I’ve just finished a tour through silicon valley (got to be up at 4:30 AM to catch a flight - yuck) for some meetings at the MySQL offices and had the opportunity to visit several customers (including our own internal webmaster!) to get some feedback on replication and backup features. I visited a good range of sites, from startups to very large established ISVs. The thing that impressed me most of all was just how smart the MySQL customers are.

When I’ve evangelised open source in the past I’ve often heard snide comments made by folks trying to understand open source, like “yeah, but does anyone actually look at the source?”. Yes, people actually look at the source. See, there are a whole lot of people in the IT/computer industry that actually care about being efficient (in terms of both human and computer resources), making things work right, and making sure that people don’t lose data. People look at the source code for MySQL …

The Pro MySQL page on Apress now has Chapter 4, MySQL System Architecture, available as a sample chapter download.

Jay wrote this one and it's one of my favorite chapters in the book. It's an in-depth look at the organization of the MySQL source code. My recollection is that Jay spent more than a week of all-day sessions digging through the source code and organizing information.

Looks like the eBook is now available too.

lathiat: Avahi

Trent has been blogging quite often about Avahi. It does look like a good project to watch. Promises ease of use (for the coder who really doesn’t care about Rendezvous/Bonjour/ZeroConf/whatever-they-call-it-this-week internals and just wants Cool Functionality(tm) in their app).

Maybe integrating this would be cool for mysqld and the gui tools. (i’ve toyed with the thoughts of using it in cluster… but do we relaly want another thing that can possibly fail in a HA environment… probably not - considering using DNS is usually a bad idea).

I'm seriously considering to use a nested set model, but I'm still not too happy about all the overhead involved.

I reread the article by Mike Hillyer, especially the bit that handles inserting new nodes. I like the function I wrote because it uses a single insert statement to handle both the rearrangement of the tree as well as the insertion of the new node. This also relieves me from the task of explicitly locking tables.
On the other hand, the wee lines Mike uses to perform an insert seem so elegant, that I can't help thinking I'm doing something horribly wrong. But then again, in Mike's article, the user that's inserting the nodes somehow magically knows where to make room in the tree. The whole point of using a hybrid model like I want to, is to allow for easy inserts (and updates for that matter, although I'd still have to implement it) as well as straighforward, efficient extraction. On the other hand, what I really want …

Last week I was teaching one of the MySQL training courses, this time in Melbourne. Even with experienced users it's important to go over the basics, as there's always some aspects that they haven't come across in their work. Filling in those gaps is essential before you can focus on design, optimization and scaling.

Anyway, since all my students did indeed have SQL experience, we were able to run through some of the materials at higher speed and so on Tuesday afternoon we actually had quite a bit of spare time. So we set up a MySQL Cluster using six of the student PCs in the classroom as data nodes, a configuration with two replicas. We loaded up the data from Jeremy Cole's FlightStats demo app which provides a decent (and growing) dataset to play with.
…

MySQL Connector/Net 1.0.5, a new version of the fully-managed, ADO.Net provider for the MySQL database system has been released. This release is the latest production release of the 1.0 series and is suitable for use with any MySQL version including MySQL-4.1 or MySQL-5.0.

It is now available in source and binary form from the Connector/Net download pages at

 and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

The forum announcement (along with …

I’ve written a simple web frontend for the perror utility which is provided by MySQL. Some distributions, or some systems running older versions of MySQL do not have this utility, and sometimes, I don’t have access to a shell, I ran into this very problem over the weekend when I was on vacation, so I needed a quick way to be able to lookup these errors. Long story short, I now have this utility working and it’s available to all. I figured I’m not alone, so I’d let everyone hit it if they needed to.
You can get to it by just going to http://www.phpcult.com/mysql/123. Replace the last thing with 123, 111, 122, 120 whatever and it will give you the meaning. Hope this helps people.

MDB2 development has been a lengthy process indeed. As a matter of fact development began back in the summer of 2003. Now two years later the fact of the matter is that MDB2 has been useful for production purposes for the past 1,5 years and all that really stopped it from going stable is the final decision to mark the API as stable.

That is not to say that the past 1,5 years were wasted on API changes alone. Alot of things where tweaked, performance improved and useability drastically improved. Most PEAR modules that can talk to a database support MDB2 natively etc. However life as an MDB2 user was full of suprises (not as much for those that actually read the changelog) on every update and I think its really about time this ends.

So I am finally dropping the idea of PDO API compatibility once and for all. …

Congrats to Simon Phipps who has been promoted to Sun's Chief Open Source Officer.  I don't know if Simon's the first open source guy with such a fancy title, but it is obviously a significant endorsement both of Sun's open source strategy and their confidence in Simon to lead the charge. 

As Sun frequently points out, they've long been a supporter of open source technology and they made a major commitment earlier this year by open sourcing Solaris, their flagship operating system.  OpenSolaris appears to be gathering steam, particularly on high performance Opteron systems.  Sun has had a long history of …

Ok.  Everyone else seems to be doing it.  You can google talk me at reggie.burnett@gmail.comm