By Tim O'Reilly

Paul Tuckfield of YouTube has just joined the keynote lineup at the MySQL User Conference, which will be held April 23-26 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Paul will be talking about Scaling MySQL at YouTube. Every web 2.0 company is ultimately a database company. Some roll their own, a few, a very few, use proprietary commercial databases. Most are running on MySQL. Given the rapid scaling that YouTube has enjoyed, I'm sure Paul will have a lot of useful advice for other up-and-coming sites. Paul's keynote is part of a general focus on scalability at the conference -- there's an entire track on performance tuning and benchmarks, and another on …

As I write this blog I have over 90 draft blog posts. That’s 9-0. Why do I have so many posts? The main reason is I want to say something, and I’ve either not completed it, or researched it sufficiently to consider the entry complete.

This frustrates me as sometimes I just want to get the word out on something, or of my opinion, or of something great I’ve discovered. I do it for me, I don’t really care if anybody actually reads my stuff, but I’m surprised sometimes when I get comments how people actually get to see my blog.

JotThat is a surprisingly simple yet brilliant idea. It’s quite simply a site for making Jots, making quick notes, making a passing comment, noting a thought, something you want to either remember or something you want to say in a simple Jot form.

What makes JotThat in my eyes? Well it’s simple, …

I was out at lunch with some clients and started discussing properties of database systems and the idea of MySQL not having stored procedures popped up its ugly head again. I explained it did have stored procedures as from 5.0 version, but started a heated debate about whether they were actually of any use any more? Why was there a debate over this issue, I simply said, they are no longer important as they once were.

I put forward the question as to why stored procedures were used and after discussion everyone came to the opinion that they are used primarily for two purposes:

1. A data-level API interface.
2. For encapsulating and abstracting larger, multiple queries or transactions, thus keeping the load on the server, rather than on the network.

Everyone agreed that the second option was still valid, although seemed to be less required now, it was the idea of using stored procedures to maintain an API interface …

I was out at lunch with some clients and started discussing properties of database systems and the idea of MySQL not having stored procedures popped up its ugly head again. I explained it did have stored procedures as from 5.0 version, but started a heated debate about whether they were actually of any use any more? Why was there a debate over this issue, I simply said, they are no longer important as they once were.

I put forward the question as to why stored procedures were used and after discussion everyone came to the opinion that they are used primarily for two purposes:

1. A data-level API interface.
2. For encapsulating and abstracting larger, multiple queries or transactions, thus keeping the load on the server, rather than on the network.

Everyone agreed that the second option was still valid, although seemed to be less required now, it was the idea of using stored procedures to maintain an API interface …

I was out at lunch with some clients and started discussing properties of database systems and the idea of MySQL not having stored procedures popped up its ugly head again. I explained it did have stored procedures as from 5.0 version, but started a heated debate about whether they were actually of any use any more? Why was there a debate over this issue, I simply said, they are no longer important as they once were.

I put forward the question as to why stored procedures were used and after discussion everyone came to the opinion that they are used primarily for two purposes:

1. A data-level API interface.
2. For encapsulating and abstracting larger, multiple queries or transactions, thus keeping the load on the server, rather than on the network.

Everyone agreed that the second option was still valid, although seemed to be less required now, it was the idea of using stored procedures to maintain an API interface …

I was out at lunch with some clients and started discussing properties of database systems and the idea of MySQL not having stored procedures popped up its ugly head again. I explained it did have stored procedures as from 5.0 version, but started a heated debate about whether they were actually of any use any more? Why was there a debate over this issue, I simply said, they are no longer important as they once were.

I put forward the question as to why stored procedures were used and after discussion everyone came to the opinion that they are used primarily for two purposes:

1. A data-level API interface.
2. For encapsulating and abstracting larger, multiple queries or transactions, thus keeping the load on the server, rather than on the network.

Everyone agreed that the second option was still valid, although seemed to be less required now, it was the idea of using stored procedures to maintain an API interface …

Technocation is proud to announce its first grant to help further the goals of IT professionals. We have helped Proven Scaling’s “Free Ride” to give three people all-expense paid trips to the MySQL conference happening at the end of April. We are proud to have been able to grant Proven Scaling $300 to help, and we hope this is the first of many monetary grants we will give.

Congratulations to the Free Ride winners:
Jan Lehnardt, a student from Münster, Germany; J.R. Bullington, from a non-profit in Sterling Heights, Michigan, USA; and Carlos Proal Aguilar, from a non-profit in Puebla, Mexico. For more details on the contest winners, see Proven Scaling’s announcement at http://jcole.us/blog/archives/2007/03/31/mysql-conference-expo-free-ride-winners/

This grant was made possible by everyone who donated to …

I’ve been preparing for my innotop session at the upcoming MySQL conference, and enlisted Giuseppe Maxia’s MySQL Sandbox to help me get a bunch of MySQL servers, from 3.23.58 to 5.2.3, running on one machine. It was super-easy and has helped me find some bugs in innotop. I should have done this a long time ago. To get started, I just read through Giuseppe’s Sandbox article on O’Reilly Databases Blog. After reading this, I downloaded the scripts and a bunch of binary distributions of MySQL (I’m using Ubuntu).

After reading about the new Firebird 2.1 alpha I was eager to test it, and here are some sample queries that show how the new features look like, all examples are based on the standard EMPLOYEE.FDB.
The first one is about the MERGE statement, which is useful in many ways (my favourite is synching tables).

1. MERGE
2. INTO country c
3. USING (
4. SELECT * FROM country
5. UNION ALL
6. SELECT 'Maroc' country, 'Dirham' currency FROM rdb$database
7. ) cd
8. ON (c.country = cd.country)
9. WHEN MATCHED THEN
10. UPDATE SET
11. country = …

A frequently asked question about MySQL replication is "how do I know whether my slave is identical to the master?" Until recently there hasn't been a good way to know, but now you can compare all the data in your master to the data in the slaves and get a reliable yes-or-no answer. And you can do this online, efficiently, across many servers simultaneously. Read on to find out how.