I’m listening to the first MySQL University session. It’s the highest form of education available at MySQL AB, hence the name. Not about how to use MySQL, but how to write code patches for MySQL.

Right now, Sergei Golubchik is sitting in Cologne, Germany, speaking behind Skype Conferencing and two pillows (sound quality!) about memory management and mysys libraries and algorithms. Monty and others are assisting Sergei over our internal IRC, where there are 31 developers listening in.

Our presenter, Sergei Golubchik, in a non-virtual setting

Here’s an IRC transcript:

monty|uni ie, only destructior is called, memory is not freed until free_root()
rafal|school monty|uni: if I initialize String from other String, or char table[] …

I’ve been following the development of the PBXT storage engine for some time, but only recently got the chance to get my hands dirty with the engine. I have to say - I like what I see! Paul McCullagh (PBXT’s creator) has done a great job creating a stellar transactional engine for MySQL, and the new beta sports foreign keys that work like a champ.

Check out the article I just wrote on PBXT - I think you’ll be excited too once you see all that PBXT offers and the performance it delivers. Paul has also started making binaries of the plugin-engine available, which makes it even easier to pop PBXT into a version of MySQL and run.

Check PBXT out when you can - like me, I think you’ll quickly be turned into a fan.

About a week ago, I wrote about the upcoming Certification for MySQL Cluster and that you can take the exam at the MySQL Conference and Expo. I promised then to write some more about why we are offering this certification and also about the cluster certification study guide.
Cluster Certification, Why?
MySQL just released the MySQL Carrier Grade Edition, which is a special edition of MySQL Cluster that is especially targeted at the telecom market. A large number of people attended an …

This week I spoke with Jay Pipes about the upcoming MySQL Conference, April 23-26 in Santa Clara, California, USA.

Direct play the podcast here:
http://tinyurl.com/2jvnfe

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I had a setting wrong in my recording program and ended up having a very different sound quality than what I had wanted. I played with it as much as I could, but I apologize for the bad quality audio, especially the breathing that you can hear, the mouse clicks, and when you can hear me swallow …

I spoke with Zmanda CEO Chander Kant last week about the company's growth and some new things they have been working on. I first met Chander at the MySQL conference about a year ago. Since then the company has expanded its support for MySQL and is now starting to target other applications like Oracle and SAP.

Today Zmanda announced a program that I think is an interesting marketing move.

Beginning March 1st and through April 15th of 2007, the leader in open source backup Zmanda will offer existing Veritas NetBackup customers the ability to switch to its brand new Amanda Enterprise Edition 2.6 with Zmanda Management Console for free!

Simply show your Zmanda Account Manager the current renewal quote for Veritas NetBackup and Zmanda will set you up with a year long subscription …

By Allison Randal

Tim and I had a great conversation with Andy Astor of EnterpriseDB last week. EnterpriseDB is a drop-in replacement for Oracle, based on the PostgreSQL codebase. Rather than forking the code, they've developed their product as a collection of extensions on top of PostgreSQL, and their releases track the latest version of the public code. They contribute patches back to the core in the virtuous cycle of benefit->contribute->benefit. They hire several developers to work on PostgreSQL (6, last I heard), and are among the largest donators to PostgreSQL.org. They're a significant open source success story as a viable and growing competitor to the largest commercial database on the market. And yet, they've met a mixed response in the community: enthusiasm for their contributions and participation, but …

I’ve updated MySQL Query Profiler, which I consider the most important tool I’ve written. It’s now included as part of the MySQL Toolkit project on Sourceforge. The updates are mainly small bug fixes, and I reviewed the documentation as well. Since I’ve been using it for a while and didn’t change much, I have decided to release it as version 1.0.0. At some point I may extend it to address the new storage engines being developed for MySQL 5.

I’ve just released MySQL Duplicate Key Checker on SourceForge. This is a complete rewrite of a tool I initially released under a slightly different name. It is now much more powerful and friendlier to use, especially for scripting, and has many more options. As with the MySQL Table Checksum tool, it is part of MySQL Toolkit. What’s new I’ve redesigned the program from the ground up to be more UNIX-friendly.

Today we launched our Amanda Enterprise Edition 2.6. This comes with Zmanda Management Console - a totally cool way to install, configure and manage backup environments. This was result of an amazing effort done by our developers in past few months. This is how the navigation bar of the Zmanda Management Console (ZMC) looks like:

One of our most important goals while designing a graphical interface for Amanda was to simplify the life of a backup administrator. We found existing backup products in the market to be unnecessarily complex to setup and manage. I (and rest of Zmanda team) believe that managing your backups should be simple. In order to get backup going, all we need to know is:

What do you want to backup? (e.g. what hosts, filesystems and applications)
Where do you want to …

Update: Terry Chay has answered my question about why this is happening. In a nutshell, PHP is using 33,160 opcodes and 33,157 regsters for the verbose code. In comparison, the serialized array only uses 5 opcodes and 2 registers. He used something called VLD, which I had not heard of, to figure all this out.

So, at dealnews, we have a category tree. To make life easy, we dump it to an array in a file that we can include on any page. It has 420 entries. Expanded, one entry may look like:

$CATEGORIES[202]['id'] = "202";
$CATEGORIES[202]['name'] = "clothing & accessories";
$CATEGORIES[202]['parent'] = "0";
$CATEGORIES[202]['standalone'] = "";
$CATEGORIES[202]['description'] = "clothing";
$CATEGORIES[202]['precedence'] = "0";
$CATEGORIES[202]['preferred'] = "0"; …