Its interesting to note some happenings in the MySQL world of late, that might be of interest to people in the database world, and those following open source software development and business models.

40% of developers say they use MySQL, according to the Evans Data Group. This is not including pilot projects, but real production use in corporate environments. A lot of MySQL’s popularity is generally attributed to the LAMP stack, though I see a change. Look at all the Ruby on Rails projects out there. They most definitely run on a MySQL backend. A good example are the products from 37signals, makers of the rather new, and cool tool, Highrise - they’re Ruby on Rails, and MySQL powered.

Is this 40% statistic …

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/02/26/techcrunch-others-love-linux-mysql

I’m not quite sure what to say about this article, except that a sample of 7 “big” sites showed that the LAMP[hp] stack was heavily used. Perhaps, “And this is news?”

What happened to the MySQL Winter of Code? Are they waiting for winter in Australia?

I live near Boston, MA and I can tell you it’s definitely winter in the northern hemisphere….

So what are we waiting for?

Well, I can say this — we’re waiting for people. The Winter of Code idea is a great one, particularly since if MySQL works with academic institutions they could help students find Master’s Projects or part of Ph.D. work. Imagine someone writing a new storage engine and having that earn them a Master’s degree. This is exactly what MySQL needs — more people who understand database internals and best theoretical practices to start coding and see where it goes. Note the “more people” — they already have staff that does this.

I’m guessing the Winter of Code is nonexistent because of other big announcements that have been happening; still, I would love to see some collaboration with …

According to analyst firm Evans Data Corp, MySQL has a 44% share of the global RDBMS market making it the #1 database in the world. The article explains all the basic stuff about MySQL, with information such as where it started, what it is for or what systems it runs on. My favourite is “What makes it special?”

EDC’s research among users found that proprietary database servers were “almost twice as likely” as MySQL servers to have suffered a security breach.

According to MySQL AB, using MySQL can reduce database licensing costs by 90%, and administration, engineering and support costs by up to 50%. There is also a 60% reduction in downtime. …

Many people ditch the rat race, to start anything from a one-man show right up to a medium-sized business these days. Globally, computers are being accepted everywhere, and its always been touted to help the business owner, improve business processes. From an open source perspective, how do we help the small business owner?

We start by studying what a small business owner requires:

• contact management - the business is in the network. Without contacts, there’s no exchange of services, and definitely no exchange of money.
• document management - businesses, no matter how large or small, end up with lots of documents. Moving to the e-society that we’re all aiming for, we should aim to manage documents well, right up to the backups of these crucial business data.
• accounting - taxation, income, expense, credit, debit, etc. are what make the business world work. You need to keep track of absolutely every …

The rumours are confirmed: MySQL, the fastest growing database, is planning to go public before the end of the year. This will make it one of the few Open Source products to be listed in the stock market, together with RedHat, Mandriva and VA Linux.

Their results so far are pretty good: around 10 million installations worldwide and 10,000 paying customers (25% of them just in the last year). Many people consider this as a failure, comparing it directly with Oracle’s result, but in my opinion this is a short-sighted vision. MySQL’s main asset are all those non-paying customers; thanks to them most web applications have been built on the LAMP stack, where MySQL plays a key role, and it makes it possible for other businesses to exist, bringing more paying customers without …

Phorum needs to get to the MySQL Conference. Perhaps you do, too? Or perhaps you want to help people get there? Technocation, Inc is a not-for-profit committed to helping folks get the education and networking contacts so important to IT professionals. So, they’re opening up their very first campaign!

Technocation, Inc. is a not-for-profit organization. Your contributions are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law. You may choose to donate money, goods or services. Money may be donated through PayPal at http://tinyurl.com/28fa76, and services should be arranged through e-mailing donate@technocation.org . To send payment by mail, see details at . Technocation’s EIN/Tax ID is 20-5445375
Currently, this campaign is …

While MySQL customers have been bitterly complaining about the move to package support and rigorous testing of binaries into a paid package, Stephen Walli of Optaros has been thinking:

What if Microsoft SQL Server open sourced their codebase, provided support and testing of binaries in a paid package similar to MySQL Network, and “DB mashups” ensued?

http://stephesblog.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/01/microsoft_and_m.html

It’s an interesting read to get you thinking. Most of my thought was, “that’d be neat….I wonder if folks would stop complaining about the MySQL Enterprise and Community models if that actually happened.”

From: http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingnews.jhtml?articleId=196700062

The short version is that among 380 wireless application developers surveyed,
30% use Microsoft SQL Server as a backend,
20% use MySQL,
16% use Oracle.

Microsoft can offer bundles, so they can just offer SQL Server cheaply so long as companies have the MSDN service (I don’t know if they do, but they can). MySQL and Oracle are standalone offerings — no bundles. And as an embedded database, a MySQL license must be bought.

So this research shows that when customers have to pay for a database, they choose MySQL over Oracle. Granted, they choose Microsoft SQL Server over both.

Now, many folks say I’m a MySQL nut. I am, but that’s not the point — I do not advocate that MySQL is the only …

My company has 9 production MySQL servers.

Our company does:

over 4 billion queries a week — an average of over 450,000 per machine, though in reality 2 servers do near 1 billion themselves, 5 do about the average, and 2 do much less (about 65k and 100k queries).

receive over 1380 GB (almost 1.35 TB!!) of data per week, an average of over 153 GB per server.

send out over 1400 GB of data per week, an average of 157 GB per server.

Our hardware is only somewhat beefy — 64-bit architecture, 3.20 GHz Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU, 6GB of RAM in 4 of the 5 most-used servers (4GB in the others).

We make over USD $220,000 per week ($10 billion per year) in sales for our web application.

If we bought the highest level of service, Platinum, for all 9 production machines, the cost would be 0.40% of our sales. The cost would be less than the cost of a new IT person (even a junior IT person!), and …