You’ve probably seen Monty’s post Help Saving MySQL. This is about

1. Development (will Oracle put significant effort into MySQL, actually innovating)
2. Brand (”MySQL” has a huge footprint), the trademark owner can enforce this – there have already been issues with companies offering MySQL related services via Google AdWords not being able to use the word MySQL in their ad text even though it was correctly used as an adjective.
3. Forking is fine, but still has to deal with the branding. For MySQL, that’s possibly the most significant issue of any OSS product ever encountered. You’re not competing against a company, but against an existing brand footprint that you (because of the trademark) have to steer clear of. So “just fork it” is not an easy or short term option, there’s more involved than …

After reading Fernando Ipar’s interesting post on partial indexes for string columns, there were two things I wanted to note:

First, this trick works quite well, but only if your like clauses only ever use the wildcard on the right hand side (or not at all). MySQL will not be able to use the index if the like contains a wildcard on the left.

Consider the following table definition:

mysql> show create table people\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Table: people
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `people` (
`person_id` int(15) NOT NULL default '0',
`username` varchar(255) default NULL,
`email` varchar(255) default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`person_id`),
KEY `people_username` (`username`(5))
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
1 row …