I'm just done listening to a presentation on MySQL from my esteemed MySQL colleague Robin Schumacher. Robin is director of product management at Sun/MySQL. Not being a database expert, I thoroughly enjoyed Robin's whirlwind tour of MySQL. I want to note of a couple of highlights that caught my attention :

• MySQL Community Edition and MySQL Enterprise Edition are feature identical. Wow, that was a suprise to me. I hate it when the Community Edition is distributed as "crippleware".
• Kickfire offers a SQL chip. If I understood correctly, this is a piece of silicon that speeds up your SQL statements. Wow again. I thought the time for custom built silicon for a specific purpose came and went, and the market has long ago decided to pack the intelligence into software, and to use commodity processor units as base. I guess I was wrong here.
• Lastly, …

The setup on Launchpad is better organised (Launchpad rocks!), and we already have the first feedback in the form of bugreports - mainly on the packaging and repo information. That’s excellent! Thanks Vladimir Cherednichenko, Steve Walsh, and Peter Lieverdink! Peter actually deserves a special mention as he has put in a lot of work on the debian packaging.

Also, because sometimes instant banter is useful, there’s now a #ourdelta channel on Freenode. Naturally, real discussion should just happen on the ourdelta-developers team and list. It’s really easy to join.

Antony Curtis did just that (join) and already put one of his many patches in: this one fixes issues which occur while a thread …

Can you hear me back there? Anyone have a problem hearing me?

Let's have a look here then... Blog is active, name chosen, sidebar seems to work. Hmmm this Sun blogging system isn't too bad. Looks like I can configure this pretty much how I want it as I get some time.

Well, this is Dups on the Sun/MySQL Web Team and this will be my technical blog of things done, of things to come, of things to do and of things a-happening for anything that isn't well, personal and about photography. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, you might want to mosey on over to http://www.dups.ca/blog and my photo blog at http://www.dups.ca

So what's my expertise?

I always joke that I am the dumbest person in the room. My "expertise" often involves me …

This Thursday, Stewart Smith will give a MySQL University session:

Checking Threading and Locking With Helgrind

Note that this particular session starts 9:00 BST / 10:00 CET /
18:00 Brisbane/Melbourne

Stewart is always enjoyable to listen to, both because he knows his stuff and because he is a really fun guy (heads up for the MySQL Conference 09, the Monty Taylor/Stewart Smith double act at this years conference was one of the most interesting and information sessions I went to).

Please register for this session by filling in your name on the session
Wiki page. Registering is not required but appreciated. That Wiki page
also contains a section to post questions. Please use it!

MySQL University sessions normally start at 13:00 UTC (summer) or 14:00
…

We use valgrind to find memory leaks in MySQL on Linux. The tool is a convenient, and often enlightening way of finding out where the real and potential problems are location.

On Windows, you dont have valgrind, but Microsoft do provide a free native debugging tool, called the user-mode dump heap (UMDH) tool. This performs a similar function to valgrind to determine memory leaks.

Vladislav Vaintroub, who works on the Falcon team and is one of our resident Windows experts provides the following how-to for using UMDH:

1. Download and install debugging tools for Windows from here
   MS Debugging Tools
   Install 64 bit version if you’re on 64 bit Windows and 32 bit version
   otherwise.

2. …

i5/OS doesn’t immediately strike you as the most natural environment for running MySQL, but in fact, there some advantages and benefits of making use of the hardware and i5/OS environment. The System i environment used with i5/OS is scalable, and the i5/OS itself provides lots of benefits over the control and separate of work.

Obviously another key advantage is that if you are already using i5/OS for your application, then being able to plug in MySQL into that equation on the same machine makes a big difference. For those companies and organizations that already have a business application on their server, you can use MySQL in combination with ODBC or more direct interfaces such as PHP to provide a web interface to your business application all in the same box.

MySQL works through PASE (Portable Application Solutions Environment) which allows AIX applications to run directly on i5/OS through a direct application binary interface. …

Last week I mentioned that we had added a topic-based interface to the MySQL documentation to make it easier to go to specific topics, identified either by your needs, user type or technology.

It occurred to me at the end of the week that the information is just as useful when reading the documentation, so you can go direct to a topic within the online reference manual, rather than trying to work out what chapter it is in.

This works in all reference manuals, whether you are viewing the online HTML version:

Topics embedded in the reference manual, HTML

It also works in all the offline versions, including HTML and PDF, as here:

…

It is the start of the last quarter of 2008 and we engineers in ISV Engineering are still baffled when we hear from new Startups when they say "Oh we are startups, I don't think we can afford Sun Microsystems" or sometimes even from old partners. It's like  Flashback to 1999! Yes we were selling $4million servers based only on SPARC in 1999. However in 2008 we are selling many servers for much less than $1000. (HINT: Join Sun Startup Essentials) In fact now we sell systems based on various CPU architectures like  AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon, UltraSPARC T2, SPARC64 VII. We also have one of the biggest OpenSource offerings right from MySQL, Java, …

I thought I'd share a note I sent earlier in the week to Sun's leaders - about the turmoil we're seeing in the markets, and how I want our team focusing their efforts.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Begin forwarded message:
From: Jonathan Schwartz
Date: September 30, 2008 12:02:29 AM PDT
To: All Sun
Subject: Headlines, Financial Crisis, etc.

You can't have missed today's headlines - the American Congress failed to pass a critical bill authorizing the Treasury to put a floor under the US banking sector. The market swooned, and politicians in the US, and across the world, are bickering over the right long term answer - jump in and take action to save the troubled institutions, or step aside and …

If you want to get certified for MySQL Cluster then there is only one guide that you need, the MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA Certification Study Guide.

Since the move to Sun, we have changed the method that you can get the title. You can now order a ‘print-on-demand version of the guide directly from Vervante. You can go ahead and order a copy now using this link.

If you think you want the book, or just want a read anyway, but don’t want to commit to buying the full guide, then you can read three of the key chapters in their entirety on docs.sun.com. You can read the chapters online …