The latest from the MySQL community

Read Alexis' Adoption Story and, for full details, go to our usual Questionnaire.

Hey everyone, I try to get the magazine out every three months on the 15th. Sometimes life gets in the way. Imagine that! The next issue is looking great and will be out very soon.

Not to early to start thinking about what you want in the next issue. I will be asking for article ideas very soon.

Keith

There’s a Facebook event for OpenSQL Camp. If you RSVP to it, your friends will find out, and that will help spread the word.

Our product historically used an Oracle backend, and after implementing simple date based range partitioning we got a 20-30 time performance increase in our queries. We had used MySQL in other more minor products we had developed, but we couldn’t move to it until partitioning was implemented. In Dec 05 we started to test MySQL partitioning, where partitioning syntax was supported but the optimizations were not in place. As soon as the optimizations were put in, we were able to run a side by side comparison against unpartitioned tables and Oracle partitions. Not only did we get in MySQL a 30+ times performance increase, but the MySQL version ran nearly twice as fast as the same Oracle configuration in a like for like test.

First of all, let me say that I think it's great that you're using MySQL, regardless of the underlying operating system.  What I'm currently  looking at is when might it make sense for MySQL users to give Solaris or OpenSolaris a try.  In that process, something that would be helpful to know is why do so many existing MySQL users deploy on Linux?  Is it familiarity, what's available in their environment, known to work, licensing model, cost, etc?  Do you have other reasons?  I'd like to know. Please share your comments.  Thanks.

Just a quick post that I've moved The FederatedX Storage Engine for MySQL to Launchpad from my Mercurial repository. I'm trying like anything to get a spare moment to work on it-- writing a book takes every spare moment I have. I have made it group accessible and am working with Antony Curtis (who with Arjen encouraged me to get this on LP) on it. So, what I need to do is start a 5.1 compile (it has a problem with latest 5.1) and then give it a test run to see what the problem is. I want to keep this project moving!

The Launchpad page for it is:

https://launchpad.net/federatedx

Microsoft inches closer toward distributing open source software in a big way READ MORE

Today at the Venture Capital Forum in Hilton Arc de Triomphe, Paris, I received the EVCA “Hall of Fame” Award on behalf of MySQL AB. What a timing, to meet with investment bankers and venture capitalists now!

In these times of a deep finance crisis, of no credit handed out by banks and of general doom and gloom, it felt great to be somewhat of an “everybody’s darling”. In the VC community, MySQL is seen as a great success — and in particular, we’re seen by European VCs as a European success story (despite over 50 % of our personnel and most of our Management Team being US-based, at the point of time when the VCs exited).

Side note: I don’t mind MySQL being seen as a European success story. We’re used to portraying ourselves as belonging to whatever geography is relevant for the moment. That …

I'm just done listening to a presentation on MySQL from my esteemed MySQL colleague Robin Schumacher. Robin is director of product management at Sun/MySQL. Not being a database expert, I thoroughly enjoyed Robin's whirlwind tour of MySQL. I want to note of a couple of highlights that caught my attention :

• MySQL Community Edition and MySQL Enterprise Edition are feature identical. Wow, that was a suprise to me. I hate it when the Community Edition is distributed as "crippleware".
• Kickfire offers a SQL chip. If I understood correctly, this is a piece of silicon that speeds up your SQL statements. Wow again. I thought the time for custom built silicon for a specific purpose came and went, and the market has long ago decided to pack the intelligence into software, and to use commodity processor units as base. I guess I was wrong here.
• Lastly, …

DTrace allows you to instrument any live running application in production without the need of extra coding, application recompile or even an application restart. All you need is that the application is running on an OS that supports DTrace. Today Solaris, OpenSolaris, OS X and FreeBSD are a few that have DTrace built in.

For example here is a D-script that instrument MySQL to observe the SQL statements that is being executed in production. Just a 3 line script like this can be extremely useful to observe a live MySQL database

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -qs
pid$1::*dispatch_command*:entry
{
    printf("%d::%s\n",tid,copyinstr(arg2));
}

You need to pass the pid of the mysql process as the first argument to this script.

Here is a sample output from the script. We are observing the SQL statements that are executed to bring up the SugarCRM login screen.

 …