In the “Australian Technology and Business Magazine” - December 2005 edition there was an article on comparing database products. Here are my comments, which I also plan to forward to the editor.

BTW: I’ve since also found this articles content on another site here. It seems that most if not all is the same.

In response to your cover story article “The Usual Suspects Four databases we suspect your business could be quite interested in.” which appeared in the December 2005 edition, I would have to sum up your article in one word “Disappointing”. Let me provide some feedback from my perspective.

You start by defining a scenario, which is the only approach you can take for a suitable comparision of database products due to diversity of features available in …

zip:

At last night's Boston MySQL meetup someone raised a point that I've been thinking about off and on for the last day.

The attendee suggested that for years MySQL was the database that didn't have all the frills. It was simple to use, easy to maintain, and performed better than a more complex database. MySQL AB has been working on changing that perception for some time. Misconceptions about lack of transactions and referential integrity have been a battle since back in the 3.23.x days. Now with the release of 5, the message seems to be even stronger. It's no longer the database that it used to be, it's grown up, all of the features that it's been criticized for not having are now there in some form, and a lot more greatness is in the pipe. …

Having a sysadmin background, I am fairly familiar with cron. I’m amazed at how many companies set up cron jobs and assume everything will just work. If root mail is not checked (or forwarded to someone who actually reads it), a cron job could fail and you would never know.

Having an automated task fail silently is a Bad Thing ™. I take commands which should have no output normally (such as mysqldump > dumpfile.sql and mysql < maintenance.sql) and pipe the output into a script called mailif. The script will e-mail a specified recipient if standard input is not blank.

In plain English, if the automated task has ANY output or error code, it e-mails me.

One of my current tasks is going through all the database maintenance scripts and making sure it e-mails me if there’s an error.

Standard cron entries have 6 …

Wow! I just stumbled across mysqldumpslow (while RTFM’ing) and what a tool!

It goes through the slow query log you give as an argument and tallies up the number of times each query appears and a lot of other summary data. Not knowing about this before, it makes it easy to prioritize which slow queries to work on first.

DB User = dba
DB Pass = dba
DB Name = TEST
command = trace_on
argument = TRACE_INSERT

Voila:

$ dbmcli -u dba,dba -d TEST trace_on TRACE_INSERT

While this may be old hat to those of you out there who, like me, regularly scour through the source code commits on the internals (and newly forked commits) lists, however, in the past few weeks, a couple of documentation and code commits have caught my attention. Things catch my attention for any number of reasons. Most often, the commits that I flag for a later look at are those things which I suspected would change in the near future when I wrote chapters of Pro MySQL that dealt with the source code, architecture and storage engines. Other times, I catch something about a particular bug that I've run into has been fixed. Other times, I just notice some really cool idea that's going into the code and decide to investigate. Of course, besides the few things below, there …

Thanks to Lenz Grimmer on the MySQL forums. His solution was to use the following variables:

CC=icc \
CFLAGS="-O3 -unroll2 -ip -mp -restrict" \
CXX=icpc \
CXXFLAGS="-O3 -unroll2 -ip -mp -restrict" \
LDFLAGS="-static-libcxa -i-static"

There's a good blog article on the Xooglers (ex-Googlers) web site about how they use MySQL to run their adwords program.  If you're not familiar, adwords generates something like 99.9% of Google's advertising revenues, so it certainly a business critical application.  While Google is generally quite secretive about their internal operations, there are some interesting tidbits in this posting about how Google tried a commercial, closed-source database but it was never able to perform as well as MySQL.  A few select quotes:

• "AdWords was built using the MySQL database, which is open-source and therefore available for free. It is by now also nearly as full-featured as the best commercial databases, but back in 2000 this was not the case."
• "Many managers seem to have this idea that it is invariably true that you get what you pay for, and that therefore …

A couple friends are looking to put together a new on-line service and are in need of a skilled engineer to get their first working prototype built. If things go well, you'd have the chance to be a founder in their new venture.

Specifically, they've requested:

• PHP and MySQL experience.
• Drupal experience as a "very nice to have" skill.
• Some AJAX know-how, if possible.
• Experience building consumer-facing websites with a community/social angle.

I'm 90% sure they'd like someone in the San Francisco Bay Area but will consider remote folks too if it's a good match.

If you're interested, please e-mail me or leave a comment and I'll forward your information along to them.

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