MySQL 5.1 is moving to a new system for building the source code on Windows, based on CMake (more on this another time).

While finishing up the last bits of this, I ran into a very annoying limitation in Visual Studio (version 7.1 I think). The library include path in Visual Studio project files (.vcproj) has a very tight limit on the maximum length, around 2000 characters it seems. Put a path longer than that in the AdditionalLibraryDirectories section, and you will not get an error but the build will fail to find required libraries. This problem is made more serious by the fact that CMake tends to use absolute paths, leading to longer paths in the project files.

Googling a bit for this problem turned up nothing, so in the end I had to resort to some extremely ugly Perl one-liner build cleanup:

perl -i.bak -pe "s/[a-z]:[^,; …

Do you have a users group near you? Is it thriving? In conjunction with Mike Kruckenberg, I’ve been running the Boston MySQL Users Group for 6 months. Every meeting draws 30-60 members, and members overall are quite satisfied.

How do we do it? If you’re at the MySQL Users Conference, come find out at the MySQL Users Group BOF to get tips and tricks, or to share your own success stories and pitfalls. 8:30 -9:30 pm, Tuesday April 25th.

MySQL UC 2006 - April 24-27, 2006 - Santa Clara, CA - MySQL Cluster: New Features and Enhancements

So I’ve done some more run throughs to get things running smoother (and made some more edits along the way). At some point I will stop fiddling with the darn thing. It’s going to be fine (repeat, take 8 times and call me in the morning if pain persists).

Some features take a lot longer to explain than others. It’s quite interesting really.

I’ve tried to strike a balance between good overviews of technology and the down-and-dirty details. Hopefully it’s a good balance and fits the audience. I’m assuming a bit of knowledge about Cluster (I think the SQL knowledge should be a given - it’s a technical talk at the MySQL UC!). I’m expecting to be thrown a bunch of questions througouht - and …

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Many MySQL critics have complaint about the lacking of key features, scalability and standards compliance. They also often complain about users who fall for MySQL's successful marketing, short of blaming the inherit evil nature of the universe why such inferior technology is so popular.

While MySQL has been catching up on all of the above mentioned fronts, it cannot be denied that one of its key strength's is its active community. While some will argue that this community was a direct result of giving the masses the features they needed, instead of clobbering them with features that would just overwhelm these often self educated people. Others might simply attribute this to their effective marketing machinery. However even today MySQL attracts new users even though the product has become considerably more complex. This is probably due to its clear dominance as the OSS database of choice. At the same time MySQL is now able to make in roads …

A chunk of another sample chapter from Pro MySQL has made it's way out there. This time it's the first 10 pages of Chapter 5, Storage Engines and Data Types over on DBAZine.

I can't be 100% sure (and please correct me if I'm wrong) but I think MySQL is fairly new to DBAZine. When I first went to look around the site to get an idea of what chapters might fit I couldn't find anything about MySQL anywhere. Conversations with Apress indicated that DBAZine was looking to expand to include some of the open source database offerings. I'm excited that MySQL is the first of the open source databases to get attention.

Stewart has a new toy for his MySQL User Conference presentation, which is probably for the best as I fully intend to ask why MySQL replication is so unreliable, why Innodb hot backup appears to hate me, and lots of other biting questions if I think of them. It does make me wonder what other Aussies are going to be in town for the conference? I have a survey for you to complete:

• My name is: ________________________________
• I am arriving: ________________________________
• I will be staying in: ______________________________ (name of city only please)
• I would be interested in drinking so much I fall off my chair: yes / no (please circle)
• I would like to know where you can get Coopers beer in Silicon Valley: yes / no (please circle)
• Is …

MySQL today announced that Seat Pagine Gialle, one of Europe's leading business directory providers, has selected MySQL Cluster technology to provide maximum uptime and availability to its heavily-trafficked online properties, including Virgilio, Yahoo.it, Yahoo.co.uk, Thomson Local Services, Corriere della Sera, and Supereva.

A few months ago I wrote from Caracas, Venezuela on the importance of infrastructure. I'm on vacation in Costa Rica now with my family, and the same lesson is hitting home.

In software, we're largely coming to take infrastructure for granted, thanks to exceptional middleware from JBoss, databases from PosgreSQL and MySQL, etc. We think, in other words, that 280 (California), I-80 (CA to UT and beyond), I-95 (Massachusetts), M25 (London), and other roads just happen. They're free, like much of our best software. Infrastructure is FREE!!!!

Except that it's not. I drove on pseudo-free infrastructure Sunday as my family and I headed to church in Puntarenas, Costa Rica. The drive is roughly 60 kilometers, and took us 1.5 hours. Why did it take so long? Because try as I might, I couldn't jump our little Toyota over the massive …

Disclaimer:
I have the unfortunate luck of being hired on the same date that Tom Kyte started his blog. Honestly, I've been working on this a couple days so I'm posting it anyway, even if you think I am a copycat.

Six years ago today I started with my current company. This is the longest I've ever had the same title, although my responsibilities have changed over the years. It's also the most time I've spent at the same place.

It was the tail end of the dotCom boom and I had over 40 interviews with companies in the Tri-State area. Most of them didn't pan out, but when it came time to choose, I had three offers to consider. When I accepted this job, I took a chance because I liked the people but didn't think they had enough for me to do. I was the sole DBA for one production database that ran on an Ultra 2 (2 CPUs, 54G of …