Some recent posts regarding Oracle (See Smart moves by MySQL AB and Larry Ellison still doesn’t understand open source) leads me to put in my 2 cents worth.

My background I’m sure like a lot of experienced MySQL people is in Oracle, and indeed in Ingres before that (starting in 1988). I have also worked for a number of years at Oracle Corporation. Ironically I started as their resident Ingres Specialist, in an international research project of DMS (Design & Migration Services) of re-engineering Ingres applications into an Oracle Designer Repository some 10 years ago in 1996. I of course moved into a number of other Oracle roles for clients following that. I still retain some …

I've been posted as a speaker at the MySQL Users Conference at the end of
April.
http://www.mysqluc.com
I will present the partitioning development that has happened in MySQL for
5.1. There's been a lot of work to accomplish this but it's nice to see the
result now that it's nearing completion.

At first when I started this development my main objective of doing this
was to prepare MySQL for parallel query support (which it actually has
support for since 5.0 in MySQL Cluster).

However while developing support for this I've learned a lot about other
nice uses for partitioning. Other open source DBMS's have focused mainly
on the performance aspects of partitioning. I think this has been solved
very well in this 5.1 release, this particular part needed some intricate
understanding of the optimiser which I did not possess on a sufficiently …

Wow, I really have been waiting for this to happen...

I've been using DBDesigner 4 for some time now. DBDesigner let's you define a datamodel using familiar diagramming techniques. Although the user interface has some quirks, I find it a very handy tool, especially for defining simple, physical data models for MySQL. The has got some reverse engineering capabilities, and of course, you can have it generate the SQL DDL statements to realize your datamodel.

Now, for some time there's been talk about the successor to DBDesigner: MySQL Workbench. The alpha has been available since 14 september 2005. I did install it then, but at the time the functionality seemed so limited, it was clear the tool was in the middle of development.

Frankly, it became quite silent after that. The tool is also not (yet?) listed among the other client side mysql tools at …

Recently, Oracle stole a little the show on the database market by acquiring Innobase and Sleepycat, who are producers of two storage engines (InnoDB and BerkeleyDB) that are in use by MySQL.

Now there seems to be a clear response. MySQL has hired former Firebird developer Jim Starkey and MySQL has a new CTO: Taneli Otala - read Kaj Arnö's interview with Taneli.

The final statement on this interview declares a clear goal: "Definitely. I want to be part of the team building the world's best database!". The times when MySQL targeted itself mainly to drive small and medium web based applications are definitely over!

The fact that MySQL is hireing new developers is just another indication that underlines that MySQL is moving forward towards …

What are we going to have BOF (Birds-of-a-Feather) sessions on during the MySQL UC?

Looking at the corresponding web page, the list is short today. It just has Zak Greant and myself moderating a GPLv3 Jam Session.

So please submit your own ideas into our BOF Request Form.

I’d be interested in seeing BOF sessions on topics such as

• Performance Tuning
• Architecture
• Cluster
• Replication
• GUI tools
• MySQL Network
• PHP/LAMP
• Java
• .Net

The ground rules …

Important information: this article is the opinion of Björn Schotte in the role of the editor in chief of the PHP Magazin.

I was just reading the new Computerwoche (one of the most recognized weekly IT journals in Germany) and found an article called "PHP steht vor einem Generationenwechsel". It's quite interesting (irony!) and I wonder who gave the author of the article these information (please e-mail me, thanks). The article is available online, unfortunately only for Premium users

Just to cite a few things:

"Bisher besteht die Programmiersprache aus dem Zend-Core, der ausschliesslich von rund 20 Zend-Angestellten entwickelt wird." (Currently, the language [PHP] consists of Zend-Core which is developed exclusively by 20 Zend employees)

…

Mr. Ellison spouted off on open source yesterday and showed that he has a very sophisticated understanding of open source...as it existed circa 1998. What Ellison doesn't seem to understand is that open source hasn't been about free love and free beer for a long, long time. As such, no one is particularly surprised (at least those that read this blog shouldn't be) to find out that Linux, for example, had a huge chunk of it contributed by Intel, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, etc.

Hence, he says,

"Open source becomes successful when major industrial corporations invest heavily in that open-source project. Every open-source product that has become tremendously successful became successful because of huge dollar investments from …

I had a writer ask me "so do all of your tools run on the Intel
Mac?". The answer is yes. The server is currently a native port and
our GUI tools work quite fine on the Intel Duo Core chipset, which is
a testament to Apple's Rosetta technology.



(and before anyone asks, yes its a bug that all engines appear as plugins... plugable engines are 5.2 not 5.1, Antony is working on it)

Some days ago I interviewed Ian Linden, the Director of Operations at Linden Lab (the company behind the virtual world simulation Second Life) about Second Life, Linux, MySQL and other OSS usage for their operations. I actually performed the interview inside of Second Life, which was quite fun, especially now that there is a Linux client! You can read the full interview on the MySQL Developer Zone. Have a nice weekend!

Update: The interview is now listed on the Featured Articles page on the MySQL Developer Zone, too. If you would like to know more about Second Life and MySQL, Ian will …

The release of MySQL 5.0 introduced the MySQL Instance Manager (IM), which intends to replace the mysqld_safe wrapper script as well as the mysqld_multi script that keeps track of multiple MySQL instances running on the same machine.

This article will qive you a quick overview about the IM and how to enable and configure a minimal setup that uses the IM to manage the default mysqld instance. I used MySQL 5.1.7-beta for my tests, some of this may work differently on other versions of MySQL.

Continue reading "Enabling and using the MySQL …