While writing my thesis paper on open source in the database market I of course quoted Martin, MySQL AB's (ex-)CEO, with replying to Oracle acquisition attempts that MySQL AB "will be part of a larger company, but it will be called MySQL,". Well things did not turn out that way, was instead of an IPO to lay the foundations of this large organization, MySQL AB was instead bought up by SUN. I have mixed feelings about this, but there is definitely one good thing now: People will now no longer have to be confused about MySQL vs. MySQL AB (I always …

We announced big news today - our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we're acquiring MySQL AB.

If you're interested in the financial details for the quarter, tune in to our conference call (see details on sun.com) today - we'll obviously have more to say as we release our formal results on January 24th.

But the biggest news of the day is... we're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you're an industry insider, you'll know what that means - we're acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world's most popular open source database.

You'll recall I wrote about a customer event a few weeks ago, at which some of the …

Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs) have been quietly increasing their penetration, but until recently they have lacked the capabilities to seriously threaten proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

All that has changed. OSDBs now boast the necessary features and robustness to support commercial databases hundreds of Gigabytes in size. And a growing trickle of competitive benchmark results shows them …

Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs) have been quietly increasing their penetration, but until recently they have lacked the capabilities to seriously threaten proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

All that has changed. OSDBs now boast the necessary features and robustness to support commercial databases hundreds of Gigabytes in size. And a growing trickle of competitive benchmark results shows them …

Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs) have been quietly increasing their penetration, but until recently they have lacked the capabilities to seriously threaten proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

All that has changed. OSDBs now boast the necessary features and robustness to support commercial databases hundreds of Gigabytes in size. And a growing trickle of competitive benchmark results shows them …

This morning I was looking for something on Ohloh and realized I should “stack” maatkit. Since I couldn’t find “maatkit” nor “mysql toolkit” in Ohloh, I created a new project for it at:

http://www.ohloh.net/projects/10083

If you’re on Ohloh, stack it!

www.ohloh.net is a neat social networking tool for open source software. Instead of searching freeware lists, search ohloh, and you can find reviews, # of people using the software, and direct links to download pages. My profile is at:

http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/8446http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/8446
and you can see my stack at:
http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/8446/stacks/default

Time to install MySQL on my new MacBook.

$ cd /opt
$ wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.0/mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-i686.tar.gz/from/http://mysql.mirrors.hoobly.com/
$ tar xvfz mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-i686.tar.gz
$ cd mysql-5.0.45-ox10.4-i686
$ scripts/mysql_install_db
Installing MySQL system tables...
071129 22:10:48 [Warning] Setting lower_case_table_names=2 because file system for /opt/mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-i686/data/ is case insensitive
OK
Filling help tables...
071129 22:10:48 [Warning] Setting lower_case_table_names=2 because file system for /opt/mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-i686/data/ is case insensitive
OK

bin/mysqld_safe &
[1] 239
macbook:mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-i686 rbradfor$ chown: /opt/mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-i686/data/macbook.err: Operation not permitted
Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /opt/mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-i686/data

$ bin/mysqladmin …

I think the briefest way to sum up the difference between a good developer mindset and a good sysadmin mindset is “a good developer thinks, ‘how will this work?’ and works accordingly. A good sysadmin thinks, ‘how will this break?’ and works accordingly.”

Developers think in terms of “edge cases” and “off by 1″ errors, which start from a default of things working. This is good as a design skill; developers need to think algorithmically, pondering a main way of something functioning and then dealing with anomalies.

However, sysadmins tend to install systems and maintain them with scripts, as opposed to building new software — usually. Sysadmins deal with systems when anomalies happen, so they must have a mindset of “how will this break?” vis-a-vis — “how will this break and how can I be notified of the breakage before my boss/the customers call?” which leads to “what if the notification system …

(The Executive Summary: I left my job last week, and I start working at The Pythian Group on Monday. Go to their website if you’d like to work with me, or with people just as knowledgeable as me.)
I get inquiries all the time about consulting. Folks are madly searching for experienced MySQL DBAs. The lure of a new environment is always tempting, however, working for any one environment has its quirks. In October I realized I was coming up on having worked 2 years at my job. That’s not a very long period of time, but it certainly was long enough for me to learn the environment and get stuck in a rut — mostly my rut was doing more systems work than database work.  More »

I have complained about this IP protection blabla put forth by CLA protected projects previously. But I keep hearing the same (imho false) arguments that CLA's are a non issue. I was kind of shocked that neither the Zend nor the eZ Systems representative at the PHP Conference in Frankfurt was unable to display that he actually knows what is in their respective CLAs. One issue is the one-way OSS, where due to the explicit copyright grant required, it becomes hard to cherry pick OSS code. While thats annoying, the bigger issue imho is the problem of the patent grant clause found in all CLA's I have seen (which all seem to be derived from the apache CLA). I keep bringing up this point until people who push CLA's will finally stop repeating lies about them. Saying that single developers do not need to worry about getting sued over patent infringements is simply wrong.

Anyways, we …