Welcome to the inaugural Log Buffer, a Carnival of the Vanities for the DBA community. Since this is the first, the duty of hosting it falls to us, but we hope other bloggers in the community will take on future editions. Here are our favourite database-related blog articles. Ten years ago on July 8th, the [...]

One of our managers at MySQL recommended the book "It's Not What You Say... It's What You Do" to me as something that he's used in managing teams.  While there's nothing here specifically about open source, the book provides a good "back to basics" approach to management.  Forget the big strategic initiatives in a company, the radical pronouncements of being customer-centric or sigma-six-oriented or whatever the latest buzzword is among management gurus.  The key questions are: Did you set goals?  Was there buy-in?  How much did you follow up? 

My own management style is not perfect, but I try …

This past Monday the Boston MySQL meetup featured Jim Starkey, a database guru who's hard at work coding a new database storage engine (code named Falcon) for MySQL.

This is a great presentation, Jim throws in a lot of database history and insight into working with MySQL. I left the camera on for the first bit of the Q/A. Also very good stuff.

I put in some extra video production effort this month. The video includes superimposed slides for better readability. Sheeri bought a new mic last month which captures the audience feedback better than in the past, seems to work well.

You can get the Quicktime here or …

Some weeks back I posted that the development of SQLbusRT had started. After some days this task had been postponed to reconsider the architectural design and to do some more theoretical research.

The version I started was programmed in C, which seemed to be a logical choice since there's a good ORTE API in C.

Yesterday I restarted the coding, now with C++ as the language. It's still possible to use the C API for ORTE, but it also allows me to have an object oriented approach.

The following components will be present in the first release:

• A tiny API for writing simple clients and sensors
• An insertion interface, which writes the sensor data to the database
• A selection interface, which handles query requests from clients
• A small example client and sensor

As soon as a package becomes available, I will post a message here on how to …

Please note that I am in no way affiliated with MySQL (AB). I am just a user of their products. Everything you read here, especially my explanations and conclusions are to the best of my knowledge, but there is a chance that they are awfully wrong!

I recently had to investigate the cause for a very long running delete operation in one of our applications. Apparently the time was spent in a single MySQL statement. While looking into the matter I exchanged numerous mails with the MySQL customer support, until I finally came up with a (much) improved version of the query. Along the way I learned some valuable information about MySQL's (or better InnoDB's) transaction levels.

Problem

The general problem looks quite simple:

• Three tables, let's just call them A (500.000 rows), B (4.000 rows) and C (180.000 rows)

• B contains detail information for …

If you haven't picked up a copy of Pro MySQL, Barnes and Noble has a great deal on a selection of books called "Web Coding Tools." Between now and August 9th you can get 40% off these books.

That makes Pro MySQL $29.99 ($26.99 for members), not a bad price. You can order online if a physical B & N isn't an option. If there's a store nearby and you can get a photo of the special display these books are in there may be an iPod nano in it for you.

I took a trip …

I was wracking my brain for a bit, and could not figure out how to do a partial outer join where I was limiting rows from one table. So, I went to post to the MySQL user list — in writing my post, I found the answer. This often happens. It’s not that I don’t have questions to ask the MySQL user list (or forums), it’s just that most of the time, while I’m writing up the question, I find my answer.

First, I simplified my question. Many people do this, but they leave out important information. The trick is to come up with a simplification that you test to make sure it breaks in the same way the more complex, “real” query breaks.

The problem is basically this:
I want an outer join of a static table with a data table, such that I get a report of how many rows in the data table match the static table — including “0″ if there are none, but for a subset of the data in the data table. Consider a …

I've been fortunate to be able to help Tim put together the Open Source Executive Briefing for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention this year. Fortunate because my views of open source tend not to stray far from "What will make my company more money today?" Tim, of course, tends to think in terms of years and decades, not days and weeks. So working with him has helped me see a bit farther out into the darkness to see where open source is going.

The picture is very, very bright.

However, most people will continue plodding along in their "open source is about commodification" mode, missing out on the bigger picture(s), unless they attend. There are very few events that I think can fundamentally change the way you look at, invest in, and monetize open source technology. This …