If you are migrating your production environment to MySQL database or even thinking about it, you do not want to miss this webinar Experts from Zmanda and MySQL will present various methods to backup MySQL database and correlate them with tools and terminology you may be familiar with in other databases, including Oracle.

A good pre-read for this webinar would be Paddy’s blog on online MySQL Backup

WHO:

Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda

Robin Schumacher, Director Product Management, MySQL

WHAT:

MySQL Backup Techniques for the Oracle DBA (web presentation)

WHEN:

Thursday, December 13, 2007, 10:00 am PDT, 1:00 pm EDT, 18:00 GMT
The presentation will be approximately 45 minutes long followed by Q&A.

When I first arrived at MySQL more than 4 years ago, we didn't have much in the way of internal Quality Assurance. There were a couple of test suites that had been created and many engineers wrote unit tests. We supported a wide range of platforms, but formal testing was pretty spotty. As bugs were identified and fixed, the test suites were extended to help identify regressions. It was by no means a bullet-proof process; mostly the team depended on external testers to report issues. Sometimes a build would be created that would have some embarassing bug and we'd scramble... READ MORE

A

Marten Mickos emailed to point out the MySQL Workbench offering (a good FAQ here). As I've said before, MySQL gets it. Why? Well, in the eyes of commercial enterprise software vendors, the optimal result is for OSS vendors to stick to their "OSS religious" roots. An incredibly low % of OSS users end up paying for the software/subscription. This means that OSS Vendor A doesn't have the financial resources to close the feature/function gap vs. Enterprise Vendor B. That?s why growing an OSS business beyond $100M is more difficult than getting to $100M. Yes, OSS is already competing with enterprise... READ MORE

If you do serious web development, you sure have multiple working environments. This is true for ruby on rails, but I’ll guess you’ll do the same using other frameworks or languages. I’ve found a quite useful Firefox extension to switch from development to production (and back) with just a click (or a keystroke: Ctrl-Shift-X): Server Switcher

This is helping me redesigning the MySQL training part of our website, and can be useful in some other situations.

The market for server virtualization software appears to have gotten a whole lot more crowded this week. Not only did Oracle announce free server virtualization software at the Oracle Open World conference, but Microsoft and VMWare also made announcements of competing free offerings. And this morning at Oracle OpenWorld Sun announced their plans for virtualization also, known as xVM with support from Intel, AMD, Symantec and MySQL among others. Rich Green, head of Software at Sun, demonstrated Sun's xVM virtualization server and the xVM Ops Center management software console with a live demo deploying a workload to some Sun servers... READ MORE

I just read Colin Baker's article about a European OSS support provider named Credativ. The Credativ website claims: "credativ support covers a large number of open source projects, including: Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Red Hat, Xandros, Mandriva, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Kolab -Groupware, eGroupware, Asterisk, Apache, Squid, Postfix, Exim, sendmail, Cyrus, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Samba, OpenLDAP, Nagios, DRBD, Keepalived, Amanda, XEN, Gnome and KDE, OpenOffice.org, Firefox and many more." They seem to have a very similar business model to OpenLogic. Apparently the news is that Credativ has been successful in Germany for the past two years and is now expanding to the UK. It... READ MORE

We've kicked off our annual survey of MySQL users recently on the developer zone of the MySQL site. There are some new questions and some old questions so that we can gauge trends over time. For example in last year's survey we saw that: -40% of MySQL users also use Oracle -50% of MySQL users are using MySQL Replication -Over 50% of MySQL users have been using MySQL longer than 4 years -Over 50% of MySQL users plan to increase their usage in the next year We get lots of feedback from our users and customers and the survey is... READ MORE

Jim Starkey, Senior Software Architect at MySQL, is featured in an online interview over at Dr Dobb's Journal. It's a short interview, but every question reveals insight into the Jim's thoughts on the relational model, SQL, security, standards and more. For those who don't know Jim, he is one of the pionneers of the database industry and has implemented several relational databases in his career. Jim has always been an innovator, inventing the widely accepted notion of Blobs (binary large objects) and multi-generational versioning, a key innovation of InterBase. Jim and Ann Harrison joined MySQL from Netfrastructure, the company they... READ MORE

Jim Starkey, Senior Software Architect at MySQL, is featured in an online interview over at Dr Dobb's Journal. It's a short interview, but every question reveals insight into the Jim's thoughts on the relational model, SQL, security, standards and more. For those who don't know Jim, he is one of the pionneers of the database industry and has implemented several relational databases in his career. Jim has always been an innovator, inventing the widely accepted notion of Blobs (binary large objects) and multi-generational versioning, a key innovation of InterBase. Jim and Ann Harrison joined MySQL from Netfrastructure, the company they... READ MORE