In a Financial Times report today about RedHat's quarterly earnings, Sam Ramji of Microsoft takes note of MySQL and its influence as a key component in the general move towards open-source software:

Larger deployments of open-source to firms that already run the technology in a small way might be the most that happens, due to the fact that recessions make IT managers worry about risk. For the same reasons, a recession is not the time to switch a workforce to a new technology.

Microsoft is counting on that, while accepting that every leading company will soon be running at least some open-source software.

“It’s a heterogeneous world,” said Microsoft’s Sam Ramji. While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji’s role is to make sure …

Continuing my series of in depth looks at flash appliances, sans, and drives I spent a few weeks test driving the Violin Memory flash ( and DDR based ) solutions. Just from the specs the Violin Memory 1010 is impressive. According to the site the v1010 does 300K random reads per second and 200K random writes and has latency of less then 300 microseconds! That is pretty impressive!  But as I have stated before its difficult to test these limits with our current set of benchmarks.   For my test’s I did run this through the  ysbench fileio tests and dbt2 to get a feel for performance, but I was really eager to test the new juice db benchmark to really drive IO.  For the test Violin generously made available a 4 core (3.4Ghz ) server with 8GB of memory with access to a 360GB DDR based v1010 and then a 320GB DDR based v1010. Unlike the Ramsan I tested a …

2.6.29 was released. I don’t usually write about linux kernel releases, thats what Slashdot is for :), but this one introduces write barriers in LVM, as well as ext4 with write barriers enabled by default. If you run this kernel and forget to turn off barrier support at filesystems (like XFS, nobarrier), you will see nasty performance slowdowns (recent post about it). Beware.

At this year's CeBit 2009 trade fair, there was a dedicated exhibition area called the Open Source Forum. In addition to providing booths for various Open Source projects, they also had a stage for presentations about different topics. Every talk was recorded and available as a live stream during the show.

My dear colleague Simon Phipps spoke about "Adoption-Led: The Third Wave of Open Source" on Wednesday, I gave a presentation about "MySQL Backup and Security Best Practices" on Friday. The recording of these and all other talks as well as the Linux New Media Award ceremony are now available from the archives. Enjoy!

We are proud to announce the release of the first official Beta of MySQL Workbench 5.1, the next highly anticipated version of our database GUI tool - MySQL Workbench. For the first time we are making an announcement for all our major platforms at the same time: OSX, Linux and Windows.

MySQL Workbench 5.1 has some major improvement over our current 5.0 release, many of them might not be that visible when looking at the UI only. We did a major overhaul under the hood in addition to enhance usability and adding some features. On top of it, we moved some features to 5.1 OSS, that were only available in SE edition for 5.0 (like different notation styles i.e.). The editors have been tuned to startup more quickly, and some of them also got face lifted. All Wizards have been revamped using our new mForms library.

Please keep in mind that this is the first beta release of MySQL Workbench 5.1, and it’s not supposed to …

IBM to acquire Sun? TomTom countersues Microsoft. Sun unveils Open Cloud Platform. Oracle’s contributions to the Linux kernel. SpringSource updates Tool Suite. And more.

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IBM to acquire Sun?
No prizes for guessing the big story this week as the Wall Street Journal reported that IBM was in talks to buy Sun for $6.5bn, according to “people familiar with the matter”. Raising the game, the New York Times reported that the purchase price was nearer $7bn citing “a person with knowledge of the negotiations”.

The media exploded with …

Introduction

If you, like me, are building or thinking of implementing a MySQL-powered application that has any need for prioritizing selecting certain data over other data, this article is for you.

Example

As a real world example, consider a queue-like video processing system. Your application receives new videos and processes them. The volume of incoming videos can at times be higher than the processing rate because the process is CPU bound, so occasionally a pretty long queue may form. You will try to process them as fast as you can but…

Note that I am using a queue here, so the the next item to be processed is a result of sorting by some sort of field in a ascending order, for example ORDER BY id or ORDER BY upload_date. Iâ€ll pick the id sort here.

…suddenly, you need to process a video somewhere in the middle of the queue or an important video enters and …

Following our plan to release the MySQL Workbench 5.1 Beta1 later this week we have uploaded a last Alpha build for Ubuntu and the Mac for you to check for serious issues. The following binaries will not be published on our official download site but are only available trought the following links.

Please join us in our #workbench IRC channel on freenode to discuss issues or simply leave a comment here.

ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/gui-tools/mysql-workbench-oss-5.1.8-1-alpha-i386.deb

…

I’ve just started using the CSV engine for a practical application and I’ve come across a few subtle and unexpected issues/limitations.

First, you can’t create any columns in your CSV table nullable.

mysql> create table t1(i INT) ENGINE=CSV;
ERROR 1178 (42000): The storage engine for the table doesn't support nullable columns

RTFM shows this was introduced in 5.1.23. See CSV Limitations

The second and more annoying was creating a CSV table, inserting a sample row (just to check the syntax), then replacing the file ([datadir]/[schema]/[table].CSV) with the same format, but with additional generated rows. This was to no avail when attempting to SELECT from the table.

The solution was to do a REPAIR TABLE [table] in order to see the newly refreshed data.
Futhermore, some more RTFM shows in …

I am happy to say that I found a kernel level way to join a ramdisk (actually not a tmpfs strictly speaking) with a normal file system. This cut my motivation for the MiniWheatFS project by 99.999%. I recall that the goal of the MiniWheatFS project was to provide and efficient filesystem for the the “tmpdir”, where MySQL puts its temporary files and tables. The trick uses the tendancy of ext2 (and probably ext3 and 4) to use the first available block from its bitmap and LVM to join a ramdisk with a normal device. Here are my steps.

1. Give a ramdisk to LVM

root@yves-laptop:/home/yves# pvcreate /dev/ram0
  Physical volume "/dev/ram0" successfully created

By default, my Ubuntu laptop creates 16 ramdisk of 64 MB each. RAM is not allocated until used. To create bigger one, you need to add a ramdisk_size=SizeInKB to the kernel command line in Grub menu.lst or …