MySQL replication is cool. Almost everyone, when asked what they like best about MySQL, will mention replication. There can be no doubt that many web companies, Yahoo included, owes much to MySQL replication. How else can you scale the reading capacity of your database so easily?

It's not all rosy, replication has its problems too. It's very simplistic (I like the term brittle, if any errors happen when executing the SQL, it just stops), it can be inefficient in some places (think UPDATE that does a table scan to change one value, though 5.1 starts to address this with row-based replication), and it is single-threaded.

Single Threadedness
Let me stop here for a second. A lot of people spend good money on a nice Master DB, …

Shortly before MySQL Users Conference I announced that I would be cover new ground in table logs management.
I am keeping that promise, and in addition I am also showing some related hacks.

The announced facts from last year usability report were that you can't change log tables at will, as you can do with log files, and you can't change the log table engine to FEDERATED. Both claims, as it turned out, were incorrect. You can do such things, albeit not in a straightforward manner. As a bonus side effect, you can also:

• add triggers to log tables;
• filter log tables depending on user defined criteria, such as query type, user database, or time;
• centralize logs from several servers.
  …

Sun advances OpenJDK with new code and governance board. Dell joins the Microsoft/Novell collaboration effort. GroundWork releases new version with SOA development framework. (and more)

Note: Due to an international flight and limited Internet access in transit, there was no 451 CAOS Links on Monday 05/07/07.

Sun Fulfills Promise of Open and Free Java Technology and Releases Java SE Platform to OpenJDK Community, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Dell Joins Microsoft and Novell Collaboration, Microsoft / Novell / Dell (Press Release)

Sun To Develop New Communications Application Server Through Open Source GlassFish …

I just went through the attendee list for the Open Source Business Conference and loved what I saw. For the first time, OSBC is truly drawing a deep bench of IT buyers. It's something that we have strived for since the first show (well, the second, since the first show was intended to be a vendor strategy event), and which has finally happened. We have CIOs/VPs/Directors from the following companies (and I won't even bother to go into all the CXOs/VPs we have from Red Hat, MySQL, Alfresco, Microsoft, MuleSource, JasperSoft, SugarCRM, OpenBravo, Loopfuse, Zmanda, XenSource, etc. etc. - this... READ MORE

And again we're on our mission to keep XAMPP up-to-date and put the first beta version of the upcoming XAMPP release in our public beta download area.

In this beta we updated both PHP versions (to 4.4.7 and 5.2.2) and phpMyAdmin (to 2.10.1). In the Windows beta we also fixed the security vulnerability published April 28th.

Get the downloads at XAMPP BETA.

XAMPP beta versions are always for testing purposes only. There will be no upgrade packages from and to beta versions. To all testers: Many thanks in advance!!

Update, May, 10th 2007: The Linux beta now also contains the newly released MySQL 5.0.41. Windows beta follows asap.
Update, May, 15th 2007: Windows beta with MySQL 5.0.41 online.

MySQL is indebted to the Software Freedom Law Center for very good advice and insight on how to combine Free Software with a viable business model. SFLC provides legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software. Founded in 2005, the Center now represents many of the most important and well-established free software and open source projects.

Professor Eben Moglen, SFLC director and FSF legal counsel, has provided us with profound guidance over the years. We have tried to give something back through our work in the GPLv3 Committee B, but our time resources as a small company are limited in comparison to our fellow committee members.

In recognition of Eben’s help and as a token of our appreciation, we’ve made a small …

At the MySQL Conference the closing keynote was on Yahoo! Pipes, by Pasha Sadri, a Principal Software Engineer, Advanced Development Division, Yahoo!. I wanted to try it, but I was on Firefox 1.5 on Fedora Core 6 and there was no way I was going to build a pipe during the talk.

Fast forward a week or so later, and a boring Friday night ensued. What better thing to do, than to play with Pipes. In under fifteen minutes, I created the Edwin Pipe. What is it? Its a pipe that is all things MySQL - comprehensive source of news, whats cool, and so forth. There are some limitations - regular expression support is supposedly like Perl’s, but is not quite complete. The Unique operator is pretty cool, filtering is good (can be improved with better regex support), and maybe some sort of fuzzyness in …

Multiple Data sources in action! First, MySQL:

mysql> show plugins;
+----------------+--------+----------------+-----------------------------+---------+
| Name | Status | Type | Library | License |
+----------------+--------+----------------+-----------------------------+---------+
| binlog | ACTIVE | STORAGE ENGINE | NULL | GPL |
| partition | ACTIVE | STORAGE ENGINE | NULL | GPL |
| ARCHIVE | ACTIVE | STORAGE ENGINE | NULL | GPL |
| BLACKHOLE | ACTIVE | STORAGE ENGINE | NULL | GPL |
| CSV | ACTIVE | STORAGE ENGINE | NULL | GPL |
| FEDERATED | ACTIVE | STORAGE ENGINE | NULL | GPL |
| MEMORY | ACTIVE | STORAGE ENGINE | NULL | GPL |
| InnoDB | ACTIVE | STORAGE ENGINE | NULL | GPL |
| MyISAM | ACTIVE | STORAGE ENGINE | NULL | GPL |
| MRG_MYISAM | ACTIVE | STORAGE ENGINE | NULL | GPL |
| ndbcluster | ACTIVE | STORAGE ENGINE | NULL | GPL |
| …

Wow, this is really neat. Joe Celko, author of various SQL books including my beloved Trees and Hierarchies book, is going to provide virtual training courses on DB Design with MySQL.

There’s not too much detail at the link, but this would be an excellent course to attend by a real SQL master.

It’s also a nice turnaround to see MySQL go from being dismissed by Celko for lack of standards compliance (search MySQL, see page 98) to using the …

MySQL AB today announced a joint partnership and services agreement with LINBIT, the well-respected Austrian provider of high availability Linux systems technology called DRBD. Through its MySQL Enterprise subscription offering, MySQL AB will now offer direct support for this proven, low-cost solution for attaining ?Four Nines? and greater uptime for transactional database applications in LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) computing environments.