I met Scott McNealy several times over the last year in customer meetings and to talk about Sun's open source strategy.  He's a class act all the way.  He sent out his final email to Sun employees and partners earlier today. 

Here's an excerpt:    

    While it was never the primary vision to be acquired by Oracle, it was always an interesting option. And this huge event is upon us now. Let’s all embrace it with all of the enthusiasm and class and talent that we have to offer.

    This combination has the potential to put Sun, its people, and its technology at the center of yet another industry and game changing inflection point. The opportunity is well documented and articulated by Larry and the …

Readers following the performance schema saga will be happy to know that the man who designed and wrote the code, Marc Alff, has a blog. His first posting about it is at http://marcalff.blogspot.com/2010/01/performance-schema-overview.html.

Times are a-changing, and the past couple of months have witnessed a flurry of activity on the cloud computing front; namely, SQL Azure and Amazon RDS. Touted as the harbingers of a new era — the era of Relational DBMS-as-a-Service (DBaaS) — these latest offerings pointedly reassert the fact that databases are now part of the utility model of cloud computing.

For those planning on an early adoption, even with just two significant products (no one seems to have noticed Joyent’s Accelerator for MySQL), it could get really difficult to choose. Here’s a list of 5 things that will help you make the right choice.

1. Targeted Customers: Microsoft’s target for SQL Azure (based on extensive research, I’m sure) is business applications running in the enterprise using databases of 5GB or less. Amazon RDS, …

We've all been there: Getting some totally unreadable portion of SQL queries from someone else's code, and you are hard working to find the logic in order to understand it. Now, HeidiSQL can reformat such SQL, so it gets readable again. Just press the relevant button on the main toolbar:


Example code, before reformatting:

select * # select
from bla join bla on b=1 left
join blub on /* big comment select */ b.ud = udfu
where biuaosdi=1 and concat( a , 'das' ) like date_sub(now(), interval 1 day)
order ' concat () ' # select
by rand() group by askdhja limit 10, 199

... and after reformatting:

SELECT * # select
FROM bla
JOIN bla ON b=1
LEFT JOIN blub ON /* big comment select */ b.ud = udfu
WHERE biuaosdi=1 AND CONCAT(a, 'das') LIKE DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 1 DAY)
ORDER ' concat () ' # …

One of the most wanted, needed features in HeidiSQL was a GUI for creating and editing triggers, available in MySQL 5.0.2 and above. Now implemented and hopefully as usable at it can be. Very simple compared to editing tables or procedures. See it in action by downloading the latest build file (Help > Check for updates).

The recently refactored "Table tools" dialog has a new tab now: "Bulk table editor". What is bulk editing?
* Move all tables of one or more databases to another database
* Change default collation of these tables
* Change table engine
* Convert data to a different charset
* Reset auto_increment value

See it in action:

Happy Holidays!

Black Friday is back. We are happy to offer a 50% flat discount on all Webyog products. Yes, you read it right, fifty percent flat discount. Hurry up, this offer is valid only till 1st Dec 09, 23:59 PST.

Still using SQLyog Community Edition? Held off buying SQLyog Enterprise Edition? This offer is literally too good to pass up. Its time to own your copy of SQLyog Enterprise with all the PowerTools. Check out what Enterprise Edition has to offer.

Worried about your MySQL server’s health? Monitor it like a PRO. Get MONyog – MySQL Monitor & Advisor. Your MySQL DBA in a box! Check what it has to offer.

Want to extend your maintenance period? Don’t think twice, head right away to …

The old "Export as SQL" dialog is gone. Functionality was moved to the table tools dialog which has one tab per tool (maintenance, find in db, export SQL). Most features are still alive, only the target version drop down was found to be more confusing then helpful to me so I left it out for now.

Apart from the GUI changes, I rewrote the whole bunch of code which loops through your table rows and creates INSERTs. Probably you have noticed the old dialog was very slow when it came to export large tables. Not so the new dialog - it is nearly as fast as mysqldump does an export!

I have a 23M table with 1,1 Mio rows, used for testing purposes:
* Old HeidiSQL export took ~1 minute
* New dialog: 10 seconds
* mysqldump: 4 seconds
Another 5M table with 40,000 rows:
* Old dialog: 22 seconds
* New: 1 second
* mysqldump: 1 second

The problem with the old dialog was …

So you’ve finally caught on with the hype, and you’re seriously considering using Amazon RDS for your database needs. Here are ten things you ought to know before you take the leap:

10. Amazon RDS uses a patched version of MySQL 5.1.38. While several discussions within MySQL forums allude to a growing concern that Amazon may not have the required expertise for upgrading and maintaining patched versions of MySQL, the fact still remains that Amazon has enough resources to just buy them from other vendors who do. The patch enables MySQL to scale dynamically in the cloud, besides adding other features.

9. EC2, EBS, and RDS: Connecting the dots. Amazon RDS DB instances are basically instances of MySQL running on an EC2 platform. Persistent storage (for back-ups, etc.) is allocated in EBS volumes. However, neither can you access the underlying EC2 instance nor can you use S3 to access your stored …

On the eve of Microsoft’s announcement of the public release of SQL Azure Database, Amazon decides to release RDS. And that, too, after having resisted users’ demands for a relational database service for a very long time. Preemptive action, perhaps? Whatever it may be, I believe that such a healthy competition can do much good to the Cloud marketplace.

RDS brings with it the promise of MySQL on a Cloud. Having been a MySQL fan for quite some time now, I was itching to get my hands on an AWS account and check out what the hype was all about. Imagine my confusion when I signed up for Amazon RDS and all the AWS Management Console showed me was the EC2 dashboard! It was time I downloaded the Getting Started Guide and went through the rigmarole of studying it.

Setting up the Command Line Interface Tools

Apparently, there is no GUI yet for RDS. The only way to go about using it is through the CLI tools. Setting up the tools, …