There is much excitement today at the launch of MySQL 5.4, so I will relate my story about a project I contributed to this new version.

When we started looking at performance improvements for MySQL, we were interested in "low hanging fruit", or fixes and changes that could reap measurable benefits for users in the short term.

An obvious candidate at that time was the now well-known Google SMP patch. I had seen Mark Callaghan present on this at the MySQL User Conference in 2008, and was interested to investigate.

I was pretty new to InnoDB at that time, and was soon to discover that InnoDB was possibly experiencing poor scalability around its mutexes and read-write locks because InnoDB had a private implementation of adaptive mutexes and …

A rotten little apple by Ashley Harding

Apple has had a nasty Safari bug since December which breaks SmugMug, Facebook, Gmail, and lots of US banks.

3 months later, it’s still not fixed. Your only option is to use Firefox if you’re affected.

Apple’s known about the problem since December, and has lots of internal bugs on the issue (30+ I last heard). (For my Apple readers, here’s our bug on …

The time is just running and it's already time, again, for students to apply for this year's Google Summer of Code program. PHP and MySQL are among the list of 150 participating organizations. So if you're a student and are interested to learn how OpenSource works, do some networking with some famous people or just want a Google T-Shirt it's your time to take a look at the different idea pages (PHP, MySQL, others) or come up with an own idea and apply. Oh if accepted you even can earn some money as part of the program ...

MySQL is participating in Google Summer of Code 2009 (GSoC for short), and so is the MySQL documentation team. We've just put our ideas on this page; you might want to have a look if you're interested in applying for a GSoc project.

One of the projects is purely technical and doesn't involve writing any documentation, but rather improving the technique that goes on behind the scenery.

The other project does involve writing documentation, but it's mostly (if not exclusively) about creating examples for the Connectors & APIs chapter of the MySQL Reference Manual, so you don't have to be a Pulitzer award winner to contribute, but you should …

I was a little worried last week with regards to our Google Summer of Code status, but I’m glad to see that MySQL has been accepted, for a third year running, for the Google Summer of Code 2009.

Mentors & students alike, check out the ideas page. You as a student can even submit ideas, and we’ll look for a mentor for you, naturally.

Things we’re looking for:

• Simple bug fixes
• Improvements in documentation of code
• Test suite improvements
• New features, but simple enough to implement in timeframe
…

Today I come back from the dentist, if that wasn’t bad enough news, I get an email from Google AdWords titled Your Google AdWords Approval Status.

In the email, all my AdWords campaigns are now disapproved, because of:

SUGGESTIONS:
-> Ad Content: Please remove the following trademark from your ad:
mysql.

Yeah right. I can’t put the word ‘MySQL’ in my ads. How are people to now find me? It would appear that many ads have been pulled not just mine. Is this a proactive measure by Google? is this a complaint from the MySQL trademark holder Sun Microsystems?

I’d like any comment, feedback or suggestions on how one can proceed here.

It reminds me of the days CentOS advertised itself as an “Open source provider of a popular North American Operating System”, or something of that nature.

After checking with the relevant parties, MySQL has just submitted an application for the Google Summer of Code 2009. We’ve successfully participated in SoC during 2007, and 2008, and we’re hoping to get another shot at SoC, for our third year running.

What is Summer of Code? It means different things to many different people. If you’re a student, it means you get to hack on MySQL and the related products, and churn out code, that over eleven million people use, while you sit on the beach in your bathers! And when successful, you get a nice wad of cash even!

If you’re a mentor, it means having someone to help you write features, you’ve been wanting — someone to spend a good fourty-hours per week, hacking …

It is possible to generate SVG graphs directly without requiring access to the Google Chart Servers. Perl provides a wealth of libraries which can create SVG graphs (but most not quite as pretty as the charts which the Google service creates).This could be invaluable for people who want to serve all the information from their own website - for example, SSL encrypted websites - where some 'secured

Ian Bullard asserts that you should never use the RAND() function. The Ayn Rand Google Ad is pretty funny. The new Zend Server is coming out as a web stack. Although it can be easier to install a Xampp style … Continue reading →