There's a good article at Linux.com that profiles MySQL database guru Brian Aker and his background in achieving high scalability of systems.  Brian is also one of the speakers at the upcoming MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara April 23-26. Brian will be covering several tutorials and sessions on MySQL 5.1, storage engines and replication.  (Note: Tutorials tend to sell out early, so if you want to make sure you can attend these, you should register by March 14.)

• Linux.com: Portrait: Brian Aker - …

I'm pleased to announce the release of DBD::mysql 4.003! This release contains
various fixes including:

• 
  
• Fix re-exec of Makefile.PL when forcing $ENV{LANG} to 'C'. (RT #25233,
  reported by Slaven Rezic).
  
• Rewrote table_info method to support all arguments (previously it would
  only ever return all of the tables in the current database, no matter what
  was specified)
  
• Fixed $DBD::mysql::VERSION to be a string instead of a float, which caused
  problems for certain locales
  
• Fixed bug #23974. $dbh->column_info now returns statement handle with no rows upon table not existing. Much thanks to Tim Bunce for help fixing the problem in mysql.pm vs. dbdimp.c
  
• Removed #ifdefs for do error (sqlstate being passed as last arg depending on
  version)
  
• Fixed insertid test to work with …

Where does real power of MySQL Storage Engines, and pluggable storage engines as MySQL 5.1 lays ? It is very much advertised this allows third parties to create their own storage engines and we can see solutions as Solid and PBXT . Plus there is Falcon storage engine being developed inside MySQL.

All of these storage engines are however similar in their features and focus - all of them are transactional storage engines with multi versioning and row level locks so it is question of architecture implementation details of how it would compare to Innodb storage engine - old timer in this space. Does it add choice to the people ? Yes! but it also adds high level of complexity because it will not be easy to figure out which storage engine or storage engine mix is best match for …

Pretty Sick Slick

The last week I was under the weather and a year ago that would have meant that development of Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) would pretty much stop. These days I’m happy to say that this is absolutely not true anymore. In fact, hundreds of commits where done in the last week.

MySQL bulk load

To pick one example, Samatar Hassan added a job entry that allows you to configure a MySQL Bulk load job entry:

This job entry loads data as fast as possible into a MySQL database by using the LOAD DATA SQL command. It’s not as flexible as the Text File Input step, but it sure is fast. In certain cases, it might actually be up to ten times as fast. In short: …

An interesting but ambitious idea would be to refactor the mysqld code in a major way: Not just a minor tweek but would take a lot of the concepts, libraries and design of mysqld and put them together in a cleaner way with the benefit of hindsight, wishlists and the goals of mysqld. Very possible to do but not at all easy.

I somehow introduced a syntax error into MySQL Table Checksum in the 1.0.1 release and didn’t notice till just now. I’ve replaced the file in the Sourceforge release, but it may take a few hours for it to propagate to all mirrors. My apologies.

I’ve been designing an algorithm to resolve data differences between MySQL tables, specifically so I can ‘patch’ a replication replica that has gotten slightly out of sync without completely re-initializing it. I intend to create a tool that can identify which rows are different and bring them into sync. I would like your thoughts on this. Background and requirements I see this as the next step in my recent series of posts on MySQL tools and techniques to keep replication running reliably and smoothly.

Matt Asay proposes the following definition to the answer what consititudes an "open source company" that I blogged about yesterday: "An open source company is one that, as its core revenue-generating business, actively produces, distributes, and sells (or sells services around) software under an OSI-approved license."

I see a lot of merit in this definition. However it does shut out companies like EnterpriseDB that do proprietary extensions while feeding a lot of code back to the open source parent. Of course you can point to the fact that the product they sell is not open source.

This however is the only code based business model around BSD projects. Without picking favorites, I personally do appreciate the fact that BSD style projects produce an ecosystem that …

I have never been that interested in strict definitions of concepts and this never-ending discussion of what is and isn't open source is an interesting philosophical argument but not an entirely practical one.

There is no question that the GPL offers many benefits to companies/people who create products and release them under that license. But it's not for everyone, and there is often a necessary evolution (as Matt and SOG note) where the benefit of adoption under MPL or Apache or whatever are potentially more important than what the GPL affords.

Matt is excited about going to GPL and I back Alfresco's choice 100%. I think it makes sense for the business and where their product lives in the enterprise stack. But GPL doesn't make sense for everything (not that I think Matt believes it does, but I have had a number of people …