Welcome to the 72nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) is over, and Lucas Jellema of the AMIS Technology blog notes the OOW Content Catalog has been updated with most of the presentations available for download.
On his way home from OOW, Chris Muir of the appropriately titled One Size Doesn’t Fit All blog notes how OOW and the Australian Oracle User Group Conference and OOW compare with regards to 99% fewer attendees in AUSOUG Perth conference - from 45k down to 350. …

Avid readers of my blog know that I have been pondering how to best approach schema evolution. I ported the schema management from Metabase to PEAR::MDB2_Schema. I even gave a talk that admittedly only did a good job of defining the problem and solutions that all suffered from severe limitations. Now for the first time I am starting to feel somewhat good about an approach to migrations. I wrote a post to the Doctrine developers mailinglist detailing the key pieces that I want to add to Doctrine's migrations. The idea is to use the migrations approach made popular by …

We have taken over an application which had "pretend" failover. Essentially it had two servers with automatic failover between the two. However they both relied on another server for providing the data storage via NFS all the way down to the MySQL server. Interesting how one can manage to provide no real failover with 3 servers. Obviously we want to fix this and actually a number of servers have already been bought. So now we have moved the MySQL server with a cold standby on separate machines. We also have 3 frontend servers which we want to load balance. We will probably use memcache to manage the sessions, as we are not so worried about a lost session when a crash occurs. But now comes the problem: There are a lot of places where administrators and end users can upload files, which end up in the file system. Now how do we replicate those files across all the nodes?

The temporary approach we will be taking will be using NFS with rsync. One …

I needed to start mysql without privileges after a database restore today, and while confirming the correct option which was –skip-grant-tables I came across an option which made me laugh.

$ mysqld --verbose --help
...
  --sporadic-binlog-dump-fail
                      Option used by mysql-test for debugging and testing of
                      replication.
...

And here is the Official Manual Entry

So, the article at:
http://mysql-dba-journey.blogspot.com/2007/11/mysql-and-vmware.html says:
Don’t get seduced to the dark side unless you understand all the issues.
And that’s wonderful and all, but….what are all the issues? What are some of the issues? Is it related more to VMware, or more to MySQL, or more to MySQL on VMware? Is it something like “VMware isn’t stable” or more like “load testing on vmware isn’t always going to work because you won’t have full resources”?  More »

Peter makes an interesting post about the MySQL company’s trademarks at http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/10/26/mysql-support-or-support-for-mysql-mysql-trademark-policies/
The point is that Peter is not selling “MySQL Support” — he is selling “Support *for* MySQL”. “MySQL Support” is the name of a product that MySQL offers. Even if some other consulting company used the name before the MySQL company ever did, MySQL still has the rights to the name.  More »

At first sight it seems MySQL AB has learned the lesson from its 5.0 release and is not rushing as much anymore with their releases as much. It seems that the 5.1 GA release was pushed back from this fall to Q1 2008. MySQL 6.0 will feature the new Falcon storage engine, but without foreign key and full text indexing. That will have to wait for MySQL 6.1. Now 6.1 is supposed to go into beta 2008/2009 which means a GA release is expected in 2009. So when exactly is MySQL 6.0 supposed to be done then? Last I heard was fall 2008, which would mean GA release for 6.0 and the beta release for 6.1 to be pretty close.

I hope this is not overly ambitious. MySQL 5.0 was to a large extend a feature checklist release. As such it took MySQL AB quite a lot …

About a month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun to try to stop the competitive impact of ZFS on their business.

I can understand why they're upset - when Linux first came on the scene in Sun's core market, there were some here who responded the same way, asking "who can we sue?" But seeing the future, we didn't file an injunction to stop competition - instead, we joined the free software community and innovated.

One of the ways we innovated was to create a magical file system called ZFS - which enables expensive, proprietary storage to be replaced with commodity disks and general purpose servers. Customers save a ton of money - and administrators save a ton of time. The economic impact is staggering - and understandably threatening to Net App and other proprietary companies. As is all free innovation, at some level. …

This was the title of an article back in 2002 by Shelley Doll and other articles with more or less the same concerns including the secretary of the ANSI database committee. In my recent blog post I made the point that I do hope that MySQL AB tries to follow the standards as much as possible (while retaining the freedom to add things as deemed necessary .. LIMIT and friends). In a chat conversation with Jan, he asked me what my thoughts are in regards to the SQL standard in particular. Most people will for example agree that standards compliant SQL routines are no fun to write. Unfortunately I had to agree with him that SQL today isn't what it should be.

Since I am not sure if everybody is aware of this so just let …

I did not attend the talk Monty gave at OpenMind 2007. I only have Zak's recollections to go by and among various interesting tidbits I found the following note by Zak: "DBMS implementations must change. FLOSS DBMS will be able to react most quickly to changes in what people want and what hardware offers. They can react quickly, because FLOSS DBMS focus on serving users first and worrying about standards, marketing and so on afterwards."

Now I actually agree on the point regarding standards .. well sort of. I guess that Zak simply had to leave out some context in his notes in order to not end up with a full length transcript. I assume the point that Monty was trying to make is that FLOSS has the advantage in adapting to change, because that change is happening in …