I’ve had a lot of feedback from my resignation at MySQL. A lot positive, a lot of shock, even some avid discussion on why, and trying for me to reconsider my decision. Roland my evil twin (it’s a funny story), really challenging me which I very much appreciated, ensuring I had considered the multiple paths before me. I am a man of my own convictions, so reversing my decision was simply not an option on principle.

So what do I want in an ideal working environment. What was lacking, that I could not see and that I’m seeking. Here are two key points.

• “Continual improvement, 1% a day, review in 3 months.” This includes a commitment from the entire team, and a system to contribute, discuss, plan and see results. Something I’m a most firm believer of and will be ensuring is in place in my next position where I will have the responsibility.
• “Your employees are …

I was wrong in my last post, it seems that all Sun database developers are now part of the same organisation, including PostgreSQL's Josh Berkus.

MySQL has the pluggable storage engine architecture, which is unique in the industry. The idea is you pick from among a suite of storage engines the most suitable one. PostgreSQL on the other hand has a plugin architecture for programming languages you can then use for stored procedures. And the cool thing about Open Source...

Someone went as far as to implement a PostgreSQL plugin of LOLCODE, a funny programming language I didn't know about until recently. So now you could do this with PostgreSQL:

read more …

Dear Metadata fans,

It’s been a while that I blogged about Pentaho Metadata. This is undeservedly so because the last couple of months, a lot of things have been moving. Most of that is not really visible to the end-user. The GUI part of the metadata suite was attacked last year and doesn’t really need all that much work. What we have been doing is extending the underlaying architecture by making it more flexible, more robust and easier to program from an API viewpoint. Most of that work has been in the capable hands of Pentaho rock star Will Gorman. The work he did last year for example was building in support for libformula (Open Office formula) by Pentaho reporting wizard Thomas Morgner.

Lately, Will and I started on …

I am a very strong proponent of Open Source (excluding my Macbook). Joining MySQL Inc was a wonderful achievement, being part of the team behind the most popular open source database. Leaving MySQL was not an easy decision due to the people, but the Sun transition and requirements did help. However it is no surprise I am joining another open source company - Primebase Technologies in Hamburg, Germany. My association with the MySQL Community will only be strengthened with my full work and support behind the PBXT and Blob Streaming pluggable storage engines for MySQL.

It is actually poetic that I am joing Primebase for I have the auspicious recognition while an active part of the MySQL community of introducing Paul …

The acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems has caused a certain amount of news in 2008 from the Initial announcement at the MySQL ACM, to the completion in just 6 weeks. It has been a very quick transition and while there is the potential for further opportunities with Sun as an employee within the MySQL product line and possibly other areas, I have elected to pursue my professional goals elsewhere.

My leaving MySQL Inc has been met with comments from “Woot!”, “Congratulations”, “Good Luck”, ‘That’s terrible”, “Are you sure”, “I’m shocked, but I don’t blame you” and attempts from multiple people to reconsider and reverse my decision. I was pleased …

Recently I got to spend a day with Jan Kneschke at his home in Kiel, Germany. This was an excellent opportunity to interact directly with a fellow MySQL employee and resident expert in several fields. Doing this on my own vacation time enabled me to control what I wanted to achieve.

Jan uses Linux, Windows and Mac OS/X all actively and with Synergy enables a single keyboard and mouse to work seamlessly across his three screens. I knew you could do this, just last year I tried to find out the software that could do it without obvious success.

Of interest was our discussion in English, while he was also communicating on IRC in German during the day. Being multi-lingual …

Today Robin Schumacher, MySQL's Director of Product Management, announced that the mysql Falcon storage engine has moved into a beta release stage. Falcon, a new transactional storage engine introduced in mysql 6 (aka 5.2), has been in alpha for years. Other popular storage engines include MyISAM, InnoDB, which Falcon is supposed to challenge (successfully? :-/), and the upcoming Maria.

Falcon …

We were using memcache in our application for a long time and it helped a lot to reduce DB servers load on some huge queries. But there was a problem (sometimes called a “dog-pile effect”) - when some cached value was expired and we had a huge traffic, sometimes too many threads in our application were trying to calculate new value to cache it.

For example, if you have some simple but really bad query like

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM some_table WHERE some_flag = X

which could be really slow on a huge tables, and your cache expires, then ALL your clients calling a page with this counter will end up waiting for this counter to be updated. Sometimes there could be tens or even hundreds of such a queries running on your DB killing your server and breaking an entire application (number of …

You have to love error messages some times. Today in MySQL is was “ERROR 1289 (HY000): The ‘UNKNOWN’ feature is disabled;”

What was even more interesting is the error message and indeed the error number changed across different versions. I took the time to also review the error in the current versions of 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0.

5.0.37/5.0.51a - ERROR 1289 (HY000): The ‘InnoDB’ feature is disabled; you need MySQL built with ‘InnoDB’ to have it working
5.1.19/5.1.23/6.0.4 - ERROR 1286 (42000): Unknown table engine ‘InnoDB’
6.0.0 - ERROR 1289 (HY000): The ‘UNKNOWN’ feature is disabled; you need MySQL built with ‘UNKNOWN’ to have it working

You can read more at Bug #29373

In my previous post I briefly mentioned Database Appliance with Project Indiana. Now that Sun has acquired MySQL (or as some people say MySQL has acquired Sun) and with our existing work in progress with PostgreSQL, there are quite a bit of options available of using some combination  of Storage, System, Operating System, Database  along with some end user application and present it as either Database Appliance or use it as Embedded Database. 

I thought I will just discuss the audience, symptoms, merits, cons etc regarding the two approach and how they can be useful. 

 The first question is who likes database appliances and who wants embedded database? To answer that I would put the question back: What do you in hand? A hammer or a screw-driver? Because if you have a hammer, the whole world is a nail to you and …