The latest from the MySQL community

I just read about the release of Honey Monitor for MySQL. I read through the features. I looked at the screenshots. Then I read about the licensing. Then I read about the fact that it only runs on windows XP or Vista. So, my questions for the ages…

1. Why, in this age of multiple OSes battling each other for market share, would you write an application that is OS specific? Every app should run in a vendor neutral web browser unless there’s a really really good reason. Monitoring software, are you kidding? Monitoring software must be vendor neutral and web-based. I will never use anything that ties me to windows or linux or osx, it has to be cross platform. End of story.
2. Why, when MySQL is so heavily used on Linux and Solaris, would you write an application for MySQL that can only be run on Windows? Every MySQL DBA …

When you eventually will buy Sun ..

Oh nooos.. I started this post last week and now it al seems in vain :(

Steven has some clues on what could have happened, I think he is right on the spot on with his Solaris prediction ..

He wonders why IBM would spend even another dime on Solaris, actually even today I can't even see why Sun is spending any more money on developing Solaris. But even with no acquisition his prediction of the future of Open Solaris imvho is spot on:

OpenSolaris will likely live on as a purely community-based operating system. After failing to gain any real traction against Linux, I expect it to become like the BSD operating systems: useful in niches and with a strong, core group of developers, but never to become a major operating system power.

As for Sparc, well I told it …

The Drizzle database, while similar to MySQL includes a number of significant differences. In this post we will look at data types and table syntax that is valid in Drizzle. For more background information you can also review A beginners look at Drizzle - Getting around with SHOW.

Data Types

This comparison is with Drizzle 2009.03.970 and MySQL 5.1.32 GA. More information at MySQL 5.1 Data Types.

The following data types are not valid in Drizzle.

• TINYINT
• SMALLINT
• MEDIUMINT
• BIT
• TIME
• YEAR
• BINARY
• SET
…

As a fitting posting for April 1, here's a video that I put together to commemorate Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL who is leaving Sun today. It was my pleasure to work with Marten for more than five years at MySQL. He was truly a unique CEO; he followed Drucker's rules and came up with new innovative ideas that we put into action.

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Just saw this story on Slashdot which made me think of this post from Marc Fleury.

The Slashdot story questions what/where is the official MySQL tree:

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Assuming you have successfully compiled Drizzle, and you are ready to start for the first time, here are some beginner differences with those familiar with the current MySQL 5.1 GA version. Note: drizzle is actually an original fork of the 6.0.x codebase however the code looks very little like mysql anymore.

Getting started differences

The first default MySQL installation step scripts/install_mysql_db is gone, and there is no replacement. The ‘mysql’ schema no longer exists. Talking about schemas, ‘test’ is also gone by default.

While a bin/drizzled_safe exists to start drizzle, this presently doesn’t operate as expected. You should start drizzle with sbin/drizzled &

They still have an empty …

I’ve not looked at compiling and running Drizzle on my server for the past four weeks. Well overdue time for a check and see how it’s going. I saw in today’s planet.mysql.com by Eric Day a new dependency is needed. libdrizzle 0.2.0 now in Drizzle is now required, so I started there.

cd ~/bzr
bzr branch lp:libdrizzle
cd libdrizzle
./config/autorun.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

No problems there, also documented at the Drizzle Wiki. Great to see the docs up to date. I see my old work on starting the compiling page still relevant. Tested on CentOS 5 and Mac OS/X 10.5

Compiling drizzle was not much more difficult.

cd ~/bzr/drizzle
bzr update
make distclean
./config/autorun.sh
./configure --prefix=/home/drizzle/deploy …

Taking the work already done with vmplot.sh, a useful tool for MySQL performance tuning by Yves and Matt at BigDBAHead, and in true Open Source fashion I’ve enhanced and modified for my own purposes.

These changes include:

• Error checking for ‘gnuplot’ command on the system
• Eliminate the first row of sample data, as this is often not a complete sample for the vmstat duration.
• Created a HTML output file for easy browser viewing
• Changed Memory scale values from Kilobytes to Megabytes
• Resizing png’s for optimal 1024×768 display output (2 per row)

Download vmplot

And I get:

So more specifics of what I did.

Install gnuplot.

$ yum install gnuplot

Create vmstat sample …

The numerous popular MySQL forks are an unexpected consequence of Sun's acquisition. But why haven't we seen any JBoss forks since the Red Hat acquisition? READ MORE

This week, I'm finishing up my book "Developing Web Applications using Perl, memcached, MySQL and Apache". I just finished up Chapter 1, which is the first chapter where I discuss several things such as how much things have changed in the last ten years with web development and Open Source in general. This lead me to write a small section about the future. I was pondering -- where are we going to be in ten years from now? What projects will be popular? This lead me even to a more specific question, and one that I would ask here: what is to become with the development of MySQL? What will be the official development branch of MySQL, and where is all the energy and excitement going to be around?

There is now one fork and one major branch of MySQL now that I will mention, both are exciting projects-- and neither of them is coming from official MySQL/Sun:

(The order of these is strictly alphabetic and not priority!)
…