This is the 149th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

MySQL

Let’s begin with the big-picture stuff. Jeremy Zawodny laid out his view of the state of MySQL in Linux Magazine’s blog, noting the rough transition between versions 5.0 and 5.1, the status of storage engines, and outside contributions.

Like Baron Schwartz’s Maatkit, for example. Baron announced this week that he is writing a book about Maatkit, and also …

Yesterday, The Pythian Group issued a press release about my book, Pythian’s partnership with Sun, and our new “MySQL Adoption Accelerator Package”. I am not a marketing guru, but I can tell you what we the package means in terms of new work that the MySQL teams have been doing.

Basically, the MySQL Adoption Accelerator Package combines customized training with a comprehensive audit of systems. The name “Adoption Accelerator” makes it sound like it’s only for new applications that are almost ready to go live. What the program actually does is have us evaluate your systems, and intensively train you in the areas you want and need. The program is designed to suit all your needs, whether it’s teaching you about one topic (say, query optimization) or an entire range of topics, from Architecture to ZFS (special issues with running MySQL on ZFS, that is, but that did not fit a cute …

A year ago, the outline was being written. A lot of work was crammed into the intervening months, and I am happy and proud to announce that the MySQL Administrator’s Bible has been published, and is sitting on the shelf at many major booksellers already. The official publication date is today — Monday, May 11th, 2009 — although some stores have had copies for a week, including Amazon.com.

The MySQL Administrator’s Bible, published by Wiley Press (available on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/MySQL-Administrators-Bible-Sheeri-Cabral/dp/0470416912/, fully covers how to administer MySQL 5.1. It is suitable for people new to MySQL, although as an experienced MySQL DBA I can say that I learned a lot while researching and writing this book, and I believe that even veteran DBAs can learn from this book.

This book for …

Augusto Bott and myself had a wonderful time at April’s MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, California, and also at the coinciding MySQL Camp and Percona Performance Conference.

We presented two sessions at the conference, and we wanted to share the slides with you. The first one is called Proactive Operational Measures.

The second one is called 8 Simple Rules to Design Secure Applications.

Augusto and I promised that we would make the slides available online, so we’re sorry for the slight delay in getting them published. Enjoy!

I enjoyed InSync09 conference and the networking opportunities there — great place to meet bunch of good old friends and make some new ones. The content of the presentations and direction where Oracle is going to provided some interesting food for thoughts on Oracle’s strategy and how it’s going to make money with all those acquisitions they’ve done recently including current Oracle-Sun deal.

My take now is that Oracle’s focus is integration of all those products. It’s absolutely clear that Oracle won’t be able to merge so many different product lines together. It’s difficult and time consuming task and customers often suffer during this transition process. Oracle does not want its customer suffer — it’s the best way to shrink their customer base.

What Oracle intends to do now is to …

I am very excited to be able to link to this press release announcing that The Pythian Group is the founding partner in MySQL’s brand-new “Remote DBA Provider” partnership program. This is great news for Pythian. It is also good news for Sun/MySQL. (Although admittedly nowhere near as attention-getting as Oracle’s announcement of their purchase [...]

I’m very proud to share with you a few things: Sheeri K. Cabral, Nick Westerlund, Paul Vallée, Peter Ling, and I (Augusto Bott) will be in Santa Clara, CA for the MySQL Conference and Expo, MySQL Camp, and the Percona Performance Conference, next week.

Nick and I will be presenting a session called Proactive Operational Measures on the Percona Conference, and another session called 8 Rules for Designing More Secure Applications at the MySQL Camp.

Sheeri will be presenting Understanding How MySQL …

I am thrilled to announce that this year’s MySQL Conference will feature a Community Keynote. This is a keynote speech delivered by a community member (not a Sun employee!) about topics relevant to us.

I am delivering this year’s keynote, entitled “How to be a MySQL Superhero” on Wednesday, April 22nd at 9:45 am Pacific. Details are at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/9098. This is a great indication that Sun and O’Reilly are taking community very seriously, and want to make sure that our voices are heard — literally.

I hope that this can be an annual featured keynote, like the “State of the Dolphin.” The thriving community is one of the reasons MySQL is the world’s most popular database.

I am passing this along — I am not sure if most folks reading this can make it, as it is last-minute and in the Boston area, but I figured I’d let people know that the New England Database Society exists. It’s free, sponsored by Sun (and has been for years, long before Sun bought MySQL), and is hosted by my college database professor, Mitch Cherniack. (To that end, I should probably make sure to promote the Boston User Group here more often! I keep forgetting…)

You can find information on how to be a part of the mailing list at http://www.cs.brown.edu/sites/neds/

The next New England Database Society will be held on Friday, March 27 and the speaker is Christian Jensen of Aalborg University.

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[N]ew [E]ngland [D]atabase …

In about 15 minutes, Giuseppe Maxia will begin a webinar in which the main focus is a presentation on “How to have a good presentation”. Talk about meta!

Giuseppe posted how to join the free webinar.

The slides can be found at http://datacharmer.org/downloads/2009_03_Presentation.pdf.