An update about Ubuntu: Mark Shuttleworth is coming to Moscow this week, and there will be a meeting with community. Is anyone coming? I'll be there. One reason, our CEO, Marten Mickos, is coming to INTEROP on 21st of June, and there will be no such meeting with MySQL users. So I'll go and see how to organize these things :)

The biggest current problem that I know in the MySQL servers is the performence of information_schema. This is reported as bug 19588:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 1829 to server version: 5.0.22-max-log


Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.


mysql> SELECT TABLE_SCHEMA,
    ->   sum((DATA_LENGTH + INDEX_LENGTH) / (1024 * 1024)) as size_mb
    -> FROM information_schema.TABLES
    -> GROUP BY TABLE_SCHEMA
    -> HAVING size_mb > 10
    -> ORDER BY size_mb DESC;


...


xxx rows in set (7 min 34.71 sec)

Even though this server hosts a lot of data - more than 7 minutes for this query is tough.

Google offers a little Toolbar that provides additional information about the displayed website, including the PageRank value that indicates how "important" the website is in Google's eyes (and that's said to be used to calculate the relevance in Google searches).

Here are some values that I looked up:

www.mysql.com: 9/10
www.planetmysql.org: 8/10
www.google.com: 8/10
www.microsoft.com: 9/10
www.yahoo.com: 9/10
www.oracle.com: 9/10
…

Seems I have over time, thought of many ideas, jotted some notes on some, and even done some work, but everybody knows that “home projects” can take a long time.

Here are a few that have resurfaced over the past month, and I doubt I’ll ever get to them, or perhaps some other enterprising person has already done a similar thing. Of course most are for my own personal/professional gratification, but input from others of “great idea, when do we see it” could sway my interests.

INFORMATION_SCHEMA for MySQL Version 4

Why?

Well, quering the INFORMATION_SCHEMA is very cool, and long overdue for information gathering including statistics, schema definitions, schema version comparision tools etc. Of course there are concerns regarding the performance of using the INFORMATION_SCHEMA, and any design should significantly …

What is this? How can a slave have multiple masters? Well the architecture is not what the name implies. A slave can have only one master. But here we are going to create a loop between slaves and masters, also known as Circular replication.

Lets take 3 machines. (Since i have only a single machine - my laptop - i created 3 instances of mysql running on 3 different ports and with 3 different data directories to work out this architecture.) Suppose, we have installed mysql on all the 3 machines/nodes - say NodeA, NodeB, NodeC. What needs to be done is that NodeA is slave of NodeC, NodeC is slave of NodeB and NodeB is slave of NodeA. So each mysql instance is a master and also a slave. I will go into implementation details of this in a minute. First of all, let me list down the benefits and issues with this setup.

Benefits:

• 
  
• You can build a high availability and high …

In my previous blog entry, I wrote about how I'm currently checking out the Pentaho open source Business Intelligence platform. Well, I've only done a little bit of all the checking out I planned to do, but here I'd like to present some of the things that I found out so far.

In this blog entry, I will focus on some features of the latest addition to the Pentaho: K.E.T.T.L.E, which forms the principal ETL component of the platform.

In case you're interested in Pentaho in general: I just heard that on 21 june, MySQL will be conducting a Web-seminar on BI with Pentaho and MySQL, so you might want to …

The following is based on a presentation given at the Enterprise Open Source Conference in New York City on June 6, 2006. You can download the slides for the presentation.

Good afternoon. My name is Si Chen, and thank you for coming to my presentation about the adoption of open source business applications.

It's a long of fun to be here alongside the developers and industry veterans who are shaping open source software today because, well, my background is a little different. I used to be a hedge fund manager and worked right up the street at the Met Life building on top of Grand Central, right here in New York City.

I'm here today because about six years ago, I helped start an online retail company named Gracious Style. …

If you've been reading enough database related forums, mailing lists or blogs you probably heard complains about MySQL being unable to handle more than 1.000.000 (or select any other number) rows by some of the users. On other hand it is well known with customers like Google, Yahoo, LiveJournal,Technocarati MySQL has installations with many billions of rows and delivers great performance. What could be the reason ?

The reason is normally table design and understanding inner works of MySQL. If you design your data wisely considering what MySQL can do and what it can't you will get great perfomance if not, you might become upset and become one of thouse bloggers. Note - any database management system is different in some respect and what works well for Oracle,MS SQL, PostgreSQL may not work well for MySQL and other way around. Even storage engines have very important differences which can affect performance dramatically.

The three …

I'm reading through an excellent JMP Securities research note called "Turning the Software Model Upside Down: The Proliferation of Open Source." [Subscription required.] It's a good overview of the open source business phenomenon - the how's and why's open source is increasingly dominating software - but I particularly like its analysis of proprietary vendor's likely responses to open source:

• Proliferation of enterprise license agreements ("ELAs"?). Large enterprise software vendors such as Oracle Corporation, Microsoft and IBM may aggressively pursue ELAs with customers. Our due diligence suggests Oracle has employed this practice over the past few years. ELAs reduce the cost advantages of open source software since they are often structured as "?all you can eat" type of deal. Effectively the …