Best Practices. I'm used to give such seminars, getting better each time. But with this one, there were 2 problems: I was nervous because I couldn't see the people, and second: it was in Dutch! Although my mother tongue, I don't talk it everyday. And surely no technical terms. I put some German words in there as well I think, hehe..

I just filed a bug regarding slow queries executed by replication thread are not being logged to the slow query log.

This is not a big deal but it is ugly little gotcha which I think few people know about. It is especially bad if you're using tools to analyze slow query log to find what queries take up the most resources on your server - in certain configurations replication load itself may be very significant contributor.

But even if you do not, as I wrote in the bug report it is quite handy to have this information our where as query times on master and slave can be different in a lot of circumstances.

One more thing to consider - slow replication queries also identify replication lag, ie if you have query which ran 10 seconds on the slave and …

In a heavily webbed, automated, interconnected world with most data stored on relational databases, we can sometimes forget that there are indeed many situation where you simply want to FTP a file from one place to another.

That process in itself holds many dangers as I pointed out to someone on the forum today.  Let me re-cap that post here on the blog…

Suppose your files are coming in using FTP to a local directory.

A file is being written, let’s call it FILE_20070328.txt.
Now, in advance you don’t know the size of that file. Let’s say it’s 10MB and takes 30 seconds to FTP.
In your transformation you detect this file and start working. Chances are very high that you’ll be reading an incomplete file.  (See also this technical tip on variables and file handling)

There are 2 ways to …

Thanks to a gift from MySQL AB, I'll be attending the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007. I presented at the 2005 conference, and found the conference itself to be pretty educational. Plus the food is generally pretty good at the O'Reilly conferences. Of course the real reason people to conferences is for the swag. Now this year's PyCon had some pretty good swag; I got at least six free T-shirts and two Rubik's cubes. So top that.

mysql doesn?t have quite the number of fancy internal applications that you might suspect, and i got frustrated when the company started to roll out a system of monthly time-off reports based on emailing around an excel spreadsheet. (to add icing to that cake, they kept sending out the excel sheet with password protection!)

last friday, i spent an afternoon cooking up this little proof-of-concept application that tracked the same information as the spreadsheet, but in tasty web format, with some ajax goodness (courtesy of prototype).

as it turns out, there was an official company tool for doing this that was in the works, but they hadn?t bothered to let anyone know it was imminent. i?m told it is …