The latest from the MySQL community

I created my Events to handle adding new partitions (and removing old ones) from my log table and they seem to be working.  However, today I noticed that the events ran a few hours later than they ran yesterday.  

          EVENT_TYPE: RECURRING
          EXECUTE_AT: NULL
      INTERVAL_VALUE: 1
      INTERVAL_FIELD: DAY
            SQL_MODE: 
              STARTS: 2008-02-13 05:36:21
                ENDS: NULL
              STATUS: ENABLED
       ON_COMPLETION: NOT PRESERVE
             CREATED: 2008-02-13 05:36:21
        LAST_ALTERED: 2008-02-13 05:36:21
       LAST_EXECUTED: 2008-02-14 07:32:22

My addpartition event is current date dependent: it creates a partition for tomorrow hopefully before tomorrow comes so we don't miss a partition and so my INSERTs don't get "No partition" errors.  So if it waits a few extra hours more each day, gradually it will push past midnight and screw things up. …

As some of you surely know already I'm moving back to USA, so does Vadim. From very beginning we had much more business from US than from rest of the world combined so this is a great step in company development having more comfortable time zones for our customers (without having to work nights) as well as more readily available onsite consulting. This also will give better time distribution among time zones which makes it easier for us to provide 24/7 support for MySQL and other technologies.

Initially we thought of going to Seattle area where I've previously lived for about 2.5 years. However talking to our mostly Silicon Valley based customers we kept hearing they really want to see us in the Bay area and we thought a little bit more sun would not be bad either (especially after London and Kiev) so we were seduced and will be located in East Bay town Pleasanton.

We're moving this weekend so our schedule is already erratic and …

For some reason I never was that excited about trying to accomplish these sorts of things in Perl:

1..rand(256)).inject("") {|string,n| string + ('a'..'z').to_a[rand(25)] }

This generates a string from 1 to 256 characters long, containing random letters from 'a' to 'z'.  

Normally, I wouldn't use something that's quite so unreadable, but I'm starting to like Ruby's way of taking what should be a very simple operation that I might have done in 3-5 lines in Perl and boiling it down to a single line.

I'd love to see if anyone can make this more succinct (but one line is still a requirement!)

Here's the code in it's context. It's just a test script writing into my partition table every minute so I can verify my Events from previous posts are working correctly.

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Do you know the difference between client programs and standalone programs?

The MySQL Certification exams have a series of questions about client programs spread among the six exams. The gist of the questions are that MySQL supplies some programs that need to connect to the mysqld server. These programs depend on having a running MySQL server with which to interact.

MySQL also supplies some programs that do not require a running server. The risk adverse would be wise to just shut down their database before using them. The myisamchk table-maintenance utility or myisampack MyIsam table compressor for examples. Read the documentation on myisamchk for the list of woes that can be befall the more adventurous.

Some of the questions on the exams are quite detailed on these various programs. But it is obvious that many candidates are not able to differentiate the two types of programs.

On one of …

As one can imagine I've been getting a lot of questions about the Sun acquisition.

"Will you still blog?"

"Will MySQL be rewritten in Java"

"Can I get a picture of you in the "Java, the best replacement for Cobol" t-shirt?"

I also hear things. Good stories about Sun, bad stories about Sun. A lot of past history on poor attempts at open source libraries which people still think are current.

A lot of very happy people over Open Office's existence.

Someone asked me if Sun was likely to be sold to Microsoft (huh?).

What no one has asked me so far is what should an open source advocate/programmer going into Sun should try to do.

In general I believe strongly in a combination of "let a thousand flowers bloom" and "be afraid to die until you win some victory for humanity".

More open source is good; software patents kill …

Day 2 for me started with watching Simon Phipps talk about Sun’s FOSS Philosophy and Strategy. It rained in the morning, so the talk started a little late, and there were hopes of better attendance. Nonetheless, the talk was interesting, and the announcement that there was money in it for FOSS developers, was just fabulous. I took away a few points, which I ended up Twittering:

• There’s this idea of a global mesh nowadays, and its leading to a changing society. FOSS is all about it. And “Its Going Mainer Mainstream”!
• Investment in skills is important for any country. There should always be a …

I’ve been doing a lot of work lately on behalf of clients who are looking to deploy applications to virtual data centers. When I first started working as a technology consultant in the ’90s, it was a given that if you wanted to have a web application, you had to buy a bunch of servers and rent out a cabinet in a data center somewhere. Now the notion of spending all that money on hardware that will go obsolete in a few years seems like insanity most of the time (particularly when the size of the audience for your application is completely unknown). When I first started a hosted web service in 1999 people judged us by how many servers my company owned. Now when I tell them "we don’t own any servers at all" they nod knowingly.

It’s great that we have more cost-efficient virtualization options today than we had ten years ago. Unfortunately, though, virtualization is a disruptive technology, which means that there are incumbents …

Singapore. Last stop of my world tour. Shortly after my arrival, the new Lunar Year began. The year of the rat was happily celebrated, and its symbols can be seen everywhere in town.


In Singapore, the Freedom To Work Anywhere @ MySQL has a new meaning. Most of the town is connected via a free wireless net. While sitting on a public bench (in cool evenings) or while enjoying food and drinks at hawker centers and cafes, you can just fire up your laptop, connect to the free wireless, and start browsing. You will need to get a (free) username and password through your mobile, but you can live with it easily.
I am on vacation, so I am not "working from anywhere", but the ubiquity of the wireless connection was hard to resist!
By the way, in case you were wondering if the Sun acquisition …

Last week, we held a conference for leading financial and industry analysts from around the world. My keynote presentation is below - broken into two parts for ease of viewing. One analyst remarked, "but this is pretty much what you said last year."

I responded with, "That's the point."

If you'd like more specifics on our financial performance (directly from Mike Lehman, our CFO), views from the marketplace (from Don Grantham, our Global Sales and Services) or specific product roadmaps (from the heads of our Systems or Software businesses), just click here...)

A lot of people have repeatedly asked me why I’ve not mentioned my thoughts on the Sun-MySQL acquisition (and this blog post, clearly comes almost a month later). I’ve just been pre-occupied and have not had the time to come up with a lengthy blog post. I can however, recommend the following video, created by Mike Lischke, of MySQL Workbench fame.

Naturally, you should also read the Q&A Session with Marten Mickos, that was mostly whipped up almost immediately after the acquisition. Editorial kudos on that one goes to Lenz Grimmer, Steve Curry, and Zack Urlocker. I pretty much had those thoughts that Marten answered really …