A potential customer asked my about porting her application from Oracle Database to MySQL.

I always try to start with the "why" (a dear friend bought me this book, recommended: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447).

She said "cloud!". I said "OK!".

I conducted a short research, found many things in many places all over the place, brought them to a nice email I sent her back and then thought I'll post it here and make it public as it might be useful for us all. If you feel that I missed something, add comments, send feedback.

These are the leading tools to do the actual migration of the data structure, data export/import, sprocs, triggers, etc.:

1. MySQL Workbench has a migration feature: http://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/migrate/
2. MySQLYog can be used to migrate: …

I recently received a question from Robin Schumacher at Calpont, the makers of the InfiniDB analytics database engine for MySQL: "How would you recommend we try and get bundled in with the various Linux distros?"

Since this question has come up several times before, I thought it might make sense to blog about my take on this.

First of all, please note that there is a difference between "being part of the core distribution" and "being available from a distributor's package repository". The latter one is relatively easy, the former can be hard, as you need to convince the distributor that your application is worth devoting engineering resources to maintain and support your application as part of their product. It's also a space issue – distributions need to make sure that the core packages still fit on the installation …

Red Hat releases Spacewalk. It is described as: “the upstream community project from which the Red Hat Network Satellite product is derived“. Congratulations to all whom have worked on it, especially my friends who tired endlessly over it in the past.

Red Hat, is sticking true to its promise, of open sourcing everything they make. Best of all, they recognise Fedora (they always did, since say, Fedora Core 2 or 3), CentOS (a direct “competitor”/rebuild of RHEL), and Scientific Linux (I know of a certain university’s sysadmin who will be blessing Spacewalk, as her life will now be a lot easier).

There have been a few blogs about it… Matt Asay asks about a community (Red Hat traditionally wasn’t good at this, but with Fedora, I believe they’ve learned, and I’m happy …

Why? In brief, it is said that mysql is not as stable as postgresql. Postgresql or pgsql focuses on a single database engine as compared to mysql which has a pluggable engine architecture and has multiple engines. Also postgresql is well designed as compared to mysql. psql console is much better than mysql console (you will realize it when you use it). It is supposed to be much more scalable and

As you probably know, or at least heard, we are currently porting Workbench to Linux. Generally speaking the porting process is split in several stages. The first one is to compile non-GUI Back-End which represents about 80% of the total application code. The next stage is to ensure that unit-tests are run correctly for the ported stuff. The third is to create user interface and to bind it to the back-end/core. After that we will have alpha version of Workbench for Linux.
Regarding tests, actually a portion of unit-tests are already passed. These are 121 of 122 going well. At the moment we are working on non-GUI back-end, and core part is compiled and run, so now the modules and plugins are in progress. I must admit that process of porting is pretty smooth, most of the code has already been prepared with Linux/OS X ports in mind. I will be posting our progress on the porting efforts frequently, please keep checking our blog.

For those of you who enjoy running exotic operating systems: I just stumbled over a port of MySQL 5.0.45 for OS/2 and eComStation. Thanks a lot to Paul Smedley for maintaining this version! He also maintains a large number of other Unix applications that he ported over to OS/2 - very impressive.