My talk on 10x performance improvements – A case study has just been approved for the 2010 MySQL Conference. This will be my 5th straight year speaking at the MySQL conferences. For those in Europe wanting a sneak peek I am also speaking at FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels on Feb 7th where I’ll be giving an abridged version.

As an independent MySQL consultant, my work generally covers performance tuning and scalability and sometimes database architecture. Often however my work involves a review of a given problem and recommendations (immediate, short and long term). I’m rarely involved in the full implementation and generally do not see the full fruits of the proposed work.

Recently however I was able to work with a client, first in resolving …

Last month cloud computing and systems management expert John Willis published his best of Cloud Computing for 2009 list he calls the Cloudies.  I am not an expert on the latest developments in cloud computing so it was nice to get a list of the best (in his expert opinion) cloud computing tools. I was especially interested in the latest open source software and I did a little research on each of these projects to see if they had active development mailing lists, regular releases  and a real community behind …

In all our application we connect to MySQL database as single db user, and we need to pass the end user id to the mysql database?

So how can we pass it?

I've idea to create plugin to add mysql variables ex. "app_userid" and set it when user login??!!

but i don't have any idea how to create plugin?

Or do you have another idea??

Note: i don't want to change the application code, and i need it

If you have done a good job of building your rails models, you may find that they are helpful for your non-rails system maintenance and such. They may even be necessary to reuse if you follow the rails model of using activerecord validations (rather that database RI) to preserve the integrity of your data.

Or you may just find yourself rewriting the same code again and again, and want all that good railsiness to make it easier to write and maintain. Personally I find myself in some instance of ./script/console as often as irb just so I can get the activesupport helper methods ( 4.days.from_now and such) that many rails developers are surprised to find are not actually a standard part of ruby.

So, the good news is it is easy to reuse rails code outside of rails.

Let's say you want to do some data manipulation (reporting, loading, scrubbing, etc) in your rails db, …

Yesterday, I was working on a survey that Selena Deckelmann put together for open source databases. She will be presenting the results at Linux.conf.au this month.

One of the questions on the survey was this:

How would you describe your development process?

followed by these answer choices:

• Individuals request features
• Large/small group empowered to make decisions
• Benevolent dictator
• Other, please specify:____________

I thought a bit about the question and then answered the following in the “Other, please specify:” area:

Bit of a mix between all three above.

The more I think about it, the more I really do feel …

A quick review of Save MySQL online petition stats shows that the results are still in line with the results I reported previously. Over 90 percent of petition signees would require Oracle to divest MySQL to a "suitable third party."

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Today I caught a tweet from Kara Swisher referencing some exclusive news she posted on Boomtown about VMware’s upcoming deal to buy Zimbra from Yahoo! This is would be VMware’s second acquisition of an open source ISV in under a year. In August 2009 VMware …

There is no denying that MySQL has a huge amount of momentum behind it. 10+ years as the leading free SQL database kinda does that. It has successfully changed the perception of databases - where people used to visualise big-iron mainframes in specially cooled rooms to where anyone can install it for free within 15 minutes.That is not what this blog post is about. The topic of today is the "Save

Florian Mueller began 2010 by demonstrating why he was named EU Campaigner of the Year by the Economist magazine five years ago. While most of us were prepping for New Year's Eve celebrations or contemplating New Year's resolutions, Mueller and MySQL co-founder and creator Michael "Monty" Widenius spent Dec. 28 launching an online Save MySQL petition against the Oracle acquisition of MySQL via Sun. Mueller reports via e-mail:

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There's a campaign started by Monty Widenius to save MySQL from the evil clutches of Oracle. You can read about it here.

http://helpmysql.org