One of the big advantages of MySQL is its concept of "pluggable storage engines". This means you can choose the most optimal storage engine for your needs. This also has a disadvantage: You have to know what you are doing...

MySQL has also a full text search engine built in. But this search engine is not as fast a you probably want to. Thus there are some alternative full text search engines which might be working together with MySQL.

My brother alerted me to a good posting on "The Eight Truths of Real Innovators" from the futurelab blog.  It may be a bit pretentious to call these the "eight truths" but they are certainly thought provoking.  Perhaps readers will come up with their own "truths" to add to this list:

1. Stop equating innovation to R&D
   Its not about the lab experiment, it's about how you're helping customers.  Innovation doesn't just mean the code; it can be the development model, the business model, the distribution model and more.
2. Pay people to fail
   It is the risky …

Bob Field posted his reactions to the recent MySQL announcement to offer two versions of the MySQL Server product: Enterprise Server and Community Server. I feel somewhat similarly; the change has the potential to give greater value to both the corporate customers of MySQL and their community users. It will be interesting to see how this develops as we go forward.By making less frequent

MySQL has recently started a campaign of open contribution, inviting the community to participate to the MySQL project in many ways.

The next target, also considering the higer stakes coming from the MySQL Enterprise challenge, will be Quality Assurance.
Quality AssuranceNow what is Quality Assurance (QA)? If you think that it's just bug hunting, then you have a simplistic view of the software generation lifecycle. QA deals with all the steps in the software lifecycle, and at each steps there are actions that can affect the quality of the final outcome. QA components include (but are not limited to) failure testing, statistical control, process and performance control, best practice …

This is the fourth in a series of articles on profiling MySQL. My past three articles have explained how to measure the work a query causes MySQL to do. In this article I introduce a tool I've written to do the work for you and produce a compact, readable report of that work, with all the math already done, and the measurements labelled and grouped for ease of comprehension. With this tool you can understand query performance at a glance.

Novell Delivers Integrated Stack for SUSE Linux Enterprise Built with Mixed Source Software and Systems from IBM, Novell (Press Release)

European Consortium to Prove Quality of Open Source Software, SQO OSS (Press Release)

Pentaho Marks Second Anniversary with 1.5 Million Downloads, Pentaho (Press Release)

Centeris Sponsors New Interoperability Event, TechX World, Centeris (Press Release)

Open Country Enhances Systems …

Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL is a robust and intelligent solution for live backup and recovery of local and remote MySQL databases. In case you are not familiar with it, take a look at ZRM for MySQL project page.

Key features in 1.1 release
- Backup images can be compressed and encrypted using platform tools
- Custom plugin interfaces for
- Backup encryption
- Pre backup actions
- Post backup actions
- Flexible scheduling
- Binary log parser
- Secure file transfer
- Automatic HTML and Text backup report generation
- Backup reports are available as RSS feed

This is an open source community project. Feel free to check out the project wiki, go to …

This post originally appeared on O’Reilly’s blog. This post originally appeared on O’Reilly’s blog. MySQL provides some tools to monitor and troubleshoot a MySQL server, but they don’t always suit a MySQL developer or administrator’s common needs, or may not work in some scenarios, such as remote or over-the-web monitoring. Fortunately, the MySQL community has created a variety of free tools to fill the gaps. On the other hand, many of these are hard to find via web searches.

Noel Yuhanna, database guru over at Forrester Research, has published a new report "Six Database Initiatives That Can Save Money."  Several of the initiatives are directly related to using open source technology and also fit with our recent MySQL Enterprise announcement, especially the new MySQL Network Monitoring & Advisory Service. 

While it's obvious that eliminating hefty license fees for closed source databases is going to save money, Noel's other ideas can boost the savings even further.  For example, we've seen many customers engage in consolidation or standardization strategy whereby they replace old Informix, Sybase or other obsolete …