I often see things go past my eyes where customers (and users - i.e. those that don’t send wads of cash our way and hence are not financially supporting my beer, curry and photography habits) have amazing uptime and reliability requirements.

When talking to businesses that use MySQL, it’s not uncommon to have the “if the DB is down, our business doesn’t operate” line bandied around. How people make sure this never happens can differ (hint: it often involves replication and good sysadmin practices).

One thing I like doing is making things easier for people. Sometimes it’s also a much more complicated problem than you’re initially led to believe.

I think configuration files are obsolete. Okay, maybe just for databases. Everything should be changable as an online operation. This should also be able to be done via a standard interface - in our case, SQL. This means it’s suddenly really easy to write portable …

One thing I learned fairly early in my DBA career was that if I was ever going to excel in managing the databases under my care, I needed to do one thing: smartly automate as much of my job as I could. This became particularly important in my last full-time DBA spot where one other guy and I had responsibility for about 120 Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2 databases. A lot of these databases ran critical applications with lots of users, so we were rarely bored at work. To keep our heads above water, we needed to do something to ensure we always had our finger on the pulse of all our servers, plus we needed to make sure that any performance issue was recognized as early as possible.

I wrote a post recently that focused only on things I see as shortcomings or problems with Gentoo GNU/Linux. That was the intent of the article, to explain why I switched to Ubuntu for my personal systems. On the flip side, nothing's perfect, but nothing's perfectly flawed, either. There are still many things I like about Gentoo.

I have been waiting and waiting ever since the announcement that the MySQL database had split into the MySQL Enterprise Server and MySQL Community Server.

Waiting for what?

For my mind to come to some resolution or conclusion about the change and what it means. It has been some time now and it just hasn't happened. I'm not sure what it says about me that I can't come to a conclusion about this, but here's what I've got so far while waiting for more time to pass. Feelings on any of this are subject to change.

Note: I've had a long-time sense that MySQL must be careful in their balance between feeling like a commercial business and feeling like an open source project. I wrote about this almost three years ago at the 2004 MySQL Users Conference. I think the …

I got notified yesterday that my proposal for a talk at php|tek. I'll be presenting a talk entitled "Top 15 Ways to Kill MySQL Performance", which will be a fun-filled look at all those things we, as application and database developers, do to shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to MySQL database performance. Lots of SQL coding techniques, and, as I say in the abstract, you're guaranteed to leave the taslk with at least one gem you can use to point the finger at a colleague! Good times!

TimeSys Board of Directors Appoints Joseph J. Raffa Interim CEO, TimeSys (Press Release)

realMethods Expands Its Open Source Scope, realMethods (Press Release)

DHS gears up for research phase of open source bug hunt, Linux.com, Michael Stutz (Article)

Opinion: Five reasons why you should never use PostgreSQL — ever, SearchOpenSource.com, W. Jason Gilmore (Article)

Editor’s Note: Which Road To Take?, Linux Today, Brian …

A popular myth holds that the MySQL Database Server strips the comments from stored procedures, functions, triggers, views and events. This is not true. Or at least, it is only somewhat true.

On an earlier occasion, I have written about MySQL views and how they lose all their comments and whitespace formatting. The article also describes a workaround for it. (Interestingly, a few of the bugs I ran into at the time are now resolved, which means …

Daniel Nichter has released version 3.0 of mysqlreport, one of my favorite tools for quickly comprehending the overall state of a MySQL server. The new version prints out the most important information about InnoDB.

• LOST invite LOST is a student project. The aim of LOST is to show how 7 million people connect to one another, and break the record for the game with the most players ever!

  LOST enables you to interact with people across the world, and see how you are linked to them (tags: socialnetworking networking)

• BBC - bbc.co.uk Standards & Guidelines Standards and guidelines for producing applications suitable for production use by the BBC. Includes database use, coding style and accessibility. (tags: accessibility …

When people are comparing databases and trying to select the correct one for their application, it is a very complex and confusing process. There are many factors, price being not the least of these. Some would opt for a closed-source product because of the extra bells and whistles it offers. I have to say that some of these extra features may represent security risks, or simply a database trying to take on functionality better performed at the application layer. There is a certain argument to have all of your business logic embedded in the database as it certainly eases the burden on the application programmers. But it can allow them to become sloppy, or to allow the database to be exposed directly to the users without even an application layer to protect it, counting on the database to protect itself. In some cases this comes at a price, sacrificing speed for security, when some fairly simple application coding could have implemented the same …