What a great day was had with the miniconf this year! Many people thought that there would be few people coming, or there would be issues having the PostgreSQL miniconf the next day, but it went better than could be expected.

The morning sessions were so popular it was standing room only as some of the great talks went out to an enthused audience. I was more nervous than usual delivering a talk on MySQL cluster with Stewart Smith being in the same room (he is a developer of the ndb engine with MySQL at the moment). My fears were relieved when Stewart gave me the "thumbs up" after the talk and thought it was quite good. Phew!

So was there any downside to the day - unfortunately yes. There were an over-abundance of talks submitted so some people did not have an opportunity to present. I actually submitted two talks - one on ndb cluster and one on the Sphinx search engine. Only one was accepted due to the excellent submissions made for …

Late in 2006 MySQL decided to move to a split distribution model, Community and Enterprise. A lot has (apparently) changed since then, yet nothing has really changed since then.

I'm subscribed to a lot of mailing lists - PHP, mod_perl, MySQL, web application security, etc. This week, there was an interesting conversation on the NYPHP mailing list - consulting rates.

It all started with an email from Edward Potter. He had previously emailed the list to inquire about consulting rates and was sharing the results with everyone:

Just to keep everyone up to date, based on interviews to …

I'm subscribed to a lot of mailing lists - PHP, mod_perl, MySQL, web application security, etc. This week, there was an interesting conversation on the NYPHP mailing list - consulting rates.

It all started with an email from Edward Potter. He had previously emailed the list to inquire about consulting rates and was sharing the results with everyone:

Just to keep everyone up to date, based on interviews to …

MySQL statement-based replication is widely discussed, but I haven't seen much about how to design a replication setup for low downtime and easy administration. Statement-based replication has inherent shortcomings experienced MySQL users know to avoid, but rarely write about. This article explains how to avoid problems, help your slaves stay in sync with the master, and recover from disasters more quickly.

About an hour ago, I got back from Washington, DC after spending four days attending a very productive MySQL performance tuning training session. I really enjoyed conversations with old and new friends including:

• Tobias Asplund, Instructor
  
• Ronald Bradford, Senior Consultant MySQL Inc.
• Michael "Mike" Amedeo Alaimo, IT Manager, Distributive Networks
  
• Stephen Spitzer, Learning Resource Center, USUHS
• Nyk Cowham, Systems Architect, Forum One Communications
• Joe Mansour, Web App. Programmer, and Donnie Lynn, DBA, Computing Center, …

Kathy Sierra’s closing keynote at linux.conf.au 2007 was a rather interesting one. I took away a lot from it, and while I might not be giving a summary of my thoughts here, one of her slides had a quote about a fake book she co-authored, that made me chuckle a little.

“So does this mean Ruby programmers are more emo than, say, Perl programmers?

MySQL people are definitely 5000% more emo than PostgreSQL people.”

Some will recognize that from a comment made in her blog post, Announcing The Emo Programmer book. But I took another parallel to the statement, because in the past few weeks, the MySQL community have been taking the recent Enterprise/Community announcements in a rather unwelcoming way.

MySQL are not getting rid of binaries in the Community release, as …

I'm a big fan of what I call cookbooks. Cookbooks are step-by-step directions that if followed, will yield the desired result. In fact, most of my cookbooks are copy & past enabled so that you copy a command from the cookbook and paste it into your window to execute the command. I insist my people use these established methods where available and I get pretty ticked off when they waste a lot of time trying to figure out what has already been learned.

I've installed Oracle on Linux about 50 times over the past few months. After the second succesfull install, I created a cookbook for both 9i and 10g. If followed exactly, any DBA will be able to install Oracle correctly in my environment. I created the cookbook and I know it like the back of my hand. I don't need no stinkin cookbook and proceeded to do a fresh install of 9.2.0.8 when the installer hangs at 18% linking naeet.o.

"Hmm, …

Late in 2006 MySQL decided to move to a split distribution model, Community and Enterprise. A lot has (apparently) changed since then, yet nothing has really changed since then. These things remain true: MySQL is freely available in both source and binary form – free as in freedom, and free as in beer. The MySQL community continues to get every single bug fix for free. The only real change the MySQL community sees is less frequent official binary builds.