The latest from the MySQL community

Marten Mickos was profiled in this past weekend's San Jose Mercury News, the prominent Silicon Valley newspaper.  (In fact, they have the domain name www.SiliconValley.com among others.)

Integrating with Sun's products is an attractive thing, but it's not the main idea. The main idea of the acquisition and of our business generally is to be the platform for the Web economy. Now, with the help of Sun, we will be able to accelerate this.

We had in our field organization 200 people; Sun has 17,000. We have a lot of usage in the big corporations, but we haven't been able to sell to them and become key vendors for them yet. With Sun, we get instant access to the big Fortune 500 and Fortune 2000 customers.

And to those who do want more than the …

At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, The Pythian Group gave away EXPLAIN cheatsheets. They were very nice, printed in full color and laminated to ensure you can spill your coffee* on it and it will survive.

For those not at the conference, or those that want to make more, the file is downloadable as a 136Kb PDF at explain-diagram.pdf

* or tea, for those of us in the civilized world.

During the conf, Keith Murphy spent long late-night hours getting issue 4 of MySQL Magazine ready.
Horay to Keith for starting (and continuing) that initiative!



(I snapped this pic of Keith + Monty at the MySQL Community dinner)

Read this doc on Scribd: Record every Referral for Flickr Realtime

Looks like the InnoDB plugin is completely broken with MySQL-5.1.24; at least there is no luck for me so far to set it up right. First, the Makefile is broken. Second, I tried to do a static build of InnoDB plugin with MySQL server (–enable-innodb and –with-plugin-innobase) resulted in partial InnoDB plugins (Information schema) missing the main one as shown below:

   1:  mysql> show plugins;

2:  +---------------------+--------+--------------------+---------+---------+

3:  | Name                | Status | Type               | Library | License |

4:  +---------------------+--------+--------------------+---------+---------+

5:  | …

In probably the best move by Sun during the whole MySQL Conference and Expo, Rich Green and Jonathan Schwartz turned up at the Community Dinner on the Sunday night before the conference.

As we walked into the restaurant I saw a face that I thought was familiar. Jonathan and Rich were standing outside the restaurant talking. However, only when we got inside did I hear Jay saying that that was Jonathan Schwartz.

So just before we all took our places, and while we were trying to work out how we were going to organize payment for the dinner, Rich and Jonathan turned up and quickly ended the discussion. Rich said his credit card would be good for the tab. So thanks to …

I thought I had already conquered the jet lag last night when I fell asleep at 22:00 (that's 10 pm...). But then I woke up somewhere around 2:30, read a book for a while until I decided to give up and have a nice breakfast. I kind of like jet lag though, it is a nice feeling to get out of bed 5:30, when no one else is awake, and birds are singing outside.

There would be a lot to tell about the conference, but you kind of find summaries from many live bloggers on Planet MySQL. One interesting aspect of the conference of course was to meet so many interesting people, many of whom I work with of course, but meeting them in flesh is still great. And Santa Clara being in Silicon Valley adds another funny revelational feeling to it all. For a European Yahoo, Google, Digg and others are Internet companies and seeing that they actually do have tangible offices in Silicon Valley was a …

Jay’s opening lines regarding the final MySQL Conference keynote speaker was: “I work with a lot of data. I think peta-bytes, maybe exa-bytes”. This was relating to Jacek Becla from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, giving his presentation on “The Science and Fiction of Petascale Analytics”.

The goal of the Large Synoptics Survey Telescope (LSST) is the storage of 50+ PB of images and 20+ PB data.
Let’s just clarify the size. 20 PB of data = 20 years of HD Movies = 2000 years of 128kb MP3

The next database frontier is obviously building huge databases. What part will MySQL or other relational databases play? Some interesting facts were.

• The Digital Universe Created 161 Exabytes of data last year.
• Google, processes 20 petabytes of data per day.

The Operational plan for LSST Project Timeline is 10 years, only starting in 2014. The timeline:

Over the past several years whether I am working with a small company or a fortune 500 client I have seen lots of issues and mistakes made around the configuration, setup, and ongoing maintenance of disk on Unix and Linux Servers. This is not only an issue with MySQL shops, rather it can be an issue with all database setups whether it is Oracle, DB2, or Sybase. Neglecting the disk is setting yourself up for long term issues. These mistakes often force companies to throw more and more hardware at the problem… Lets look at some common mistakes around disk:

#1 The problem is always an IO problem, and remember spindles not capacity

In performance disk is everything. It makes you happy, it makes you sad. Learn to love it. Learn to hate it. Learn to understand it. Everything eventually comes back to disk. Take this example: Lets say you have a bad query that you fix with an index. Why …

The messages going back and forth on the “close sourcing” or paying to make use of some “plugins” /addons within MySQL are flying still! And in my opinion this is getting way out of hand. < DISCLAIMER >I work for Sun/MySQL as a senior consultant but claim no special knowledge or agenda here. The comments here are simply my opinions. </ DISCLAIMER> I can not help but look at all the hubbub and laugh a little bit. The vast majority of what I have read seems way off base (more of a he/she posted this, fifth hand retelling instead of from official channels). But there is a lot of FUD floating around, and I keep seeing more and more legit news sources picking up on this “massive change to licensing”, which In my opinion it really is a non-story… because there is no massive change.

What is the issue?