Interested in being a session speaker at next year's Users Conference? Not put in your proposal yet? Get on it!

In case you didn't read my initial announcement, these are the things I am most looking for in submissions:

• Creativity. Don't be afraid to push the limits with your talk topics. We want to see unique, interesting, and innovative uses and abuses of MySQL!
• Descriptive. The more information you can provide about your session idea, the better, and don't be afraid to go into detail about the pre-requisites you expect session attendees to have in order to get the most out of your session
• Specific. If you want to do a session on stored procedures, great. But, your proposal should be as specific as possible. "Using Stored Procedures to Build a Real-Time Monitoring Solution", "Porting a Dynamic …

Been a while since we've discussed the upcoming MySQL Camp unconference, set for 3 days of rousing good times at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, from November 10th through 12th. Figured I would post an update, and an appeal for participants to schedule your sessions in the new SessionSchedule.

Currently, there are 24 participants "registered" in the Participants wiki page, but that does not include the ~30-35 Google engineers who likely will attend, according to Leslie Hawthorn. In the next week or so, we will need to start the actual pre-registration process, to enable Leslie to have the security folks know who is coming to the event and have some sort of badge available for you. While the unconference is, of course, free, the registration is required for these security reasons.

I've been throwing …

MySQL today announced that it has become a truly community-driven company. This will sound funny to those of you that think MySQL announced its Enterprise product today. Yes, it did that. But the real news in MySQL's move is its efforts to continue to bolster its already vibrant community.

Savvy users and developers of open source software already know that community is in short supply - there simply is not a large global pool of developers that are anxiously waiting to contribute code to your (or my) project. Therefore, good community developers (and users) are golden, and companies and projects work hard to find them.

In MySQL's case, the company has had to worry …

Back in 1999 I worked for a company called AuctionWatch. AuctionWatch created tools for power sellers to sell their goods with one easy interface to all 3 Major Marketplaces - Amazon, EBay, and Yahoo. The primary tool was the Auction Control Panel known as ACP. Think of a webtool that allowed power sellers to manage 1000s of auctions in one easy interface. Allowing them to schedule auctions, launch auctions and handle shipping from 1 page.

During this time in 1999, we had 2 database servers named Godzilla and Mothra. I believe they where Sun E4000s with a super expensive diskpack in raid-5. Since mySQL was only in Gamma back then and replication was just a concept, we couldn't use replication to handle the onslaught of load from our users. Getting 200 queries per second would saturate AuctionWatch back then.

So, what was done? Well more database boxes on more very expensive Sun boxes that handled different parts of the …

OK, so I am excited. Yesterday MySQL announced MySQL Enterprise (http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/news/article_1171.html). Now, I had not been so keen on MySQL Network — I had not realized the level of service MySQL will go to. Does Oracle or Microsoft offer schema review as part of a service package? I do not think so.

Basically, MySQL Enterprise is really a full suite of enterprise solutions for companies that need them. Many folks know how hard it can be to convince their boss that a DBA (or team of DBA’s) is needed. Many folks know how hard it is to be a DBA, and many folks know how hard it is to be a developer or sysadmin with DBA duties.

It’s easier to convince a company to spend money on a support contract than it is to spend money on headcount. And with MySQL, companies get so much for their money.

Oh, sure, there …

This is the third in a series of articles on profiling queries in MySQL (the second of two demonstrations of profiling techniques, but the third article overall). In this article I'll present the same example as in the second article, but use a different approach to show details I didn't include.

At a user conference in London, MySQL announced MySQL Enterprise, a departure from their existing business and development models.

Essentially MySQL will have two versions of the core product: Enterprise and Community. This is very much like RHEL and Fedora—an approach that I support. I will let Matt dive further into the business aspects, but I am in the camp that it's OK to make money from open source, at least if you are paying for the development. I would expect a bit of squawking from the community about the MySQL change, but the community version remains good news. Marten Mickos said "we'll have many things that will make the Community version have features and functions that may or may not ever make it to the Enterprise version."

MySQL Enterprise is available as an annual subscription in four different tiers (Basic, Silver, Gold, Platinum.) Existing (and new) subscribers gain access to new management tools which Marten …

Today, you will see an announcement of a new flagship commercial offering from our company, called MySQL Enterprise. I want to explain to you why we are making these changes to our business — and to the delivery of our software.

We recognise that the needs of the MySQL Community are different from the needs of commercial enterprise customers. After 11 years of producing our software, we can no longer hope that a single offering is the best solution for both Community and Enterprise users. Consequently, we are introducing two different offerings for each distinct target group.

MySQL AB today announced ?MySQL Enterprise?, a new version of its flagship commercial subscription service that includes new automated, proactive technology to help corporate users monitor and tune their production MySQL database systems.