By Allison Randal

In November of last year Microsoft and Novell announced a collaboration deal between the two companies. The exact terms of the deal haven't been released yet, so it's difficult to evaluate it in any substantial way. The two companies report that the deal involves some form of cooperative marketing, development in virtualization and interoperability, document format compatibility, and a patent agreement. It's that last item that has sparked all the controversy.

There's no question that the announcement could have been handled better. What is still an open question is whether the deal represents a threat to free software. We just won't know until we see the terms. (A recommendation for the future: releasing the full terms of the deal at …

MySQL Forge has been recently worked on. The Wiki got updated, there are some new extensions sitting around, and its “secure” as MediaWiki can get. The Forge itself has a nice little MySQL Conference & Expo banner, kudos to Lenz. Incidentally, register now, already. MediaWiki doesn’t have great banner support, so you’ve actually got to go in and hack on the PHP to display banners (MediaWiki:Sidebar itself, doesn’t support image loading! Then how do you link to an image?).

Been doing so much other stuff at MySQL recently, its a bit refershing to work on Forge. We’re safely off the 1.6 branch, and single sign on should be a goal next.

From the Google Summer of Code point of view, we’ve got a firmed up “wanting to …

On Saturday, 24th March ‘07, Open Source ?Unconference? was held at Mumbai, India.

It was great learning experience for everyone and a good event to network with MySQL users and developers in India. K. K. George, the project leader for open source Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL, gave a talk about MySQL backup and recovery. Zmanda Recovery Manager is Zmanda’s MySQL backup and recovery project that has become quite popular with MySQL administrators. It has scheduling, reporting and monitoring functionalities for MySQL databases. In addition, it can do incremental backups and can also parse the complex binary log files of MySQL dump. Remote MySQL server backup is also supported through SSH and socket options. There was lot of …

So, with a bunch of recent tests I added (and some bugs that have been fixed) we’re now consistently getting 203 or 204 passing tests. We’ve got typically around 8 or 9 that often fail - often because the test may be broken or not quite deterministic. Or there’s a bug… :)

(all numbers for the daily-basic list of tests for various 5.1 branches).

It would be great to hit 300 by this time next year… which means a lot of test cases… hrrm… anybody want to volunteer?

After much pain and suffering (One of the four noble truths!), trying to figure out how to get UnixODBC and various ODBC drivers to play nicely, I Have this to show:


mysql> show variables like 'port';
+---------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+---------------+-------+
| port | 3306 |
+---------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.06 sec)

mysql> create table mysqlodbc_test (id int(4), name varchar(32));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.05 sec)


And:


mysql> show variables like 'port';
+---------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+---------------+-------+
| port | 5555 |
+---------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> show storage engines;
…

I wrote an article late last week about benchmark results for the two table-synchronization algorithms I’ve been implementing for the MySQL Table Sync tool. I’ve spent some time developing a test suite for the tool, and learned some really interesting things about the general problem of synchronizing tables. Progress on MySQL Table Sync My test suite caught some great bugs, but not as many as I’d expected, which is a great feeling.

In the spirit of April 1st — only the other way around — I'd like to disperse a spoof I've been working on for quite a while now. Last autumn I began to tell people about a new, revolutionary database called "CouchDb".

I explained CouchDb’s advanced design and state-of-the-art feature set, leaving everyone with the impression that a lot of technical problems that exist within traditional database systems have been taken care of. For example, CouchDb’s on- and offline replication feature is the basis for a super-easy to implement load balancing and …

While I am spending my week in Japan, I will be heading back to the US in time for the MySQL User's Conference April 23rd->26th.

I'll be speaking on the following topics:

Tutorial: MySQL 5.1 In-depth
Session: Replication and Clustering for Web Technologies
Session: Understanding MySQL's Pluggable Engine API
Tutorial: Writing Your Own Storage Engine

On top of those, I will be doing a a number of BOF's related to extending MySQL's technology.

It should be a good time.

A prompt is worth a thousand characters:

mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN postgres SONAME 'libpostgres_engine.so';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)


mysql> create table april (a int , b varchar(100)) ENGINE=postgres;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> show engines;
+------------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------------+--------------+-----+------------+
| Engine | Support | Comment | Transactions | XA | Savepoints |
+------------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------------+--------------+-----+------------+
| ndbcluster | DISABLED | Clustered, fault-tolerant tables | YES | NO | NO |
| MRG_MYISAM | YES | Collection of identical MyISAM tables | NO | NO | NO |
| BLACKHOLE | YES | /dev/null storage engine (anything you write to it disappears) | NO | NO | NO |
| CSV …