Lately I've been thinking about how open source is disrupting the software industry.  In Silicon Valley, people tend to focus on a very narrow view of disruption focusing on prices or features.  But I think disruption is more than that. 

Consider these examples:

• The PC disrupted minicomputers by giving individuals power to develop and run their own applications outside of IT
• Digital cameras disrupted film by providing instant gratification
• Netflix disrupting Blockbuster by eliminating late fees
• Salesforce.com disrupted Siebel by eliminating long CRM implementation cycles

Typically new entrant disrupts the market by doing something different than the incumbent vendor.  PC's weren't just smaller, cheaper minicomputers.  They served a different …

Hola, MySQL Developers, DBAs and Users alike. I've been absent from the blogging scene for a number of weeks now (bad Jay, bad!). What have I been doing? Oh, just planning and organizing the biggest and baddest conference the world has EVER seen. Ah, you laugh. You mock. The 2007 MySQL Conference and Expo registration is now open. As program chair, I have a duty, no, an insatiable desire, to tell you all why this year's conference is worth ten times more than the price of admission. So here goes.

The Nerdliest of All Geeks So Speaketh

You want technical sessions about scaling, developing, monitoring, administering, and tuning MySQL that will blow the socks off anything you'll find at any other DB conference? Check this short list out:

Google, flickr.com, digg.com, FotoLog, Xing.com

…

Ok, so this doesn't work on all Linux systems. This because many don't ship with LinuxThreads libraries any more. While that's nice in theory, reality is that NPTL threading does not always work well, in particular MySQL server on 64-bit machines can experience trouble. Other apps don't see the problems because they don't use that many threads.

If a threading hacker with spare time were to care about looking over the NPTL code to make it work well with hundreds (up to a few thousand) threads, that would be grand.

In the meantime, you may find the below patch useful: it modifies mysqld_safe so you don't need to keep tweaking it when you upgrade your MySQL version. See the inline comments for further details.

--- mysql-5.1/scripts/mysqld_safe.sh 2007-01-29 10:26:34.000000000 +1000
+++ mysqld_safe.sh 2007-01-30 10:39:12.000000000 +1000
@@ -33,6 +33,7 @@
--ledir=DIRECTORY …

MySQL AB today unveiled a simpler way for large and growing organizations to acquire and adopt enterprise software. Designed with a customer?s perspective in mind, a one-year MySQL Enterprise Unlimited subscription offers a company-wide enterprise site agreement at the unprecedented low price of $40,000 (EUR 32,000, GBP 24,000).

I just noticed that the schedules for the Sessions and Tutorials of our upcoming MySQL Conference & Expo (which takes place on April 23rd-26th in Santa Clara, California) is now online. The program looks very promising and I am particularly excited that some of the sessions that I have helped to arrange made it into the final program:

• openBC / Xing: Growing Pains by Michael Otto and Erick Dennis from ePublica
• PrimeBase XT: Design and Implementation of a …

MySQL's FEDERATED storage engine is a fascinating example of the flexibility gained by abstracting the storage engine layer away from the rest of the server. FEDERATED tables allow you to access a table on another server as though it exists on the local server. However, the manual doesn't say much about how it really works. This article peeks under the hood of the FEDERATED storage engine.

I recently went to linux.conf.au in Sydney, and attended the MySQL Miniconf (mysql.conf.au). I thought I would recap on some highlights:

• 
  
• I leaned EXPLAIN EXTENDED [query] from Guy Harrison (can't believe i didn't know that one).
• I listened to Laura Thompson talk about the "update user set last_login = NOW()" problem that every social networking site seems to encounter. Her "proposed" solutions were roughly:
  
  
  • 
    
  • Use a different set of database systems to manage these "last logins" (often called "partition your application by function")
    
  • Lie, and give estimates ;-)
    
  
  
  

While I am a big fan of lying, I …