I spoke with Paola Lubet, VP of Marketing at SolidDB to discuss their recent announcements with MySQL. According to Paola, the major roadblock for OSS databases into mission-critical environments is the real time nature of transactional data. SolidDB has been developing real-time databases for the last 14 years with features that go beyond basic storage (as one might perceive OSS databases to offer). This advanced functionality is common to Oracle etc, but not regularly seen in OSS databases. MySQL is the first open source DB that will feature this functionality. Both camps think that this will help MySQL move deeper into enterprises.

A prototype is available for download now.
Beta is July
Production is planned for Q4.

Dear MySQL User Conference Attendees,

The resources I mentioned to some or many of you are:

• The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - the classic MIT introductory computer science course textbook (and supporting video lectures are here.)
• PHP Vikinger - a PHP-focused unconference held in Norway on June 24 and 25th.
• GPL v3 site - make sure to check out the comments section
• eZ components - well-designed components for PHP web apps that are well-designed, …

“there’s nothing here i can eat for morning tea, could I please get an apple?”

“no”.

fuck.

Today, a few days later than originally planned and after 91 days in beta testing, the new version of XAMPP for Linux and Windows is ready for downloading. The major updates in this version are PHP 5.1.2 and 4.4.2, MySQL 5.0.20, eAccelerator 0.9.4 and phpMyAdmin 2.8.0.3.

Find more details on the specific XAMPP project page.

What an informative session. One of my favorites at the conference.

I am sitting in the session Speeding-up queries by Timour Katchaounov.

Query engine principles

What's new in the 5.0/5.1 engine?

Query engine architecture.
A number of stages in the query engine happen in the parse tree. This is where the SQL standards compliance happens. Access rights are also checked here in Preprocessor. Then we are ready to execute the query in the optimizer.

First are the logical transformations, then cost-based optimization and then plan refinement. Once we have a complete query execution plan, it is sent to query execution component. It uses either table scan or the index scan etc and decides on the various join methods such as nested loops join, hash join etc. Then its passed to the handler API which uses the appropriate storage engine (InnoDB etc).

MySQL …

This is the first official post in my new category: MySQL Tips. Feel free to subscribe to the category-specific RSS feed, if you prefer.

First, for a bit of background information…

In MySQL, access is always granted based on the combination of username and hostname (or IP address, in some cases), and password—for example, jcole@foo.example.bar could be a valid username and hostname combination. As far as I know, this is a historical thing—MySQL authentication is based on username and hostname because it has always been that way.

In order to verify the “network credentials” of the connecting client, MySQL uses a “double reverse-DNS lookup” on the IP of the incoming connection. In short, MySQL first finds out …

I heard Cory Doctorow about a week ago (yes, we have cool international speakers here in Melbourne all the time!), and if there was only one thing you’re really meant to take away from his talk, I think I found the gem.

Cory signs a book

We’re usually told content is king. He says thats a myth. Have you seen the six trillion dollar industry, that is telecommunications? (okay, I don’t know if that stat is remotely correct…) So the content is king idea is bollocks. What is really king is community and inter-personal communication. Getting people to talk about it. Humans are terribly social beings, so yeah, go community.

“Trying to kill MySQL by acquiring open source is like trying to kill
a dolphin by drinking the ocean.” — Marten Mickos

And yes, that quote ties in well with the …

As I mentioned previously, I’ll be reporting on the conference swag along with the sessions at this year’s MySQL User Conference.

The first candidate? The SCO Giant Pen

Check it out!

There are over 1600 people registered for the conference, a record for the conference (this is the 4th year)!

“It’s fun to be a bus driver when the bus is full” says Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL. 1 billion in hte ‘net, 2 billion with a mobile phone, so there’s a lot of connectivity out there. 6.6 billion people in the world, so 15% are online (1 billion). And there are 20 million MySQL downloads per year, with 1/2 that remaining active. So what happens when the online population doubles?

Corporations are doing the same thing consumers are, and adopting for enterprise use. Corporate functions are hosted or put on-premise, because of the consumer experience (ie, google search).

Humans tend to overestimate the short term, and underestimate the long term. The internet has risen slowly since the bubble burst (which was the “hey, the short term isn’t meeting our expectations!”), and we’ve underestimated that. …

So, we had a really good Cluster BOF last night. Started at 8:30 and at 11pm everybody was tired enough to go to bed :)

Healthy mix of people with deployed clusters, prototype clusters and even some who have looked at MySQL Cluster in the past, decided it wasn’t for them at that point in time, but are still interested enough to show up to the BOF.

It was really freeform (as in I got up and said “there is no agenda for this - what do we want to talk about?”).

We got some really valuable feedback about what people like, dislike and even did hands-up polls of “what do you want us to do first?”. Also got some good suggestions on what to tweak (small fixes) to make people’s lives a lot easier.

The room was pretty well populated as well. my guess was half full (which means nothing until you see the size of the rooms. i’ll try and get a photo at some point).

The consensus at the end seemed to be …