Looks like I'm headed to Montreal for PHP Quebec in the end of March, giving a session on setting up and managng MySQL Cluster (I believe details are coming to the PHP Quebec site soon). There is quite a lineup of speakers and sessions, I'm looking forward to them. As a person who does a lot of Perl in the day and PHP only at night it will be nice to spend some time focused on PHP and around PHP folks. The conference has presentations on a few different databases. Looking forward to them as well, getting a look at how it feels to use something other than MySQL.

The conference is a mix of French and English speaking sessions, as I do not speak any French mine will be in English (Bostonian english).

If …

Yesterday I gave an hour long interview to a firm that ranks top 10 within it's industry. Out of the many people interviewing me, most of them were pro-MS SQL server even though the company had everything on MySQL.

The interviewers repeatedly asked me about how will I migrate to MS SQL server from MySQL? I on the other hand kept pushing for MySQL telling them that there is no need to go with MS SQL server as they can do everything they want with MySQL. I did ended up telling them about how I would go about migrating in the end.

I felt a concern that for some reason they weren't sure about MySQL's future and the acquisition of Innobase by Oracle (Heck they didn't know about BDB's acquisition).

Anyway, I am currently waiting to hear from them.

Frank

April 1st is still more than a month away and at least one rumour about Oracle’s upcoming purchases is true: today the software giant annnounced their acquisition of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB (and various other products).

One interesting point is that Berkeley DB was already seeing competition from SQLite (which is an excellent, fast and free (as in beer and freedom) RDBMS). I wonder how much the acquisition is going to drive adoption of SQLite?

Additionally, Oracle now owns both half of MySQL’s transactional storage engines, which perhaps gains them another measure of control over the Swedish upstart. (The other engines are …

After buying PeopleSoft for $11.1 billion and Siebel Systems for $5.85 billion dollars, Oracle has finally bought Sleepycat, the makers of Berkeley DB (or BDB) for an undisclosed amount.

According to the media reports, Oracle has spent nearly $20 billion in acquisitions in the last 2 years. That's 10 billion dollars a year and close to a billion dollars per month.

The troubling thing is the fact that "stopping" is not in Oracle's dictionary. The company is also after Zend and JBoss.

From what I see Oracle felt very threatened by MySQL and Open Source, and as a result is trying to drive MySQL out of the market.

Is this Game over?
As my fellow blogger, Markus has been pointing out for some …

In MySQL 5.1.6 there’s a new INFORMATION_SCHEMA table.

Currently, it only has information on files for NDB but we’re hoping to change that in a future release (read: I think it would be neat).

This table is a table generated by the MySQL server listing all the different files that are/could be used by a storage engine. Three (may) be table to file mappings (or not) depending on the engine.

Basically, NDB does files like so:

A table is stored in a tablespace.

A tablespace has datafiles.

Datafiles are of a set size.

Space is allocated in datafiles to tables in a unit called an extent.

If you don’t have any free extents you cannot have new tables store data on disk.

If you don’t have any free extents you may still be able to add data to a table as …

Noticed this about our web based forums today:

the “Re: What is this? “Can’t find record in ‘'’ on query.”" post on the cluster forum from 10/02/06 07:53:20 isn’t the last message in that thread. there are currently 6 messages of which I only see 2.

Not only that, but from looking at the RSS, I can’t even see this post.

argh! So I shot off an email to our internal guys. The reply was that they don’t have hacking Phorum on their radar (fair enough). Of course, this just means that Phorum sucks[1] (or at least did in the version we do) and adds to the list of reasons why web based forums are much like doing $adjective to $noun.

What is it with new internet lamers and the inability to use an email program? Or even an nntp client (okay, usenet is officially crap now unless you just want spam and …

Today I was asked to transfer an OSCommerce store with MySQL for a client.

First of all, we need to login to the old server and archive all the data. So navigate to home directory and issue the following command

tar -cvf old.tar ./

Now FTP this directory to the new server and untar it.

tar -xvf old.tar

Now we need to dump MySQL databases. Login to old server and issue:

mysqldump -uusername -ppassword -a --databases database1 database2 database3 | ssh user@newhost.com "mysql -uusername_new -h hostname_new.com -ppassword"

The hostname is needed in the above command if you cannot connect using localhost.

Q: Does anyone know how I can dump a database that …

As a "little developer", I don't really know what's exactly going on behind the scenes - business stuff is not so my big thing.

However, I feel that it would be good for MySQL to have its own full featured storage engine(s) (with foreign key constraints, ACID transaction and all that stuff) under its control. Maybe there are no risks for the short term (I don't know), but it would still be better for MySQL's reputation to be completely independent from any competitor and from anybody else.

Insecure users will more likely migrate to another database systems than those who know what the future will bring. And people who now use other database systems will more likely not migrate to MySQL, if they can't anticipate how data will be stored in the future. So I would see an own and independent full featured storage engines as one of the very highest priorities for MySQL's future - not only from the technical point of view, …

April 1st is still more than a month away and at least one rumour about Oracle's upcoming purchases is true: today the software giant annnounced their acquisition of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB (and various other products).

One interesting point is that Berkeley DB was already seeing competition from SQLite (which is an excellent, fast and free (as in beer and freedom) RDBMS). I wonder how much the acquisition is going to drive adoption of SQLite?

Additionally, Oracle now owns both half of MySQL's transactional storage engines, which perhaps gains them another measure of control over the Swedish upstart. (The other engines are …