Many of you know I publish a newsletter monthly. One thing I love about it is that after almost a decade of writing it regularly, the list has grown considerably. And I’m always surprised at how many former colleagues are actually reading it. So that is a really gratifying thing. Thanks to those who are, … Continue reading Should we be muddying the relational waters? Use cases for MySQL & Mongodb → …

Engine condition pushdown is a MySQL internal mechanism that is intended to avoid to send non matching rows from the storage engine to the SQL layer. This is very important when the storage engine involves traffic over the network. This mechanism was initially created to optimize MySQL Cluster (NDB) behavior. For the NDB storage engine [...]

Key-value databases are catching fire these days. Memcached, Redis, Cassandra, Keyspace, Tokyo Tyrant, and a handful of others are surging in popularity, judging by the contents of my feed reader.

I find a number of things interesting about these tools.

• There are many more of them than open-source traditional relational databases. (edit: I mean that there are many options that all seem similar to each other, instead of 3 or 4 standing out as the giants.)
• It seems that a lot of people are simultaneously inventing solutions to their problems in private without being aware of each other, then open-sourcing the results. That points to a sudden sea change in architectures. Tipping points tend to be abrupt, which would explain isolated redundant development.
• Many of the products are feature-rich with things programmers need: diverse language bindings, APIs, embeddability, and the ability to speak familiar …

As I distribute my card, the most common question I run into is "what does MySQL AB do?"

My answer is usually something like "we allow you to store a lot of information and process it efficiently."

But I've been thinking a bit, and perhaps a better quip might be "you know what the Central Intelligence Agency is, right? Well, we are the most popular database system used by the Decentralized Intelligence Agency, as it were."

:)