By Brady Forrest

Benchmark Capital funded oDesk operates an online project marketplace for hiring and managing remote technical staff. It is free to post a job. They have 5,000 developers in their network. oDesk made two announcements today at the Web 2.0 Conference.

First, they announced the oDesk Online Testing service production launch. Over 100 free tests are available in Ajax, PHP, MySQL, .NET, Java, and XML. More than 1,400 developers have been tested so far. I wonder how this will affect the hourly rates on oDesk. Will there be oDesk study guides in the future?

Second, they announced a partnership with O'Reilly Research to analyze their data and produce …

Infobright Inc. and MySQL AB have signed a partnership agreement as part of the MySQL Certified Storage Engine Program. Infobright has completed the technical integration of MySQL® with its innovative BrightHouse database engine. It is available for purchase now -- sold and supported by Infobright.

Introduction: Eventually every database system hit its limits. Especially on the Internet, where you have millions of users which theoretically access your database simultaneously, eventually your IO system will be a bottleneck.

Conventional solutions: In general, as a first step, MySQL Replication is used to scale-out in such a situation. MySQL Replication scales very well when you have a high read/write (r/w) ratio. The higher the better. But also such a MySQL Replication system hits its limits when you have a huge amount of (write) access. Because database systems have random disk access, it's not the throughput of your IO system that's relevant but the IO per second (random seek). You can scale this in a very limited way by adding more disks to your IO system, but here too you eventually hit a limit (price).

I recently got a message letting me know FreeBSD users will soon be able to install the innotop MySQL and InnoDB monitor through ports. Gentoo GNU/Linux users can find innotop in Portage. FreeBSD adds innotop to ports When this is finalized, FreeBSD users will be able to install innotop with the following commands: cd /usr/ports/databases/innotop make all install This is great news. It makes innotop easier to find, install and use.

MySQL Connector/ODBC 5.00.07 Beta 3 has been released. MySQL Connector/ODBC is our next generation ODBC driver which allows access to the MySQL server using the ODBC standard - a cross-platform, cross-database, C, Call Level Interface.

This version is being released to get community feedback but is NOT suitable for production environments. It is now available in binary form from the Connector/ODBC download pages and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can’t find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

Install Notes

Please uninstall any existing Connector/ODBC v5 before installing this version.

Changes

• FIX: Fixed SQLDescibeCol returning column name length in bytes rather than …

If cost were no object, I'd always deploy Oracle. I'm comfortable with Oracle technology and I think I have a pretty good idea how to implement and administer it.

In the world of corporate IT, however, budgets are king. Projects are measured by their Return on Investment (ROI) and the lower I can get that investment, the better return I can get for my investment. I have a real hard time spending $160K on an application that will occupy 40G of space.

In my opinion, I'd use MySQL for anything but the most mission critical applications. I'm not saying MySQL can't handle the most mission critical applications, but I'm not comfortable betting my business on MySQL at this point.

I think there are about three sweet spots for MySQL. The first is small to medium size OLTP databases (<100 GB) that are fronted by something like a java middle-tier. These applications typically control most of the business logic …

Probably the answer to this question is already known. But we want to prove it and by the way learn to deal with oprofile.

Started my own link collection for interesting MySQL links.

A quick reminder to those of you who still haven't gotten in your proposals for session topics at the 2007 MySQL Conference and Expo. Tonight at midnight, PST, is the deadline for submissions. Get those submissions in, otherwise I will sound like even more of a nagging wife (or husband...)

Click here to submit a proposal

So far this is what I am thinking of for sessions for MySQL Camp (AKA
free conference this weekend on MySQL at Google... you are coming
right?).
http://mysqlcamp.org/


1) How to write show commands.
2) Internals to Storage Engine Design
3) How to add new Field Types
4) Scale out with the memcache engine

Any other ideas?