The latest from the MySQL community

Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs) have been quietly increasing their penetration, but until recently they have lacked the capabilities to seriously threaten proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

All that has changed. OSDBs now boast the necessary features and robustness to support commercial databases hundreds of Gigabytes in size. And a growing trickle of competitive benchmark results shows them …

Last week I wrote about CVE-2007-5925, a vulnerability in MySQL 5.0.51 (current version of the MySQL Community Edition), which is fixed in 5.0.52 (current version of the MySQL Enterprise Edition, released on the same day as 5.0.51) and was known for more than three weeks when 5.0.51 got released. 5.0.51 is also affected by CVE-2007-6303 and CVE-2007-6304, both as well already fixed in 5.0.52. While preparing 5.0.51-1 (not yet uploaded to unstable) for …

The potential for successfully building or extending a corporate identity based on Open Source depends on a company’s relationship towards an Open Source product. The graph below relates the extend of product ownership to the level of awareness potentially available for marketing:

Basically, the more you own the product, i.e. the more it is directly correlated to your company, the more you can make out of it.

If you’re the creator of the product (e.g. MySQL, the company, is the creator of MySQL, the database), you can utilize maximum awareness in your market. Your whole ecosystem will support your marketing efforts. For example, those providing extensions to your product, will automatically market your product while promoting their extension.

If you’re an external contributor to a product (e.g. providing patches with bug fixes), you …

For all new contributors devoted to quality, FAQ was slightly updated with new section.

I still remember my first database disaster that occurred almost 20 years ago.  I was a brand new systems engineer working on a massive mainframe database.  My leader needed me to make a few data changes, but they would have to be done while he was on vacation (of course) but he assured me nothing would go wrong.  Right.  To make a long story short, the morning I ran the jobs to make the change, I ended up deleting the entire worldwide telecommunications database of General Motors and keeping just the two records I needed to change.  Let me tell you, no amount of antiperspirant stands up under those conditions.

Thank goodness for the backup job that I ran right before the change.  I was able to restore everything back to the way it was, but brother, were there ever some anxious moments in between… 

For sure, data protection is the database professional’s #1 job.  And this …

We are working hard on the next release of MySQL Workbench and are trying to follow our plan of getting a release out every second week. A lot of things have already been addressed, some new things came up. But we are clearly moving into the right direction and our investments in unit tests and UI tests seems to pay off as expected. More details in a post later this week.

Giuseppe Maxia teased me last week to see whether I could decipher the notice on the Italian web site Punto Informatico about “MySQL University, lezione gratuita su Lua“.

It’s about Giuseppe teaching MySQL University attendees (for free as in both beer and speech) on the Lua scripting language. The MySQL reason to learn Lua is to do scripting in MySQL Proxy. Don’t worry, the MySQL University session is in English, not Italian, and Giuseppe has deciphered the Italian himself in his blog.

You can attend MySQL University virtually with slides in PDF and Wiki, audio …

A while ago, I had a discussion with Stewart Smith, Vinay Joosery, Monty Taylor and a number of other MySQLers who know much more about MySQL Cluster than I do. The result is a model for using MySQL Proxy to offload MySQL Cluster from doing Table Scans, without touching the application.

The discussion started from me asking Stewart about the largest road block for expanding the number of use cases for MySQL Cluster. “Oh, that would probably be doing JOINs and other SELECTs requiring the scanning of large parts of the database”, he replied. “There, other storage engines are faster, such as MyISAM and InnoDB.”

In a very simple view, the application talks SQL with MySQL Cluster, and gets responses.

Stewart’s insight can be refined into the first simplistic diagram by adding the recognition that “SQL” can consist of

1. UPDATE, INSERT, DELETE statements (very light, usually …

One of the first things I did when I started learning MySQL is to find a decent GUI tool to administer the server, since I didn't think that the bundled MySQL Query Browser/MySQL Administrator is what most people use for complex work. Luckily, I was right.
There is a huge variety of MySQL development tools - some better and some worse. I'd prefer if I only had one tool that does it all - but if that's impossible, the important thing now is to pick the right one for the job.
Here it is, the (nearly) complete list of 3rd party tools. It took me a while to find out about all of them - so I hope this saves people quite some time there.
Here are the best ones I use on a regular basis, each one is good for different set of tasks:

• SQLyog by Webyog (commercial, with free community version)
  Best combination …

Followers of the Forum Nokia Developer Discussion Boards saw interesting pre-announcements last month:

Nokia has ported MySQL and PHP to Symbian.

With 165 million cumulative Symbian smartphones shipped since the formation of Symbian and currently 134 Symbian smartphone models commercially available, it would be interesting to see the effects on the 8,134 third-party Symbian applications commercially available by what Nokia calls “PAMP”.

Availability is planned for next month, at the CCNC 2008 (Fifth IEEE Consumer Communications &Networking Conference, 10 - 12 January 2008 in Las Vegas, Nevada).

Johan Wikman of Nokia, who …