The latest from the MySQL community

“So, I suppose MySQL’s main competitor is Oracle?” is a frequent question I get asked by the press. “Well, we don’t really compete heads-on with other databases. We co-exist! Just as an example: Over a third of respondents in an Oracle User Group survey said they also use MySQL”, I answer.

The reporter then continues “But everyone has a main competitor. Don’t you plan for people to migrate from Oracle to MySQL?”. I continue with “Not really. Migrations do happen, but not all that often. MySQL tends to be used in new applications.”

“But surely you must have some competitive atmosphere, or equivalent feelings towards Oracle.” The reporter never gives up. “Don’t you at least internally joke about your relationship with Oracle?”.

And that’s where I will now have a new answer for whichever reporter nexts goes …

We released Cool Stack 1.3.1 recently. This was the last release that was built to work on releases as old as Solaris 10 01/06 (Update 1). Going forward, future versions of the stack will only be supported on newer Solaris 10 updates. So I'd like to urge everyone who is running older releases to please schedule their systems for upgrade. We highly recommend that you upgrade to at least Solaris 10 01/08 (Update 5) as it has many performance, security and other fixes.

For some time now, we've had two different stacks for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris - Cool Stack for Solaris 10 and Web Stack for OpenSolaris. We cannot continue to sustain this model  where we have two different source bases with slightly different …

Are emerging countries displaying a form of protectionism by supporting local use of open source? Or is this a small price to pay for a more vibrant software market of the future? READ MORE

I promised Giuseppe that I'd post Part II of "Some Perspective on Recent Events" today, but I got hit w/ some kind of bug.

Last month, authorities at Schiphol duly confiscated my Black Baslam, aka "The Latvian Hammer", so I've had to resort to bland, marginally effective over-the-counter remedies.

Let's see how tomorrow goes.

Reminders work. At least on me. I try to Get Things Done (TM) efficiently, but slips do happen. And when they do, reminding me has a good chance to influence my priorities. I hope I’m not alone in this fallibility.

And therefore I want to remind you that you’ve still got two weeks to reply to our Call for Participation in the MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California on 20-23 April 2009.

A few items to remember:

• We have plenty already, but we’re looking for more proposals. It does make our selection process harder (that’s when the Program Committee sits down and asks itself “what’s right for the conference and its participants”), but that’s a task that we are happy to work on.
• The theme of the conference is “Innovation …

We released Cool Stack 1.3.1 recently. This was the last release that was built to work on releases as old as Solaris 10 01/06 (Update 1). Going forward, future versions of the stack will only be supported on newer Solaris 10 updates. So I'd like to urge everyone who is running older releases to please schedule their systems for upgrade. We highly recommend that you upgrade to at least Solaris 10 01/08 (Update 5) as it has many performance, security and other fixes.

For some time now, we've had two different stacks for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris - Cool Stack for Solaris 10 and Web Stack for OpenSolaris. We cannot continue to sustain this model  where we have two different source bases with slightly different …

We released Cool Stack 1.3.1 recently. This was the last release that was built to work on releases as old as Solaris 10 01/06 (Update 1). Going forward, future versions of the stack will only be supported on newer Solaris 10 updates. So I'd like to urge everyone who is running older releases to please schedule their systems for upgrade. We highly recommend that you upgrade to at least Solaris 10 01/08 (Update 5) as it has many performance, security and other fixes.

For some time now, we've had two different stacks for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris - Cool Stack for Solaris 10 and Web Stack for OpenSolaris. We cannot continue to sustain this model  where we have two different source bases with slightly different …

i5/OS doesn’t immediately strike you as the most natural environment for running MySQL, but in fact, there some advantages and benefits of making use of the hardware and i5/OS environment. The System i environment used with i5/OS is scalable, and the i5/OS itself provides lots of benefits over the control and separate of work.

Obviously another key advantage is that if you are already using i5/OS for your application, then being able to plug in MySQL into that equation on the same machine makes a big difference. For those companies and organizations that already have a business application on their server, you can use MySQL in combination with ODBC or more direct interfaces such as PHP to provide a web interface to your business application all in the same box.

MySQL works through PASE (Portable Application Solutions Environment) which allows AIX applications to run directly on i5/OS through a direct application binary interface. …

storage/ndb/test/src/getarg.c

Guess what? It calls srand(time(NULL)) in getarg(). Why you ask? well.. what you want to be able to when specifying a flag is have it be true, false or it could “maybe” be set.

That’s right kids… maybe.

I’m sure it’s used somewhere in our test suite to get coverage on different things.. but umm.. yeah, interesting discovery for today.

I was just able to do this for the first time:

[root@piggy var]# /tmp/drizzle/drizzled/serialize/master_list_reader ./master.info
HOSTNAME piggy.tangent.org
USERNAME
PASSWORD
PORT 4427
CONNECT RETRY 60
LOG NAME
LOG POSITION 16777216

So what is the big deal?

In the reworking of replication I ran across this bird's nest of a code that exists for the master.info file. Pretty much all of the code dates back to around 2000 (despite the recent work in row based replication, most of the code in replication has been the same for the last eight years).

One of the things no one has ever tackled was getting rid of the master.info file. Even at this point in Drizzle we still have it, though we have moved it to being a protocol buffer file and now can list multiple masters in the file (so yes, that means we will most likely have multi-master support …