There are some basic, golden rules when it comes to having a vibrant community of contributors.

The following are rules I have extracted and learned based on my experience managing and working with engineers actively involved and participating in the Apache/Derby, PostgreSQL and MySQL open-source communities. These rules are also based on extensive discussions with many folks involved with the MySQL community, with the PostgreSQL community and with the Apache/Derby (Java DB) community, over many years.

Before I go through these rules, I would like to thank Marten Mickos for having suggested some of the headings for these rules. (I originally had much longer headings for all of them.) I would also like to thank many of MySQL, PostgreSQL and Java DB colleagues, as well as to many other colleagues involved in open-source development, for having contributed to the ideas and practices behind these rules.

A) …

In just over 2 weeks I’ll be the invited speaker in Washington DC to Best practices for migrating applications to MySQL. This workshop is being held in conjunction with Carahsoft and Sun/MySQL and aims to provide to the Federal sector valuable information for the continued usage and uptake of Open Source and specifically MySQL.

As part of my preparation I’m happy to hear from any organizations that have successfully migrated from Oracle/SQL Server/Informix/Sybase etc to MySQL and would like to be cited.

While I have been involved in the process I am also happy to hear of reasons why a migration failed, was aborted or postponed. This is all valuable information in determining what are the most ideal applications.

Wikimedia Foundation is expanding Wikipedia to multimedia with Sun Open Storage Solution and MySQL Database:

Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on the time of day. Wikimedia needed to update its infrastructure to handle this huge volume of traffic and ensure that its systems were reliable, highly available, and easily scalable. It also wanted to expand its upload file limit from 20 MB to 100 MB to accommodate rich media (audio and video) content, but before it could do that it needed to expand its storage capacity.

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Wikimedia Foundation is expanding Wikipedia to multimedia with Sun Open Storage Solution and MySQL Database:

Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on the time of day. Wikimedia needed to update its infrastructure to handle this huge volume of traffic and ensure that its systems were reliable, highly available, and easily scalable. It also wanted to expand its upload file limit from 20 MB to 100 MB to accommodate rich media (audio and video) content, but before it could do that it needed to expand its storage capacity.

…

Wikimedia Foundation is expanding Wikipedia to multimedia with Sun Open Storage Solution and MySQL Database:

Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on the time of day. Wikimedia needed to update its infrastructure to handle this huge volume of traffic and ensure that its systems were reliable, highly available, and easily scalable. It also wanted to expand its upload file limit from 20 MB to 100 MB to accommodate rich media (audio and video) content, but before it could do that it needed to expand its storage capacity.

…

This is a simple mysql circular replication implementation on a single machine (just a proof of concept) which can easily be done on a broader scale. Just be aware of the cons of circular replication which mainly gets down to: once a node freaks out or stops for one reason or the other, it’s a bitch and you need to take care of IMMEDIATELY.

Download Sandbox from https://launchpad.net/mysql-sandbox/+download
Download MySQL from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads

Copy the downloaded software onto the your *nix box onto any folder of your preference called $BASEDIR

run:

cd /$BASEDIR

gunzip mysql_sandbox_X.X.XX.tar.gz
tar -xf mysql_sandbox_X.X.XX.tar

ln -s mysql_sandbox_X.X.XX sandbox

time /$BASEDIR/sandbox/make_replication_sandbox –circular=4 –topology=circular /$BASEDIR/mysql-5.1.30-linux-x86_64-glibc23.tar.gz


user@hostname $ time …

MySQL has a stored procedure language. People have told me how bad it is, how inefficient, how it had to be there to make MySQL appear more professional. Yes, it’s far from perfect, it’s not pre-compiled so not necessarily any faster than running single statements by hand. However, it works and you can do many useful things with it. The complaints however miss the point of stored procedure languages as used inside a database. They are generally used for 3 things:

1. To hide the implementation from the database user, so that the implementation can change but the interface remains stable.
2. To simplify the DBAs day to day tasks of maintaining the database.
3. To speed up complex queries.

While MySQL doesn’t excel at point 3, it can be used in the other two cases. I’ve used Sybase for quite a while and many maintenance tasks could be fully programmed inside the database, just as you would write a …