This past week (November 7 - 11) should be officially named "the Week of the Open Source Database." In addition to the open source database conference in Frankfurt, Germany, there were these other interesting developments:

Oracle Opens Up

Oracle released a free version of their database, "Oracle Express Edition," this week. The initial license for the beta version seems to be a classic shareware license - you can test it but not use it in production, but they've promised that they'll release it under a new license that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute.

What's truly amazing about this is that …

Open Source Patents Search
Supported by Computer Associates, Novell, IBM, Sun, Red Hat and others, OSDL (Open Source Development Labs has launched a patents search platform to allow open source developers to search patents that have been donated to the open source community.

From PatentCommons website:
The Patent Commons Project is dedicated to documenting the boundaries of The Commons -- a preserve where developers and users of software can innovate, collaborate, and access patent resources in an environment of enhanced safety, protected by pledges of support made by holders of software patents
Yet Another Blog by Microsoft CTO
Ray Ozzie, CTO of Microsoft, has started yet another blog. He first began blogging in August of 2002. In his opening post, he writes:
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Mit der neuen Ausgabe des PHP Magazins, die am heutigen Tag an den Kiosken erscheint, beleuchten wir den Einsatz der neuen ext/mysqli Extension in PHP. Kai Voigt, Trainer und Consultant bei MySQL, führt Sie auf sechs Seiten durch die neue Extension, die ab PHP 5 zur Verfügung steht und speziell auch die neuen Features von MySQL 4.1 unterstützt.

Weitere Themen in dieser Ausgabe:

• GPS für Webseiten (Google Sitemaps)
• Eigene Streamwrapper in PHP realisieren
• Vorstellung des PHP Frameworks PRADO
• Location Based Services mit PHP
• PHP Extensions im Eigenbau
• und und und ...

Seit ein bis zwei Ausgaben hat auch das Grafikteam des Software & Support Verlags fleissig Hand an das Layout gelegt und das Erscheinungsbild des Magazins weiter optimiert. Das Magazin …

Congratulations to Masoud and his whole team at S&S Media, the publishing house that's very active in the IT area and also supports PHP through:

• PHP Magazin (German edition - btw, the current issue has been published today and we have a lot of good articles in there, like the cover stories about ext/mysqli and design patterns for PHP)
• The International PHP Conference Spring and Fall edition
• some PHP books at their entwickler.press
• and, finally, the International PHP Magazine

The website php-mag.net was relaunched today. In …

Earlier, I posted about GoogleSQL and Google Base being a threat to MySQL. On Tuesday night, Google announced on its blog that Google Base is now live and ready for users content. Some are calling it a threat to small businesses, while others think of it as an opportunity. More on Google Base going live from Google Blog. Also see: Google Base on SMA

If you use Apache, you can turn on server-status and extended status information to get some useful information. Also see: …

You can flip a coin on any trip that I am making and based on the result you have an answer to the question of "did Brian pack more weight in books then clothes and laptop put together?". Its even worse when friends loan me books at every port of call along the trip. While in Kentucky I borrowed two books in Asimov's Robot series which I have been enjoying, though the constant "Eurekea" moments found in Asmov's writing are getting a bit predictable. This morning I started reading "The Robots of Dawn", and have just finished the chapter where the detective has had another character explain the positronic brain, and how it can reach a locked state.

So what does this have to do with anything? All I can think about is why didn't Asimov didn't consider a transactional design for his brain? His robot's have zero crash recovery. The positronic brain operates entirely under the assumption that problems are entirely deterministic and that by …

MySQL's stored procedures do not provide for direct support of passing and using object names in the procedure. But it's pretty easy to work around this limitation.

So I’ve been looking into the Archive Storage Engine. What I would really like to do with it is get data in realtime, because (of course) the higher-ups want reports on realtime data — that is, they are not satisfied with a report that is run regularly, they want all the data up until “now”.

It is inadvisable to replicate from one storage engine type to another. I have not yet played with it, but since an Archive table doesn’t allow updates and deletes, replicating from a MyISAM or InnoDB table to an Archive one is a bad idea.

Most folks probably run a batch job; but I wonder if it can be done in real-time. Or rather, ‘what is the best way to run it real-time?’ One way, off the top of my head, is to do this are to replicate to a blackhole table with a trigger, to insert into an archive table whenever an INSERT statement is called. The blackhole table should not give an error upon UPDATE or DELETE statements.

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TOOLSRC does not build with gcc 4.0. It seems to be working with 3.4, however.

Earlier, I mentioned some MySQL optimization resources. Here is the guide on optimizing sysctl.conf. Today, I will be optimizing MySQL 5.0.15 on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 with dual Xeon 2GHz processors and 2GB RAM.

Note: Please use this work-in-progress guide for reference only and at your own risk. I am creating this guide on a development server and will not be responsible if anything bad happens. If you find something is incorrect or can be made better please let me know by adding a comment to my blog (mysqldatabaseadministration)


my.cnf: If you have …