I've recently noticed my name dropping further and further down the most active list over at Planet Mysql. That's hardly a surprise given that I haven't added a blog in well over 2 weeks, but rather than just simply being too lazy this time I've had other excuses.

First off I changed jobs, I was working on a short term contract which came to an end on 19th November, I had a week "off" (more on that in a second) and then started my new full time position this week.

In my week "off" I spent most of the time working on www.mysqldevelopment.com, I've had a good response to my call for more help (we still want loads more) and people have been kind enough to donate ideas and content of their own for the site. That meant I was busy formating, updating and loading content for at least part of the week. People are also working on some great content based around the CLI and it's looking really good, it's something I've wanted to …

What is Web 2.0? Well the definitions out there aren’t clear and precise. Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly Publishing has a detailed description at http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228. (More notes from this below) His compact description is:

“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web …

Who has the most downloads? Mozilla FireFox, with MySQL not far behind. (Thanks for pointing out the picture, Zack.) Here's the chart from the WSJ:

Now, keep in mind that this chart doesn't include all major open source projects (the article in which it appeared focuses on Sun) - no Linux there, nor Apache. But I think it's interesting to see who has volume.

More interesting, though, is what companies are doing with that volume. MySQL is on a $40 million run-rate for this year, last time I checked. The big question for them (and for every commercial open source provider) is how to turn downloads into dollars. That is, how to improve conversion rates.

MySQL had some 10 million downloads (give or take 2 million) in 2003. It also had ~$10 million in revenue. That's (very) roughly $1/download. (See Christof Wittig's excellent Stanford GSB paper …

Who has the most downloads? Mozilla FireFox, with MySQL not far behind. (Thanks for pointing out the picture, Zack.) Here's the chart from the WSJ:



Now, keep in mind that this chart doesn't include all major open source projects (the article in which it appeared focuses on Sun) - no Linux there, nor Apache. But I think it's interesting to see who has volume.

More interesting, though, is what companies are doing with that volume. MySQL is on a $40 million run-rate for this year, last time I checked. The big question for them (and for every commercial open source provider) is how to turn downloads into dollars. That is, how to improve conversion rates.

MySQL had some 10 million downloads (give or take 2 million) in 2003. It also had ~$10 million in revenue. That's (very) roughly $1/download. (See Christof …

Does anyone know if MySQL runs on pebble? I believe that a) it's based on Debian and b) Metrix delivers their devices pre-installed with a pebble variant. (Correct me if I'm wrong, Matt - ed: thank you. Metrix Pebble is their name for their distribution.)

I'd love to see MySQL installed and distributed with the devices that are being sold by this company because a) it's currently one of the few groups that manage and make use of the Seattle Wireless Network (SWN), and b) Metrix will be managing installation and maintenance of the SWN's Mesh Node located on UPN Tower, on Capitol Hill's …

The Wall Street Journal today, in an article on Sun's recent announcement, reported that MySQL has achieved an estimated 70 million downloads so far.  That's a pretty impressive result and puts MySQL up there with the top products out there, open source or not.  And the momentum is growing with MySQL 5.0.  In the first three weeks we had more than a million downloads.  Thank you to all the MySQL users and supporters out there for making MySQL so popular.  And congratulations to a great worldwide development team!

The news from Sun is that they are continuing in their adoption of open source by offering their Java Enterprise …

Starting today, I am now a member of the MySQL Community Relations team. This means I will assist Arjen, Colin and Kaj (our fearless team leader) in supporting and expanding our fabolous MySQL user community. I am quite excited about this change, after being in charge of the MySQL release builds for almost four years now.

We have a lot of exciting plans and ideas on how to expand and improve our relationship to the MySQL user community and how to encourage collaboration and discussion. I look forward to being more active in our community and to attend Open Source events and conferences again (something I really enjoyed doing back at SuSE).

Markus Popp was successful when asking for help to make a bug repeatable. So why not try it myself?

As I wrote in my field report we hit a few crashing bugs after upgrading to 5.0.15. With 5.0.16 and after rewriting some queries things have almost stabilized now and we enjoy a great product.

However there still remains one nasty crashing bug I couldn't yet add to the bugs database as it's not fully repeatable: We run a MediaWiki (1.4.4 default install) for some documentation on our intranet. The following simple query from MediaWiki to determine a user id from a user name on login sometimes crashes the server:

 …

No, not the kind that wakes you up a 2am. The kind that lets you easily slice and present data from the mysql client in a more managable form. This little known feature of the mysql client is one of my favoriate and has helped me slice through large process lists and page through result sets for years.

Basically the pager command allows you to attach commands to the output of the mysql client to manipulate the output just like pipes in bash. Do you hate wading through all those sleeping connections to find the important ones? Yeah me too:

Normal Processlist:

mysql> show processlist;
+----+------+-----------+------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| Id | User | Host | db | Command | Time | State | Info |
+----+------+-----------+------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| 5 | root | localhost | NULL | Query | 0 | NULL | show processlist |
| 6 | root | …

The IT crown jewels of any organization lies in their database infrastructure. Obviously, well-designed front end applications play a leading role when it comes to ensuring that critical information is captured or reviewed, but the buck stops at the database when it comes to data retention and protection.