The latest from the MySQL community

I've actually been meaning to finish this blog entry for quite some time, and now finally had the chance. Recently, Brian Duff wrote an article entitled "If I Had 5 Oracle Wishes, They Would Be...". I thought the topic would be a good blog meme to start within the MySQL blogger community, so I'll go ahead and start it off for PlanetMySQL and see if anyone else chooses to pick up the topic and pass it on. So, here are my top 5 wishes for MySQL in the future...

The Modularization of a Core MySQL Server Kernel

Certainly, this particular idea isn't new at all. I discussed the concept with a number of people at the first MySQL Camp last November, and found some receptive ears. Additionally, I …

This weekend, Monty and I got together for a different kind of hacking session.

Instead of developing software, we were working on developing a set of rough principles and rules for running a Free Software/Open Source business. We both have a good amount of experience working with various FLOSS projects (like Mozilla, MySQL, PHP, etc.) and FLOSS companies (like eZ Systems, Mozilla, MySQL, Zend, etc.) and hope that we can put this experience to good use.

For me, this was a tremendous help - I’ve been putting off working on this for Foo Associates for some months now. It is much easier to work on meeting the needs of customers than it is to work on planning for the future.

The notes are still extremely rough, but both Monty and I want to post them so that people can discuss. Also, …

I’ll be attending the Openmind conference from October 2nd to 3rd and will be giving a keynote at the event.

Openmind is being organized by COSS, an interesting Finnish Free Software and Open Source development agency that helps Finnish and Scandinavian businesses and projects use and develop FLOSS.

Other keynote presenters at the event (that readers of this blog may know) include Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, Aleksander Farstad, CEO of eZ Systems AS and FLOSS researcher Rishab Aiyer Gosh.

I also hoping that since Monty is in the area, he will also be able to attend.

…

I just received word that my proposal (which was to present my Age of Literate Machines presentation) for FrOSCon has been accepted.

I’m pretty excited - the event should be fun and it will give me a good chance to see friends (including a good number of my German MySQL colleagues)

Vertical advertising. I just stumbled upon The Problogger Job Board. They advertise it as such: post a job ad, for 30 days, at only $50.

People that visit the Problogger website, or job board, are definitely bloggers. Visiting the latter, means they’ve bought the hype that they can be a professional blogger, and make a living out of it. So what better way to hire journalists. Professional bloggers are no different to writers in a newspaper, magazine, and so forth. Turnaround times are quicker, the idea of formatting is probably a plus, but generally you’re a writer.

The FAQ lists the 37signals Job Board - $300 for 30 days. They’re a company that came to popularity thanks to a good blog, and Ruby on Rails. People that read the 37signals …

On the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007, I had the chance of meeting up with Paul (the author of PBXT) and Mikael. We briefly touched the topic of the BLOB Streaming Protocol that Paul is working on, which I find really neat. On the way back home, I traveled with Anders Karlsson (one of MySQL:s Sales Engineers), who is responsible for the BLOB Locator worklog and he described the concepts from his viewpoint.

Since I work with replication, these things got me thinking on what the impact is for replication and how it affects usability, efficiency, and scale-out. Being a RESTful guy, I started thinking about URIs both when Paul …

As I’m sure you’re aware, DRBD disallows access (any access, including read-only) to a DRBD device in Secondary mode. This always raises questions like the one I’ve taken the liberty to quote here. It came up in a MySQL webinar on replication and HA:

Because of the asynchronous nature of [MySQL] replication we end up with a dilemma when looking at using slaves as read nodes in that the only time we go to the database for information is to build a local cache file, and that local cache file is ONLY removed when information related to that cache file changes, it is NOT based on time. If we had a synchronous method of replication we would then know the cache files were always getting the right information, but because of the asynchronous nature …

I’ve noticed that in the last five years I’ve started to become very conservative about adopting new technologies.

We’re JUST now migrating to Opterons for example. I’m only now considering adopting Java 5.0.

My stack is essentially Java 1.4.2, MySQL 4.1.22, Debian 3.1 (migrating to Etch), and Athlon processors.

There just aren’t any surprises. The entire stack works and everything is a known entity. Since I have a pretty stable foundation I can look at technologies one at a time without fundamentally changing the stability of the entire system. Java 5.0 looks interesting but no real pressure here at the moment.

MySQL 5.1’s partitioning support will probably be the only feature that pushes us to upgrade. There are some InnoDB fixes I want to incorporate as well.

MySQL AB today announced that Zappos.com subscribes to its MySQL Enterprise commercial database offering to help manage the e-commerce site?s growth and market-leading customer service. Zappos.com also recently achieved the #1 rating as the most-available Internet retailer, as reported by Gomez Inc.

My last post on the replication poll was apparently lost from Planet MySQL. If you're interested, I commented on the replication poll, our future plans, and how they were affected by the poll.