Happy New Year to all our readers! Welcome to 2010 and the 174th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

MySQL

The MySQL ‘sphere since the holidays has been thick with posts on the matter of Oracle’s purchase of Sun, and thereby of MySQL. And in particular, there’s been a lot of talk about MySQL founder Monty Widenius’s response. I call all of this the . . .

Monty My-Thon

On the 28th of December, Monty framed the issue thus: Help keep the Internet free.

Singer Wang of Pythian, in reply, offers his perspective …

The O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010 Call for Participation ends in just under 3 weeks. I am on the conference committee, and thus get to see and review all the conference proposals.

This blog post will briefly explain the how each part of the proposal is used, then have a list of what not to do in your conference proposal, and end with a checklist of questions to go over your proposal before submitting. Click here if you want to skip to the checklist.

The proposal has several parts.
Title: This is the title of your presentation. This shows up on the schedules …

Having been a free software user and supporter for many years, I am disheartened by some of the comments made in the MySQL/Oracle debate regarding the GNU Public License (GPL) and other licenses. There is much throwing around of misconceptions and untruths about licenses and their differences. In this blog, I shall take on some of the bigger misconceptions.

While Linux is indeed distributed under the GPL, as is MySQL, Linux has an exception that allows anyone to run any kind of applications (including closed source applications) on top of Linux.

Monty says: Help keep the Internet free

There is nothing in the GPL that forbids running closed source applications on top of GPL-licensed software. The only thing that GPL has in this regard is that if you make changes to GPL-licensed software and re-distribute it as a binary, then …

In this article I am responding to many parts of Monty’s post at http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-keep-internet-free.html which are just plain not true, or are exaggerations.

I will give my own answers to the self-interview questions Monty provides, as I feel he is using his name and popularity to spreading fear that is not warranted.

Q: Why don’t you trust that Oracle would be a good owner of MySQL?

I cannot say whether or not Oracle would kill MySQL. However, I have already stated I believe Oracle will not kill MySQL. This is based on the fact that Oracle has had the chance to kill MySQL for several years, by making InnoDB proprietary, and has not.

Folks can debate …

Nicklas Westerlund has published the 173rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, on SELECT mysqlgenie FROM lamp;.

Log Buffer will be off next week for the holidays, and back early in 2010 to begin another year of presenting the best of database blogs. Please get in touch with the Log Buffer coordinator if you’d like to publish an edition of your own.

Happy Holidays to everyone! Here is Log Buffer #173.

The bottom line: As both a community member of MySQL, and a service provider, I am not worried about Oracle buying Sun and acquiring MySQL in the process. There is no validity to the argument that Oracle will slow down or stop MySQL development — it is not possible, with various forks already in heavy development, and it is not probable, because Oracle has owned the InnoDB codebase for 4 years and has not slowed that development down.

My bias

I use MySQL, and want to see it continue to be developed. I work for The Pythian Group, providing DBA services to clients running MySQL. Together with my MySQL colleagues at The Pythian Group, the services provided run the gamut from rotating logs, monitoring, performance tuning, designing and implementing and optimizing database architectures and schemas and queries and debugging problems throughout the full stack. The only service we do …

One week and a whole lot of snow later, it is time for the 173rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. MySQL goes first this week.

MySQL

On the MySQL Performance Blog, Peter Zaitsev and his readers discuss the question, how many partitions can you have? In Peter’s opinion, ” . . . be careful with number of partitions you use. Creating unused partitions for future use may cost you.”

Also, Peter’s colleague Aleksandr Kuzminsky announces the release of xtrabackup-1.0, an “open source online …

Hello, and welcome to the 171st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Let’s get it going this week with . . . 

Oracle

Uwe Hesse, the Oracle Instructor look at result cache, another brilliant 11g new feature. He says, “There are many amazing New Features in the 11g version, one of them is the possibility to cache the result sets of statements, that access large tables but return relatively few rows. Think of it like automagically created materialized views inside the SGA.” Commenters contribute some thoughts on problems with result cache and latch contention.

Christian Antognini is, as …

This is a little story of a little bug. This gremlin suddenly appeared in a CGI.PM web-based application I work with. To make a long story short, an email was coming out something like this . . . 

389939
Subject:Update to Report #389939 by B. bloggins Description:389939 #389939: TPDD Now Deploying to monitoring for the MySQL servers.

 . . . when it should have been some thing like this:

Subject: TPDD Update to Report #389939 by B. bloggins

TPDD Now Deploying to monitoring for the MySQL servers.

After about an hour tracking things back, my team and I narrowed it down to this line of code:

$self->send_TXT_email(CGI::param("rep_no"),$rep_object,
                     $subject,$user_ref);

We scratched our respective heads on this for a while, because for user type ‘A’, it worked fine; but for user type ‘B’, it did not. And …

Another video from the recent OpenSQLCamp in Portland, Oregon….Earlier today I uploaded the Lightning Talk Videos. Due to the holiday I am unsure when the rest of the videos will be ready. When they are, I will do one blog post featuring them all.

However, I have had several requests for this specific video, so here is Brian Aker speaking about Drizzle.

The slides are up at http://www.slideshare.net/brianaker/drizzle-opensql-camp, and here’s the video:

(Note, I will not do a post for each video…..but since this one is up and ready, I figured I’d do it before I leave for the holiday).