I first heard about Google Base on SEW (a post made by shimsand).

Google Base is Google?s latest project in an effort to organize the world?s information. It isn?t in Beta or Alpha yet. They are still developing it. I wasn?t able to get much information from my sources at Google, but I?ll tell you what they told me. Basically, Google Base will present feed results on the results page. The feeds will probably be anywhere from 1-3 results, and either presented above or below the horizontal sponsored ads. I asked if the feeds will include podcast feeds, or just RSS feeds. My source wasn?t sure. I asked if they be sponsored ads for feeds, or just what Google considers relevant? Answer not known. We?ll just have to wait and see.

At first I thought Google Base may be a new kind of personalized home page. I was wrong. Today I am …

I just noticed today that Oracle has released a beta edition of Oracle Database 10g Express Edition. Oracle must be feeling the pressure from open source databases such as MySQL, and PostgreSQL, just like Microsoft has. Oracle Express is pretty similar to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express:

• Free To Deploy
• Supports up to 4GB of data
• Supports only one CPU
• Supports up to 1GB of RAM
• One instance per server
• Downloads For Windows or Linux - no mac :(
• And is free to distribute with your applications

More Info.

Well, the sample database has not yet been released, but that is not stopping Roland Bouman from using it to demonstrate crosstab queries.

Good to see some use coming of the effort put forth so far.

Well, I have now done what could be considered to be my first press interview. I was asked a few questions on MySQL and pluggable storage by SearchOpenSource.com:

http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid39_gci1138706,00.html

Pretty lightweight but certainly fun nonetheless. The pluggable storage stuff is going to be really exciting, giving you the ability to add storage engines to a running MySQL server using shared objects.

Standards-Based System Enables Developers to Easily Build Custom Applications; Lowers Cost and Complexity of Deploying True Enterprise Content Management

MySQL developers can "gain access to the latest technology and develop against a certified, supported version of the product"

From: Open Source Business Conference 2005

BOSTON--October. 31, 2005--

Enterprises and developers can now download the first enterprise-class content management system that utilizes the power of open source. Traditional Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems were designed a decade ago, leaving them with cumbersome interfaces and legacy technology. Alfresco is built on modern, service oriented technologies and standards from this decade, such as Spring, Hibernate, Lucene and Web Services, JSR-168, JSR-170 and MyFaces. These help to dramatically bring down the cost and complexity of both implementation …

Latest news from the Oracle world is that they have just released a new beta version of their database product, Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE). What's so special about this release? Well it's free, Oracle have offered their databases for download for free to developers for as long as I can remeber but the important difference with XE is that you can use it in production environments without any charge also. This seems in direct competition with the current "free" databases on the market such as MySQL.

The database is limited in that it can only be installed on single processor machines with 4Gb of disk memory and 1Gb of RAM. Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle's server technologies division has said

"There is definitely a market there (for low-end databases) and a demand. And we want them to be using Oracle and not MySQL or SQL Server Express"

The theory is that students …

For any MySQL DBA, PlanetMySQL is an indispensable community resource pulling latest information about MySQL from blogs targeted towards MySQL users.
If your blog is about MySQL, consider submitting it to PlanetMySQL.org. An aggregated RSS feed is available at PlanetMySQL. If your blog is accepted to this MySQL community, you can be sure that your voice is being heard in the MySQL community.

Thanks to everyone at MySQL and PlanetMySQL for providing such an excellent resource and for listing MySQL Database Administration blog as a contributor blog.

It's my turn to hand out a cool iPod nano again, and after another delve into our bugs database, this week's winner is Berto van der Kraats. He has submitted a number of important bug reports for MySQL 5.0, primarily related to the optimizer. I already talked a bit about the significance of such reports a two weeks ago, when Martin Friebe won. Great work, Berto. Thanks!

It appears that Berto is Dutch, so I am able to concratulate him in his native tongue: Van harte gefeliciteerd, Berto!

I have been experimenting with many different ways to load balance connections across multiple MySQL database servers. I have come across many different possible solutions. For the longest time, I was convinced that the hardware method was the way to go, until I suffered sticker shock. A good quality load balancer can cost upwards of $25K - $75K!!! Yikes!!

In my efforts to find more cost effective solutions, I ran across an open source, GPL'd load balancer named Balance. This load balancer is pretty simple, yet functional enough to perform both load balancing as well as failover.

For example, to perform round-robin load balancing across 3 MySQL database servers, the following command could be issued (assume that the host that balance is running on is 192.168.1.1): balance 3306 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.3 192.168.1.4 …