Brian Aker gives the "zinger" lightning talk about the newly announced "Drizzle". This short (under 8 minutes) video captures Aker's highlights of why he started the Drizzle project and how Drizzle is different from MySQL -- both in what has been removed from MySQL and what features Drizzle can accomodate.

Play the video directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/576/play or download the 116 Mb file at http://technocation.org/node/576/download.

The timing of my last post is quite a coincidence. Here I write that the only feature out of the big 5.0 bunch I use is VIEWs and I did not really come out to say that its a must have. Actually with an ORM like Doctrine I can get more or less the same effect (then again in at least one case the point of the VIEW was to present external applications with a time dependent view of the data). So when Drizzle was announced with a cut down feature set I did not dread a single second. Actually I have been collecting articles in order to ready yet another plea to the MySQL folks to open up the development process. So all I can say is: Awesome! Welcome back in the open source world MySQL or shall I …

This morning at OSCON 08, Tim O’Reilly’s opening keynote Open Source on the O’Reilly Radar included a slide on Drizzle, giving this new project maximum exposure to the Open Source community.

Drizzle was only officially announced yesterday in Drizzle, Clouds, “What If?” by primary architect Brian Aker. Things move fast. There has been a number of comments from people yesterday including Mark Attwood, Monty Widenus,Monty Taylor, …

Before today, Drizzle was known as a light form of rain found in Seattle (among other places). Not any more. If you have not read the news already today, Drizzle, Clouds, “What If?” is the new kid on the RDBMS bock.

Faster, leaner and designed with the original goals of ease-of-use, reliability and performance, Drizzle will make an impact in those organizations that are seeking a viable database storage solution for large scalable applications. The key to Drizzle is several fold. First, the crud has been removed. The first part of Drizzle development is to remove bloat or non functioning software from the MySQL tree. In fact if you monitor the commits, it reads like, this has been removed, these files have been deleted, this code has been refactored, this new library has been introduced. Design decisions that have limited MySQL’s development for years are being …

While the MySQL 5.1 feature list looks quite tasty to me, the MySQL 5 feature list has not really won me over. Aside from the fact that most new MYSQL 5 features have been quite bug plagued (though this is now mostly resolved side from the performance issues with VIEW's and INFORMATION_SCHEMA). So Arjen is doing some courses on MySQL 5 features, which got me thinking which are the features I regularly use? Uhm .. I think there is only one, which are VIEW's. Actually I always end up using them for the same thing: Computing a status field that changes given the CURRENT_DATE. I tend to try and avoid cron jobs for these tasks whenever I can. Of course it would be more performant to update the status once, but replying on the status update cron job to actually work right at the expected time is …

Within the present MySQL ecosystem, there are limited options for dedicated MySQL Consulting in the US. Outside of the official Sun/MySQL Consulting, Percona and Proven Scaling both based in Silicon valley are the only options generally known and accepted by the MySQL Community.

There is now an east coast option based in New York, and that is Ronald Bradford. Providing expert MySQL Consulting in Architecture, Performance, Scalability, Migration and Knowledge Transfer.

With two decades working in the IT industry, Ronald is well qualified in MySQL having previously provided consulting services for MySQL Inc combining 9 years experience with the product. His consulting experience is not limited to MySQL, having …

I will be speaking on July 29th in New York at an Entrepreneurs Forum on A Free Panel on Cloud Computing. With a number of experts including Hank Williams of KloudShare, Mike Nolet of AppNexus, and Hans Zaunere of New York PHP fame is should be a great event.

The focus of my presentation will be on “Extending existing applications to leverage the cloud” where I will be discussing both the advantages of the cloud, and the complexities and issues that you will encounter such as data management, data consistency, loss of control, security and latency for example.

Using traditional MySQL based applications I’ll be providing an approach that can lead to your application gaining greater power of cloud computing.

About the Author

Ronald Bradford provides …

I have seen on many engagements the column data type is defined as INT(1).

People have the misconception that this numeric integer data type is of the length of one digit, or one byte. (One digit is 0-9 an one byte is 0-255)

This is incorrect.

Integer

For integer numeric data types in MySQL, that is TINYINT, SMALLINT, MEDIUMINT, INT, BIGINT the (n) has no bearing on the size of data stored within the specific data type. The (n) is simply for display formatting.

In the MySQL Manual 10.2. Numeric Types you read This optional display width is used to display integer values having a width less than the width specified for the column by left-padding them with spaces. The display width does not constrain the range of values that can be stored in the column, nor the number of digits that are displayed for values …

Recently I was asked to provide guidelines for testing fail over of a MySQL configuration that was provided by a hosting provider.

The first observation was the client didn’t have any technical details from the hosting provider of what the moving parts were, and also didn’t have any confirmation other then I think a verbal confirmation that it had been testing.

The first rule in using hosting, never assume. Too many times I’ve seen details from a client stating for example H/W configuration, only to audit and find out otherwise. RAID is a big one, and is generally far more complex to determine. Even for companies with internal systems I’ve seen the most simple question go unanswered. Q: How do you know your RAID is fully operational? A: Somebody will tell us? It’s really amazing to investigate on site with the client to find that RAID system is running in a degraded mode due to a disk failure and nobody knew.

It …

The answer is yes.

In this face off we have two numeric MySQL data types, both Integer. In fact MySQL has 9 different numeric data types for integer, fixed precision and floating point numbers, however we are just going to focus on two, BIGINT and INT. This design consideration is part of my recent presentation Top 20 Design Tips for Data Architects.

What is the difference?
We turn to the MySQL Reference Manual first, in 10.1.1. Overview of Numeric Types we see the following.

INT[(M)] [UNSIGNED] [ZEROFILL]

A normal-size integer. The signed range is -2147483648 to 2147483647. The unsigned range is 0 to 4294967295.

BIGINT[(M)] [UNSIGNED] [ZEROFILL]

A large integer. The signed range is …