We’ve been getting some nice feedback on our recently introduced Monitoring and Advisory Service that’s part of MySQL Enterprise. In talking with many of you, I know anything that makes MySQL less of a black box with respect to what’s going on underneath the covers is welcome.

If you’re a MySQL DBA or a dev/sysadmin who’s got the responsibility of taking care of one or more MySQL servers, check out the latest article I wrote on our dev zone that highlights some things in our new service that you’ll likely find appealing. And as always, let me know what you think so we can keep making things better.

MySQL 4.0 has now reached the final stage of its active development life cycle. As I noted on 12 July 2006 when announcing the MySQL Lifecycle Policy, keeping legacy versions of our software alive is expensive and time-consuming. While we know that database administrators hate to upgrade their databases, we believe that the vast majority of our customers and our community are better served by us focusing our attention on newer releases. However, we don’t want to abandon users of our older products — so we are asking them to help subsidise the cost themselves.

This means that those who wish to continue to receive our support for MySQL 3.23 and MySQL 4.0 will need to be covered by a MySQL Enterprise subscription, starting 1 Oct 2006 for MySQL 4.0.

In …

We'll have a MySQL Miniconf at LinuxConfAU 2007 in Sydney on Monday, January 15th, before the conference proper starts. Some weeks ago we posted a call for papers and we've received excellent submissions! There's a few slots left - so if you were pondering putting in for a talk, now is your (last) chance....

Please submit an abstract of your suggested presentation via email to
m y s q l - m i n i c o n f ( a t ) m y s q l . c o m

(see also my original post)

Chad and Brian have already mentioned how MySQL does indeed support Debian and Ubuntu, but I thought I would add my thoughts on the secret measure of how well an OS is truly supported.

Regardless of what is on the checklists and the advertising and everything else, the best supported operating systems and configurations are the ones that the developers themselves actively use. You better believe that when a bug pops up on the operating system I use on my desktop, it’s going to be fixed a lot faster than a bug I can’t see on a more obscure platform. I’ve believed this for a long time, and that is why I have done things like send 64-bit Windows machines, OpenSolaris machines, etc. to developers for daily use in order to improve the quality of our Windows and Solaris …

It's been a while since I released an update to innotop, but I have not been idle. I'm currently working hard to add major new features and functionality. Here's a quick list of what's coming.

This morning I am working on a bug with Monty Taylor for a customer
who is having an issue with multi-cpu capabilities on Debian. Which
makes me surprised to read:
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/12/13/1515217.shtml

Huh?

MySQL supports Debian. We have in the past and we will continue to do
so in the future. As this link points out:
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/12/13/1515217.shtml

We don't build Enterprise binaries on debian yet. The Enterprise
project is new and we are just starting to roll out binaries for it.
Ubuntu is on schedule to be supported next year (I believe first
quarter). We don't build binaries for Debian in …

I just got word today that I will be speaking at the 2007 MySQL Conference.

I’ll be doing a three hour tutorial version of my popular 2006 session on Managing Data Hierarchies (strangely they backdated my title in last year’s session listing; I was a Technical Writer for MySQL AB at the time).

This year session I plan to add more depth to the existing methodologies I cover as well as cover additional methodologies for managing hierarchical data in MySQL.

Last conference the session was standing room only and I entertained several requests for additional information when the session was complete, so I hope this next session will be equally well received and I look forward to meeting old friends and associates.

See you there!

I promise, MySQL really does care about Debian. Since I arrived ten months ago (and even before that it seems), there's been several hand-wringing discussions about Debian and how we should approach it. The Debian and Ubuntu Developers do a fantastic job packaging mysql server, and I have nothing but respect for their efforts.

With RPM-based distributions, it's easy to tell people to download and install a package file. They expect it. They don't expect automatic upgrades. Creating a RPM file is easy because there's no implicit agreement about how to update it.

Our problem with Debian is that it's just too fantastic. That is, our Debian-using customers know that for almost everything, it's hard to do better than Debian does. We at MySQL wants to be able to give people our own binaries for several reasons, some good and some bad: Timeliness of package arrival; a Not Compiled Here disorder; options and defaults set as …

Looks like I'll be out in Santa Clara, CA in April for the 2007 MySQL Users Conference.

The session I'll be giving is titled Adding INFORMATION_SCHEMA Tables, a presentation about one thing you can do when delving into the MySQL source code. I'm excited about this as fidding in the source code is my latest fascination. There's a lot of interesting stuff you can do once you start poking around.

Excited to see what else is on the program, there wasn't much said this year about folks submitting proposals (myself included). I liked what Mike Hillyer did in years past, posting proposals for feedback as they were being developed. Wait, he did post about submitting a presentation. How did I miss that?

Even more excited about getting …

First: I love Flickr. It's almost the perfect "photo gallery" for me.

One of the things I really really would like would be some simple stats so I could find out how more than 3000 people ended up seeing say my photo of the New York skyline. I linked to it from this weblog, but it only counts people who click on the photo and it can't be more than a few hundred. Or five hundred. Or a thousand.

I don't know exactly, but I do know that it's not 3000 so most of them must come from somewhere else. Where? Who linked to the photo, and more importantly: What did they say about it? Why can't I get my feedback?

I realize it'd be a lot …