The latest from the MySQL community

I have seen it time and time again. And yet, every time, it irritates me to no end. You are on a professional web site. You are navigating around and at some point you hit the link for their forums. And just like that you feel transported to another place. The whole site design just changes. Colors, layout, navigation… everything. Here are some examples, including the new C7Y site from php|Architect which inspired this post. (I really do love you guys on the podcast I promise =)

• php|architect’s C7Y - main site - forums
• Zend’s Developer Zone - main site - forums
  Zend’s forums do at least use the Zend.com header, but you can’t get to the forums …

I’ve decided to start replacing L with GL in acronyms where L supposedly stands for Linux. I’m not a big user of acronyms, because I think they are exclusionist and they obscure, rather than revealing. (This wouldn’t matter if I wrote for people who already knew what I meant and agreed with me, but that’s a waste of time). However, LAMP is one that I’ve probably used a few times, without thinking that it is supposed to stand for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python.

The MySQL Lifecycle Policy determines which versions are actively supported, and for which platforms such support applies.
The basic principle is that old versions are supported for a quite long, but definitely limited period, once they have been replaced by a newer GA version. For example, since the introduction of this policy, MySQL 3.23 and 4.0 have been retired.
The policy contains also provisions for a different kind of End of Life dismissal. When support for certain platforms has been discontinued by their vendors, of the platform is not widely used, MySQL reserves the right to stop building binaries and testing code on such obsolete platforms.
The reason is simple. While hardware can be bought and stored, time is a commodity in short supply, and there is only a given amount of time that our engineers can devote to testing and supporting multiple …

Damien has now confirmed that we will co-present the CouchDB talk at ETech. I am happy to have him with me cough so I can weasel out of the real hard questions by pointing to him — and vice versa.

But there is a treat for you, too. If you plan to come to ETech in San Diego on March 3rd to March 6th, you can get a 35% discount when you mention the code et08rdr during your registration.

Hope to see you in SoCal!

P.S. Don’t tell ay of Damien’s readers that I nicked the exclusive code!

Damien has now confirmed that we will co-present the CouchDB talk at ETech. I am happy to have him with me cough so I can weasel out of the real hard questions by pointing to him — and vice versa.

But there is a treat for you, too. If you plan to come to ETech in San Diego on March 3rd to March 6th, you can get a 35% discount when you mention the code et08rdr during your registration.

Hope to see you in SoCal!

P.S. Don’t tell ay of Damien’s readers that I nicked the exclusive code!

I had mentioned a while back that I submitted three proposals for the 2008 MySQL Conference.  Well, two were accepted.

From one server to a cluster

In the last 10 years, dealnews.com has grown from a single shared hosting account to an entire rack of equipment. Luckily, we started using PHP and MySQL very early in the company’s history.

From the early days of growing a forum to surviving Slashdotting, Digging and even a Yahoo! front page mention, we have had to adapt both our hardware and software many times to keep up with the growth.

I will discuss the traps, bottlenecks, and even some big wins we have encountered along the way using PHP and MySQL. From the small scale to using replication and even …

Damien has now confirmed that we will co-present the CouchDB talk at ETech. I am happy to have him with me cough so I can weasel out of the real hard questions by pointing to him — and vice versa.

But there is a treat for you, too. If you plan to come to ETech in San Diego on March 3rd to March 6th, you can get a 35% discount when you mention the code et08rdr during your registration.

Hope to see you in SoCal!

P.S. Don’t tell ay of Damien’s readers that I nicked the exclusive code!

By Tim O'Reilly

There's a scorching article on Forbes about the Sun acquisition of MySQL, entitled Cash Me Out: The End of Open Source as Counter-Culture:

These deals have nothing to do with peace, love and software, and everything to do with money. The open source guys realize they can't build a decent business unless they hook up with the old closed source guys.

Meanwhile, the old guard have figured out that open source code can be a wonderful way to inflict pain. IBM pumps money into Linux and other open source programs because those programs undermine Microsoft. Microsoft has pumped money into Novell, the number two Linux player, to undermine Red Hat (nasdaq: RHT - news - people ), the number one Linux player. Oracle offers to support customers of Red Hat Linux because it hurts both Red Hat and Microsoft.

While there's …

As a follow up to the series of posts I've been making, I wanted to post what I ended up with.  Thanks to everyone who posted comments, your help was extremely useful. To recap, I have a working pair of events to add and remove partitions to this table:

create table log (
    logged datetime not null,
    id int not null auto_increment,
    text varchar(256),
    PRIMARY KEY ( logged, id )
)
PARTITION BY RANGE( TO_DAYS( logged ) ) (
    PARTITION p20080206 VALUES LESS THAN (733444),
    PARTITION p20080207 VALUES LESS THAN (733445),
    PARTITION p20080208 VALUES LESS THAN (733446)

read more

Judging by the test scores, the INFORMATION_SCHEMA is unfamiliar territory to many of you. Many other vendors besides MySQL support this standard and it allows you access to data that is unavailable or hard to find otherwise.

Back when I first downloaded the MySQL tarball from tcx.se, I did not know much about DBMS software and just needed a running database. Over the years I upgraded that software and did not dig deeper into the software because I did not need to. I was too busy with other job related duties to worry about my always smooth operating MySQL instances.

But one day the database seemed slow and the regular show commands were not giving me the answers I needed. So how do you dig further? Yup, the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.

The INFORMATION_SCHEMA is the meta-data about your tables. What storage engine, column names, collation, and stored procedures are out there lurking in your database. This is the …