The latest from the MySQL community

This will be my last entry for a few days (probably more like a week).  I'm the scoutmaster of troop 440 and we're attending summer camp next week so I will not have much time available to email and blogging.  However, KISS #5 happened last night while I was activating my kids Vista computer.

The whole idea is that any message, error or otherwise, needs to be understandable by the average user.  This is the main reason why Linux will not get any serious traction on the desktop.  The gear heads that use it can't stand to dumb down the interface of their baby and the current Linux desktop experience is just to complex.  If the user has to know what a swap partition is or that a file named ifconfig even exists, then it's too complex.  But I digress.

So last night Katie (my daughter) tells me that her computer is broken.  Thinking that's odd since I just built it, I asked her what it's doing.  She …

jay pipes started with his five mysql wishes, and others have chimed in. i guess i may as well take a whack at it.

1. connect by. yeah, yeah. it?s not standard. i don?t care.
2. expose character-set conversions in the client library. all the code to convert between all of the character sets understood by the server is there, there?s just no public interface to it.
3. online backup. it?s in progress, but this will make things so much better in so many ways. we could actually have reliable backups of bugs.mysql.com. and it?s going to make starting up new slaves so much easier in replication.
4. re-learn how to ship software. the long …

I am subscribed to the memcached list. Memcached use (and interest in caching in general) has exploded it seems in the last couple of years. There are a lot of people that join the list that not only don’t have a lot of experience with memcached, but they don’t have experience with caching. We have been caching at dealnews since the beginning. We started using memcached at dealnews in early 2005.

One common concern that new users have is data not being updated the second it goes in the database. This is how it worked before they were caching. They are used to it working that way. So, when they start caching, they miss that instant gratification. We went through this at dealnews. Our content team could write a deal, go to the front page and see it right then. They could then move on with their lives. As we grew and it became apparent …

I've been highly gratified to see the response to this Open Source CEO Series. I've been impressed by the sincerity and wisdom most of the answers have revealed. Running an open source company at the beginning of the commercial wave is challenging.

Nowhere is this more true than with John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. I've known John for several years now, and can still remember first meeting him at an SDForum event (back in 2004, as I've described before). John, Clint, and Jacob approached me after I spoke on an open source panel and told me about their idea for an open source CRM company. I thought they were fools, because clearly open source wouldn't work in the application space.

Four years later, it's clear that I, not they, deserve the "fool" title.

In this eleventh …

MySQL AB today concluded its "Twelve Days of Scale-Out" educational initiative by presenting a case study on mixi.jp, the third most-popular Web site in Japan.

Each day from June 11-22, the MySQL Web site has been highlighting how many of the world's fastest-growing companies are using the MySQL database to cost-effectively scale-out their successful online businesses.

This is really too easy.  Finding stupid and idiotic things about Vista is really just too easy.  This installment is not about any type of GUI but rather with the lack of secure inter-machine remoting capability.

Here at MySQL we have several Windows virtual machines setup to perform builds and tests of both our server code and our connectors.  Our builds are automated to be sure but our build engineers still need to "shell" into a remote box to perform some functions.  As any reasonable group would, we use ssh authentication for both our Linux and Windows boxes.  The problem, of course, is that no edition of Windows has shipped with a secure shell server or client.  Our build team is left with only a few alternatives and they have chosen to install cygwin on the Windows boxes.  Considering that cygwin has only recently become stable on 64 bit systems, this was shaky at best.

Now I realize that …

There has been a lot of fuss kicked up lately over the definition of open source (kicked off by Michael Tiemann), and the OSI's role in defining that term. Word on the street is that CentricCRM will be launching a significant piece of code (Team Elements) under Larry Rosen's Open Software License early next week. This is fantastic news for CentricCRM, as well as for open source (OSI-approved open source).

Why for open source? Because Team Elements is cool and very useful technology. It's a 100% open source, Java-based "Enterprise 2.0" product. It ties together discussions, wikis, blogs, RSS, issue tracking and trouble-ticketing, project management, document management, and federated search into a single, unified …

You can find the material following these links:

• The slides for Part 1 in PDF format.
• The slides for Part 2 in PDF format.
• The slides for Part 3 in PDF format.
• Webex and Slides for Part 4 - MySQL Cluster
• Webex and Slides for Part 5 - Performance and Benchmarking
• Webex and Slides for …

Q from Efrat: Is there a flag I can use to tell the replication server to ignore duplicate entries? Currently it stops replicating each time it get duplicate entry
You can configure replication in order to ignore errors (all or some specific errors, such as a duplicate). In any case, the reason is that when you have a duplicate, this means there is some conflict, and the slave doesn't know which is right. There is coming conflict detection and resolution in some future version.

Q from Efrat: From where can I download a free trial version of MySql Enterprise server?
You can ontact mysql sales for a 30-day mysql enterprise trial, which includes MySQL Network Monitoring and Advisory Service

Q from Danilo: What is index merge?
It's when the optimizer merges several rows using one same index. See section 7.2.6 in the MySQL 5.0 …

Just came across a new exploit related to PHP code within GIF images. Thanks Sox