Distributed development teams are becoming more and more commonplace - truly distributed teams with individual members living around the globe, not just a big company which happens to have independent teams in several different countries. The MySQL development team is organized this way, as are many other projects.

A new paper is available from Andrew Bennetts about distributed development: Coding in a Distributed Team: Testing, Reviewing, Sharing and Merging Code Without Going Crazy. This is definitely worth reading for anyone who does MySQL development even if you don’t consider yourself a developer - there are ideas in this paper which can make the life of both developers and operations folks much better.

Andrew speaks from personal experience working on …

I’m interested to know what people consider will behold MySQL in 2007?

The announcement of “You” as Time person of the year can only considered a huge boost to the opportunities in 2007. So, in 2007 here are my 7 (in no significant order).

1. 2007 will be the year of the storage engine. We will see 5 offerings for transactional storage engines, 20+ available and practical engines for management of some form of data.
2. 2007 will see MySQL 5.1 GA (finally).
3. 2007 will see MySQL release it’s own Falcon Storage Engine (GA not until Q4 ).
4. The MySQL Winter of Code will enable the contributions of the community to change feature development. I foresee a Bounty system from an external party or parties for MySQL Features emerging.
5. MySQL will make major press inroads to the RDBMS Big 3 of Oracle, SQL Server and IBM DB2.
6. Despite efforts of MySQL AB, major installations of …

The last couple of weeks have been fantastic, I’ve learned and discovered so many new things that I haven’t been able to write about any of them. So, I’m going to combine many things into a single post!

Item: I have a new job. After working at the fabulous MySQL for most of 2005 and 2006, I’ve given up my post as Director of Development to take on a new challenge at Canonical Ltd. Canonical is associated with Ubuntu Linux, the Bazaar distributed revision control system, and the launchpad.net collection of services for products in the open source universe. Working for Brian and more recently …

December 29th, 2006 - by Sheeri Kritzer

Welcome to the 25th edition of Log Buffer, the DBA community?s Carnival of the Vanities-style blog of blogs about the database world.

This is the last Log Buffer of calendar year 2006. The database world seems to be a series of series lately, so let’s jump right in:

If, like me, you have no idea what doors and signals are in Solaris 10, you might want to read part 4 of Frank Mash’s “Managing MySQL on Solaris 10″, entitled Solaris Doors and Signals.

On a more theoretical level, Random Notes describes lack of …

Has anyone used MySQL Turbo Manager? What do they think?

From: http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=36474

Mentat Technologies, Inc. announced it will offer MySQL Turbo Manager Free Edition, a brand new, free graphical tool for database development and administration. With MySQL Turbo Manager Free Edition, you can browse database objects, run SQL statements and SQL scripts, edit and execute Stored Procedures. MySQL Turbo Manager works with any MySQL Server versions from 3.2.3 to 5.1 and supports all MySQL objects and all MySQL options.

You can download MySQL Turbo Manager Free Edition at: http://www.mentattech.com/themes/mentat/download.html

Chad and Brian have already mentioned how MySQL does indeed support Debian and Ubuntu, but I thought I would add my thoughts on the secret measure of how well an OS is truly supported.

Regardless of what is on the checklists and the advertising and everything else, the best supported operating systems and configurations are the ones that the developers themselves actively use. You better believe that when a bug pops up on the operating system I use on my desktop, it’s going to be fixed a lot faster than a bug I can’t see on a more obscure platform. I’ve believed this for a long time, and that is why I have done things like send 64-bit Windows machines, OpenSolaris machines, etc. to developers for daily use in order to improve the quality of our Windows and Solaris …

The state I live in (Illinois), has decided that it should do emissions testing on all passenger vehicles (never mind the amount of pollutants that trucks, trains, etc. put into the air).

I own a Volkswagen that is old, but new enough to be tested via the on-board diagnostics. The problem is that earlier in the year the secondary air injection pump went bad (a $1000 fix for a part that basically makes the catalytic converter more efficient for the first 90 seconds after a cold start, so let that be a warning to other VW owners, it‘s pretty common for this thing to fail). So, I had it replaced, as I definitely couldn‘t pass the emissions tests without it.

The big issue now is that before the emissions test can pass, the engine computer needs to report that it‘s tested all of the components of the emissions system. Some of these tests take many miles of driving, or certain environmental conditions (i.e. warm enough to create …

The state I live in (Illinois), has decided that it should do emissions testing on all passenger vehicles (never mind the amount of pollutants that trucks, trains, etc. put into the air).

I own a Volkswagen that is old, but new enough to be tested via the on-board diagnostics. The problem is that earlier in the year the secondary air injection pump went bad (a $1000 fix for a part that basically makes the catalytic converter more efficient for the first 90 seconds after a cold start, so let that be a warning to other VW owners, it's pretty common for this thing to fail). So, I had it replaced, as I definitely couldn't pass the emissions tests without it.

The big issue now is that before the emissions test can pass, the engine computer needs to report that it's tested all of the components of the emissions system. Some of these tests take many miles of driving, or certain environmental conditions (i.e. warm enough to create excess …

The state I live in (Illinois), has decided that it should do emissions testing on all passenger vehicles (never mind the amount of pollutants that trucks, trains, etc. put into the air).

I own a Volkswagen that is old, but new enough to be tested via the on-board diagnostics. The problem is that earlier in the year the secondary air injection pump went bad (a $1000 fix for a part that basically makes the catalytic converter more efficient for the first 90 seconds after a cold start, so let that be a warning to other VW owners, it‘s pretty common for this thing to fail). So, I had it replaced, as I definitely couldn‘t pass the emissions tests without it.

The big issue now is that before the emissions test can pass, the engine computer needs to report that it‘s tested all of the components of the emissions system. Some of these tests take many miles of driving, or certain environmental conditions (i.e. warm enough to create …

Every day I talk to many engineers and managers who want to be better. Better at developing software, better at shipping software, better at reacting to change in the marketplace, better at preserving backward compatibility, better at integrating new technologies, better at working efficiently, better at preventing and detecting bugs and errors, and so on.

I have often heard arguments that essentially say “all we need is a formal written process and things will be better”. I’ve consistently argued against that mindset, since I believe that principles are much more enduring than rules, and writing many rules often prevents people from doing the right thing.

You should all read this post from Jeff Patton why the best software design and development process is all in your head. Jeff explains so much more eloquently than I could why …