The latest from the MySQL community

Thanks to all the attendees to the session on creative programming with MySQL at CommunityOne.
As announced, the slides are online.
3.5M (PDF)
Enjoy!

Today is my first official day with Kickfire. I've spent most of the day reading up about how the appliance works and trying to wrap my head around some of the finer details.

My starting role here is essentially as an internal consultant, which means that I'll be the one that gets the MySQL server related questions from the development team. This is going to allow me a chance to really sink my teeth further into the source code and help implement some really cool tech, which has me quite excited.

Later I will be doing some external consulting (sales, implementation, etc) that will allow me to travel a bit.

Overall, I think this position is a great fit for me and I'm really psyched.

As you all know, MySQL is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2008. Its the community bonding period now, and real work only starts on May 26 2008.

Just a couple of highlights:

• Raj Kissu Rajandran, a student at APIIT, in Malaysia, is the first Malaysian to participate in the MySQL project. I was under the impression that he was the first Malaysian in general, but it turns out that that he has competition in another project as well… He’s mentored by Marc Delisle from phpMyAdmin, but also has a co-mentor that is Ronald Bradford from PBXT/PrimeBase. Interest stuff.
• Filippo Bollini, mentored by Brian Aker, has already started writing weekly reports, and has a most impressive …

It’s been a while since I had chance to work on Informeer as my itch was one of multi-user web based password management (AuthStor). Oh and moving house.

Now that things are settling down again (Servers back up and running) I decided to take a break from AuthStor and focus on something new – Informeer.

The concept is simple, Centralised Notification.

I am forever configuring notifications from several sources, be it backup alerts, host monitoring notification and even simple applications that send mail via SMTP. When living in a world of change, both software and business, having to visit every application to change an e-mail address or add a new user to a notification schedule can be quite time consuming. Add to that the effort of having to modify firewalls, SMTP servers and XMPP …

i was going to write some reactions to an observation that postgresql has no bug tracker and its discussion last week, but lost the spark and abandoned the post after a few days. but today i ran across a quote from linus torvalds that neatly sums up my thoughts:

We’ve always had some pending/unresolved issues, and I think that as our tracking gets better, there’s likely to be more of them. A number of bug-reports are either hard to reproduce (often including from the reporter) or end up without updates etc.

before there was a bug tracking system for mysql, there was a claim that all bugs were fixed in each release (or documented), and there has been a lot of pain in seeing how well that sort of claim stacks up against a actual …

In the tradition of creative names for MySQL related projects ...

<weigon_> arj... no arjen :(
<dormando> haven't seen him in a few days, huh
<weigon_> http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mysql/appinfo.html?csaid=B0E0C3111A6494AB looked like a proxy job
<weigon_> tokenize the query, replace the constants and rewrite the resultset to something harmless
<dormando> sounds easy
<weigon_> in the tradition of http://jan.kneschke.de/2008/4/23/mysql-proxy-commit-obfuscator
<dormando> :)
<weigon_> I really would like to see applications falling apart when this script is put in between
<dormando> mine fall apart on their own. I need proxy to put them back together :(
<weigon_> Bandaid for MySQL ? :)
<dormando> Pretty much :(
<weigon_> is "bandaid" is trademarked ?
<dormando> It's a brand, so yes I think
<weigon_> otherwise it is ... damn
<dormando> the real term is adhesive-strip or bandage …

Did you pre-order yours?

Pre-Order yours today

Peter and Byron are really smart guys and very methodical in their tests to make sure the conclusions produced are rock solid. I don't know whats in the book, but if these guys made it, its going to be good-that's how much faith I have.

Earlier today I posted these benchmark results testing HSCALE and MySQL Proxy performance.

As Jan Kneschke (the author of MySQL Proxy) pointed out there are quite some improvements in the current development version (svn trunk). So I gave revision 369 a try.

Tests were all the same as mentioned in my previous post. And indeed we see quite dramatic improvements. While the performance of the Lua script stayed almost the same the footprint of the proxy itself sank to only 50 to 65%. Here are the numbers:

Ever since I did my original post on Crippleware I have been getting a lot of feedback from individuals about how the intersection of open source works with closed source extensions.

Open Source that is not crippleware but allows for third party extensions allows for the following:

Open and documented APIs with stable interfaces.
The ability to compile or load the software without "secret sauces".
The consumer right to always have access to the data they have entered.

The first two really deal with the issue of whether or not the vendor has created a "level playing field". Third party vendors who write modules expect an even handedness when dealing with APIs.

This means that there are no special tools required that cannot be obtained by …

There were free copies of the Linux Journal handed out to attendees outside in the hallways here at CommunityOne and I noticed that they just published this year's Readers' Choice Awards - MySQL was voted as the favourite database by 62.7% of their readers!

MySQL is not only the world's most popular open-source database, it's your favorite as well. Although PostreSGL,
SQLite, Firebird and others registered votes, the competition was not fierce. It doesn't hurt that MySQL runs on more than
20 different platforms.

Thanks a lot to the readers of LinuxJournal, we really appreciate the support!