The latest from the MySQL community

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"; …

There's a nice article by Jennifer Mears of TechWorld on why Union Bank of California has switched from AIX to Red Hat Linux and the LAMP stack (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP).  This article goes in greater depth than the earlier reports interviewing CTO Mok Choe on the reason for the move, the applications etc.  Union Bank is one of the 25 top banks in the United States and while a lot of firms in the financial service sector are using the LAMP stack and JBoss, few have been willing to go on the record.  It's smart marketing on their part.  Not only does it show that they are not locked into closed source legacy software, it's makes Union Bank a more interesting place for IT staff who want to keep their skills up to date.

Choe took a gradual well thought out approach to adopting open source, ensuring that they …

Thanks to Google we have a few tech talks about MySQL. One talk about NDB and another about MySQL performance tuning.

I know this stuff and even I learned a few things.

Drupal open source CMS project forms a non-profit…Ingres announces the availability of its Icebreaker software stack…GPLv3 deadline slips…and more…

The Drupal Association - The Drupal Project’s New Non-Profit, Drupal Association (Press Release)

Exist Global Inc. Announces Venture Funding to Fuel Global Expansion, Exist Global (Press Release)

Registration Opens for First Red Hat Challenge, Red Hat (Press Release)

Ingres Makes Icebreaker Software Appliance Generally Available, Ingres (Press Release)

…

Every now and then I get a big reminder of how great it is to be a part of the open source way of doing things. Having a strong community of MySQL lovers who use the free and open source MySQL database server and pay MySQL AB with code contributions and bug reports is truly a great way to develop rock solid and innovative software. Some contributions that come back to MySQL are small, but others are very large indeed. What would be large, you ask? How about a new, powerful transactional storage engine?