The yearly PHP community summaries are already appearing throughout the blogosphere. Every year they just get better and better and it becomes clear that the PHP community's accomplishments outshine those of the previous year.

PHP for many years has been the leader in Web development. In the past couple of years though this leadership has become even more noticable. Evans Data Corporation has estimated that over 4.5M developers worldwide use PHP today. Not only is that an impressive number on its own, but when you dig into the numbers you can see that in 2007 PHP is expected to surpass Java in areas like Europe; and that includes all permutations of Java usage including in environments where PHP doesn't attempt to be relevant such as the desktop.

2006 has clearly been a very exciting year for PHP. It comes at a time where the Web, Web applications and Web services …

Brian M, who still has patches to commit, asked me to draw up a
skeleton for a MySQL Engine Project. The goal was to get all of the
Makefiles right and put in just enough of a skeleton to make it easy
to create projects quickly.

URL: http://hg.tangent.org/skeleton-mysql-engine

You will need to do a regular expression edit across all files on
"EXAMPLE" to change the name of the engine. If you aren't licensing
under the GPL you will also need to change the license text and the
pointer to license type in handlerton.

A few things still to do:

1) Make it so you can just drop the directory into the storage/
directory of MySQL and have it compile statically (this is pretty
easy to fix).

2) Maybe rewrite the thing to be a perl script that asks you …

Sheeri Kritzer has published the 25th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, on The MySQL She-BA. I’d like to wish all our readers and editors a Happy and Peaceful New Year. See you all in 2007! Over to you, Sheeri!

December 29th, 2006 - by Sheeri Kritzer

Welcome to the 25th edition of Log Buffer, the DBA community?s Carnival of the Vanities-style blog of blogs about the database world.

This is the last Log Buffer of calendar year 2006. The database world seems to be a series of series lately, so let’s jump right in:

If, like me, you have no idea what doors and signals are in Solaris 10, you might want to read part 4 of Frank Mash’s “Managing MySQL on Solaris 10″, entitled Solaris Doors and Signals.

On a more theoretical level, Random Notes describes lack of …

From the blogosphere I get this feeling that everyone who writes up
a predictions post for 2007 believes that the iTV is going to be a
hit. Let me describe why it might just suck:

1) DRM. Front Row, the media interface for the Mac, was
useless for me until I found a plugin which would allow me to enable
all video formats. I pull video from the web from many sources. Front
Row was useless until I made it universal. If iTV doesn't allow
consumers to get past whatever DRM Apple has sold its soul for then
its going to be very niche. By niche I mean iTunes store only.

2) Speed. I have a lot of content available via Front Row. The
interface is just slow when it hits a directory with a lot of files
in it. When I push the button on the remote I expect an action to
occur. The current "pause" is just annoying, I think it will drive
…

As you might noticed there are no recent MySQL Community versions available for download from MySQL Download Area This applies both to binaries (which is expected with new polices) but also to the source files which were promised to be available.

So what is if you would like to use recent MySQL code while staying with community version ? I chatted with Monty on this topic today.

Download sources from MySQL FTP Site I have no idea why this location is not advertised on download pages but it really has sources for all recent releases, both for Unix and Windows.

Use MySQL Supplied by Distribution Vendor. Some vendors already offering MySQL 5.0.30 - Gentoo, Ubuntu and Debian at the time of this writing. Fedora might also get update soon.

…

Brian Aker recently wrote about a "skeleton project" for quickly bootstrapping a development environment for a new software project. I do something similar for Perl programs that I want to connect to MySQL.

So, if your a frequent reader of this blog you know that I've mentioned thatI federates data.

So, if all servers are the same, query load is the same, and the same amount of data exists on all the shards then the overall load average and IO load metrics should be the same between each server containing it's slice of the data (these are called shards).

Well, looking over some very detailed stats, I noticed that these new boxes that are in production are kicking some major ass, these new boxes are able to handle nearly 5 times more data and queries. To good to believe, since overall they are the same as my old boxes but the main difference is the CPU in them.

Then I looked at some more my.cnf.tmpl tweaks (I have a my.cnf.tmpl that generates my.cnf by replacing certain fields when /etc/init.d/mysqld start is invoked). Low and behold I added innodb_file_per_table and innodb_open_files=1024. This must be the …

As preparation for the upcoming Quality Contribution Program, a new MySQL forum was created today.
The new forum is dedicated to Quality Assurance matters. It is not the place where to submit bugs (there is already the bug reporting system for that purpose). It is rather a place where to discuss quality assurance problems, such as:

• How do I report this particular kind of bug?
• How do I make a test case for this specific situation?
• What is the best strategy to report a nasty cluster of bugs?
• Improving testing techniques;

Everything related to Quality assurance can be discussed there. If you have an idea on how to make better test cases, go there and launch the challenge. If you want to experiment a new technique for bug hunting, let's hear it! …

In the last year, we've seen open source software explode into the telecommunications market.  Typically telco equipment manufacturers, carriers and the like are on the bleeding edge of technology adoption, so this is really no big surprise.  The only surprise is how fast they've migrated from home-grown and proprietary software to open source.  Some of the largest deals MySQL closed in the last year were in the telecommunications industry, who are heavy users of MySQL Enterprise and MySQL Cluster.  This includes such well known companies as Alcatel, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, France Telecom, Motorola, Nokia, Nortel, Telio, Vodafone and many others.

We've also started to see a new generation of "Web meets Telco" companies, like Tellme Networks, build almost completely on open source.  …