Stop the press! My boss, Stefan Hinz, has just started blogging, with his first post here: Using NetBeans with MySQL.

So who is he? Well, Stefan is the guy that keeps the rest of us in the docs team in check and makes sure we do what we’re asked, when we’re are asked and that all of the machinery, legalities and management tasks happen in the background. Without him we really couldn’t function as effectively as we do.

It’s wonderful to see some other Docs team members getting in on the act (to be fair to the rest of the team, Jon is also a blogger). We are all writers, you would think the blogging would come as a natural extension.

Behind the tease is the simple fact that the improved system for MySQL University I was talking about is getting a trial run this week. …

We use valgrind to find memory leaks in MySQL on Linux. The tool is a convenient, and often enlightening way of finding out where the real and potential problems are location.

On Windows, you dont have valgrind, but Microsoft do provide a free native debugging tool, called the user-mode dump heap (UMDH) tool. This performs a similar function to valgrind to determine memory leaks.

Vladislav Vaintroub, who works on the Falcon team and is one of our resident Windows experts provides the following how-to for using UMDH:

1. Download and install debugging tools for Windows from here
   MS Debugging Tools
   Install 64 bit version if you’re on 64 bit Windows and 32 bit version
   otherwise.

2. …

I’m reading Intellectual Property and Open Source by Van Lindberg at the moment, and despite being about a relatively dry topic, I must admit that it’s a fascinating read.

Van Lindberg introduces the book by talking about the comments that end up on Slashdot.org, almost certainly prefixed by the expression IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) where people defend, discuss, and rip people up about the legalities of open source and the various licenses. Van Lindberg also talks about how he spends much of his time translating the contents of various legal documents into engineer speak and back again.

Despite being a proponent and long time user of free software and open source for the best part of my working life, I’ll admit to being completely ignorant of many of the issues. This isn’t through lack …

MySQL University has been running for the last 18 months, and we’ve covered a wide range of topics, from the internals of MySQL right up to Amazon’s EC2, using MySQL in the Solaris/OpenSolaris Webstack and a description of the forthcoming MySQL Online Backup.

Personally, I think they’re great. Obviously many times I am scribe and am there for the sessions, but I listen to lots of the sessions anyway, and I’m yet to be disappointed by the content. What’s really great is that in all the cases the person you are listening to is probably the person that either developed, or helped drive development of the particular function, or, in the case of some of the external tools (EC2, for example), these guys are expert in it. The experience is not quite as thrilling as attending the MySQL User Conference, but the content is just the same.

The problem is that …

One of the great things about working on great products is that you get to meet such intelligent and interesting people. I can apply that to everybody that I work with, but there are some teams where not only are they working on great products, they are also all great people just to spend time with.

I have had the good fortune of working with the MySQL Enterprise Monitor team as an advisor, and more recently in writing the documentation, for the last 18 months. We’ve had some great fun at meetings in Amsterdam, Heidelberg, Santa Cruz and recently Riga. In the meeting rooms we are professional, but fun. But in the evenings we’ve gone out and just had plain good fun. Unless you’ve experienced a full day, or even week, of non-stop meetings for 12 hours a day you have no idea how important it is to kick back in the evenings. That, as a team, we are still able to have a good time at the end of each day while still being in the same room …

Sometimes there are funny communication styles between people who are geographically distributed and working together all the time. Recently one of our team members echoed back to me some answers I gave over a chat session:

Q: Is it OK for me to buy quad-core servers? A: The old man walks slow but carries much, whilst [...]

Rob Young has posted a few blog entries lately on the MySQL Enterprise monitoring software. His latest post claims that agent-based monitoring is equivalent to extensibility (MySQL Enterprise Monitor: Agent = Extensibility).

I think this is conflating two completely distinct properties of a monitoring solution. Cacti is extremely extensible, with a plugin-based architecture and [...]

My editor Andy Oram recently sent me an ACM article on BASE, a technique for improving scalability by being willing to give up some other properties of traditional transactional systems.

It’s a really good read. In many ways it is the same religion everyone who’s successfully scaled a system Really Really Big has advocated. But this is different: it’s a very clear article, with a great writing style that really cuts out the fat and teaches the principles without being specific to any environment or sounding egotistical.

He mentions a lot of current thinking in the field, including the CAP principle, which Robert Hodges of Continuent first turned me onto a couple months ago. …

MySQL’s version numbering is getting harder and harder to understand. In fact, it’s getting surreal.

Let me state up front that there’s probably a lot I don’t know here. But if I don’t know, how on earth can the general public figure it out?

Before we begin, let’s define terms: GA is completely done, ready for use. RC is a release candidate: don’t change anything, just fix bugs because we’re charging towards a release here. Beta is possibly unsafe code, use at your own risk. Alpha is known to have significant bugs, but if you’re curious please play with it.

Now for the releases/versions game. Let’s recap:

• 5.0 has version numbers that leapfrog each other in features and functionality. SHOW PROFILES — now you see it, now you don’t.
• 5.1 has been “… released to general …

Bruce Momjian says

…the volume of patches [to PostgreSQL] has risen dramatically during the past few years.

This is total hearsay — I don’t have hard numbers, haven’t verified it myself, etc etc. But consider the source!

What can be responsible for this increase in patches to PostgreSQL?

Bruce Momjian, Open Source development, patches, PostgreSQL