The MySQL Sandbox has been enhanced, with a new express installer, capable of setting up a sandbox in just a few seconds, and an interactive wizard, for fine tuning complex installations.
A lengthty tutorial is accompanying the new release.

This tool could be the basis for a long overdue interactive installation tool for Unix systems. What do you think?

Hello all! Had a good webinar today, with some great questions. Here are the slides in PDF format:

PDF version of Performance Tuning Best Practices

I finally realised and it's so true. People don't buy open source because the opensource companies don't give free movie tickets, iPods, Moutain bikes, City Trips , the proprietary companies do.. the hardware companies do, but the people that sell open source services don't.

I remember a couple of years ago when working for one of the larger mobile operators in Belgium and we had to decide on some new platforms.. the technical people were invited to some technical sessions 5km from our office by different vendors. We actually had already decided without those sessions by marketeers that didn't even knew the answers to our questions. But.. the management got invited to a full week visit to some manufacturer in California , when they came back we were not even heard about our opinions.. the deals were already closed. And it wasn't our choice.

In other unrelated news I finally found time to upgrade a MySQL Cluster test platform to …

I didn’t really know that the Open Source Developers’ Club actually existed, but I’m impressed with the previous topics. I shall aim to be at Ben Cornwell’s MySQL Normalization & Optimisation Techniques talk if time permits on the 14th of June.

Maybe as pre-requsite reading, it might be useful for folk to read mhillyer’s excellent introductory article on Database Normalization.

I spent some time with Ingres CTO Dave Dargo today talking about Ingres and the market in general. Dave was at Oracle for many moons and is definitely one of the important database thinkers.

My initial conversation question to Dave was simple: Why does Ingres matter?

Dargo responded that he joined because Ingres had some good technology and a strong customer base. He also said that market-wise database customers were not terribly pleased with the existing products from Oracle and Microsoft.

"The success of Linux and Apache emboldened people to experiment with open source. Customers felt like they could go with free and not get features, or go with closed and be stuck. Ingres was already through the maturity process and had better technology than the other open source databases. I wanted to take Ingres beyond the database. If you look at MySQL and EnterpriseDB, …

One of the main reasons to use a MySQL Cluster is the ability to get better performance and scalability compared to using a database that is confined to a single host. This chapter discusses many of the concepts related to performance and scalability, as well as how to ensure that you get the maximum performance from your MySQL Cluster setup.

I just checked out my account at www.pearsonvue.com and found out that the MySQL Upgrade Certification exams from 4.x to 5.0 are available.

Guess, I'll have to start learning again.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I would change the architecture to support multiple DB instances. In fact, the change was fairly simple, as you can see in the following drawing:

As you can see, I added a copy of the complete set of components which interact with the database. In the drawing two databases are connected to the bus, but copying the components can be repeated multiple times to allow more db instances to connect to the bus.

So what are the changes in the scenario?
In the previous design, only one db subscriber requested the sensor data to put it in the database. Again, only one one db publisher was present to publish the query results onto the bus.

In this new design, multiple instances of the db subscriber are reading the sensor data from the bus. They are responsible to pass the …

XAMPP 1.5.3 BETA is now available for download. This beta release includes
new versions of PHP 5.1.4, MySQL 5.0.21, Apache 2.2.2, phpMyAdmin 2.8.1 and OpenSSL 0.9.8b. The final versions are expect to be finished by mid-next week.

XAMPP BETA downloads