The latest from the MySQL community

Is proprietary software really that bad? Or is it a fair contract between consulting corporations? The answer is "It depends" and "Not really." Both depend on the strictures a vendor puts in place to inhibit its ability to lock a customer into its software. In MySQL's case, MySQL has no intention to lock customers in, as far as I can tell. It just wants to convince customers to pay so that it can prove its worth.

MySQL is contemplating introducing extensions to its core database that are only available to paid subscribers, for compelling reasons. This is not, as has been suggested, in and of itself proprietary. Red Hat does the same by providing an initial gate to its RHEL code which only a paid subscriber can access unless they get it from an existing customer of Red …

Just as a note the Ebay memory engine has been released:
http://code.google.com/p/mysql-heap-dynamic-rows/

This is awesome to see open sourced. It is an extension to the current Memory engine that has the engine using less memory (aka it really implements variable size character types).

A number of people have asked me about the Slashdot article Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL.

The software that was proposed to be closed source are portions of the online backup drivers. Each such driver has to be written in close cooperation with the developers of each storage engine. Well...

InnoDB already has an online backup tool, and even if/when they revise their tool to use this new API, it's still going to be theirs, open or closed, not the property of the MySQL Group.

Online backup of the engines for Archive, CSV, Blackhole, and Memcached doesn't even make sense, and even if it did, BrianA will flat out refuse to write crippleware into his own software.

Similarly, while online backup makes sense for Maria, I don't see MontyW writing crippleware into his work.

How about …

Ok. We may all (maybe not really "all") agree that XML in a relational DB is a cool thing. But which kind of approach should we use to store non tabular data in a typical tabular infrastructure?

Personally I don't like hybrids. The core of a RDBMS is designed to be efficient and with a relatively small footprint. Inflating the core with some features that would probably be helpful to not more than the 30% of the projects (to be optimistic, but this percentage is a good reason to think about XML in a DB), does not justify the extra overhead.
Unfortunately, an XML storage engine. On the contrary, it would make things worse, because we would translate queries twice - Xquery to SQL then to XQuery again (the big fans of MySQL internals will forgive me for this simplification).

My interest for a XOR (XML Over Relational) approach goes back to several years ago, mainly because in my past life I have designed a couple of …

I spent part of yesterday attending the Open Source Summit at Portland’s Innotech Business and Technology Conference, and moderating a panel on ‘IT Giants and Open Source.’ We had a great discussion about the reasons, roles, responsibilities and rewards for big vendors to be acutely and adequately participating in open source software development and commercialization. Our fabulous panelists were Danese Cooper, open source diva, knitting machine and present to give perspective from Intel, Stuart Cohen of OSDL fame and current leader of startup CSI and …

I had a great time speaking about partitioning at the MySQL conference this week.Special thanks go out to Mattias Jonsson as well for helping answer some of the questions afterwards. The room was packed - which makes me excited for the future of MySQL partitioning!I hope everyone got something out of the session, and I'd gladly welcome any comments (positive or constructive).I plan on doing some

The complaint is the same as last year:

MySQL's internal data structures change from version to version without notice. Everyone wants abstract APIs. But MySQL engineering management executives dont want to spend the effort to implement them.

In their defense, MySQL is already so late in delivery that it's hard to justify tasking people to work on that instead.

To demolish that argument, one of the main reasons that MySQL is so slow to ship, is BECAUSE we dont have workable abstract interfaces to our internal data structures.

It seems like Jeremy wants to be MySQL community president this week :)

The announcement of a MySQL yum repository is a good one but it's slightly confusing me .. didn't Jeremy already have this with
Dorsal, where there are also 5.1 builds. So what's the difference between Dorsal and the new yum repo anyway .

But he asks for Adittionals packages , well 5.1 to start with, apart from that the CentosPlus repo also has builds for Cluster , having a uniform place go get those to would be good.

And what about builds for CGE ?
Oh and …

Tue 22 April at 9am UK, 10am Central European time, we will present probably the most popular webinar on MySQL Performance and Tuning.

We will have some real hands on examples with several tips and tricks - all that we can cover in an hour!

This is the agenda:
- Performance and Tuning Tools
- Query performance analysis and improvements
- Modelling tips
- Engine specific recommendations

Slashdot totally misinterpreted Jeremy's post about MySQL starting to build features first for their customers. As a business model , this sounds like a good way to get revenue , customers want certain features that are valuable to them , so why not let them pay for it .

The question however is how your development cycle works. Often this method of keeping code first for your paying customers , and when "the feature has been paid for" give it to the opensource community , is the wrong one.

What it comes down to is that you neglect the release early , release often and the peer review , many eyeballs see more bugs, fundamentals that made opensource projects big and stable. You are in effect stepping back to a proprietary model where you have to rush your deadlines because you have promised …