Its interesting to note some happenings in the MySQL world of late, that might be of interest to people in the database world, and those following open source software development and business models.

40% of developers say they use MySQL, according to the Evans Data Group. This is not including pilot projects, but real production use in corporate environments. A lot of MySQL’s popularity is generally attributed to the LAMP stack, though I see a change. Look at all the Ruby on Rails projects out there. They most definitely run on a MySQL backend. A good example are the products from 37signals, makers of the rather new, and cool tool, Highrise - they’re Ruby on Rails, and MySQL powered.

Is this 40% statistic …

After 29 years, InfoWorld is giving up it's print edition and going to a web-only publication model.  It's hard to believe it's been around that long.  I remember reading InfoWorld when I was in University back in the early 1980s.  Back then, the only way to know what was new in technology was through magazines like InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, PC Week, PC Magazine et al.  Over the years, InfoWorld has had some of the greatest writers and editorial staff in the industry.  And they were able to morph on occasion from tabloid to glossy magazine (and back) a couple of times, adding new columnists to focus on new techologies to stay current.  But it's been apparent for a while that InfoWorld's print edition was …

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
…