According to the MailChimp blog there’s a new program in place at Gmail that allows images in a message to be turned on by default with the following requirements:

• There has to be authentication in place (either SPF or DKIM).
• The recipient has to have sent at least 2 messages in the past to the sender.

Now that second one can be a challenge since a lot of senders do not use a reply-to address that their customers are sending to (in fact many use a noreply address), meaning that none of their subscribers will accumulate two sends and therefore never see images on by default.

Essentially senders need to start using a reply-to address that customers can use, and ideally one that they would otherwise use. As an example a support@ address would be used independently of the mailing, adding the …

News providers, like most content providers, are interested in having their content seen by as many people as possible. But unlike many news organizations, whose primary concern may be monetizing their content, National Public Radio is interested in turning it into a resource for people to use in new and novel ways as well. Daniel Jacobson is in charge making that content available to developers and end users in a wide variety of formats, and has been doing so using an Open API that NPR developed specifically for that purpose. Daniel will talk about how the project is going at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Here's a preview of what he'll be talking about.

James Turner: Can you start by explaining what NPR Digital Media is …

As you may have heard, we're switching to a new release model with the upcoming MySQL 5.4 release.

If you are curious to learn more about what will change in the way in which future versions MySQL will be developed and released, make sure to attend our next MySQL University session about The New MySQL Release Model on Thursday, 11th of June, 14:00 UTC. Tomas Ulin, our director of MySQL server development will go through the planned changes and would also like to get your input and feedback on these changes.

We're using …

In an earlier blog posting “SQL Standards, ANSI committees, and Sun”, I (Peter Gulutzan) talked about our prospects for joining the American committee charged with database standards, which we typically call “ANSI” although that’s not the formal name (and by the way the formal name is about to change, but I’ll chat about organization some other time).

Well, I’m now Sun’s official voting delegate to the committee. There are also three “alternate” delegates from other parts of Sun; I’ll loosely categorize them as advocates from our PostgreSQL-ophile and Java / Java DB interest groupings. Mostly my concern is the MySQL side of things.

The committee holds frequent meetings by telephone conference, and infrequent ones in personal get-togethers. I’ve just finished attending one of the lengthier meetings. I …

One of most loved feature of SQLyog is the snappy and responsive user interface. Many of our users and customers prefer SQLyog over other tools because of this particular reason.

One reason for the zippy interface could be that SQLyog is entirely developed in C/C++, which tends to be faster than other languages when it comes to raw speed. I don’t want to start a flame war here, but our customers seem to like this fact. Using C/C++ allows us to use the native MySQL C client libraries that gives the best performance as compared to other ways of communicating with MySQL. Using C/C++ also ensures that there are no external dependencies on any bulky frameworks and the download file is relatively small.

Although using a language that complies directly to machine instructions helps a lot, but true speed comes from better algorithms. A similar analogy in the MySQL context would be that you might get some benefits from tuning your …

Last weekend I’ve reached a milestone in my work on the statistical index analysis for QOT. The code is available on Launchpad.

An example is worth a thousand words, so I start with one (once again I’m using employees-db):

$ ./qot –info –host=192.168.200.1 –analyse=possible –schema=employees –query=”select * from dept_emp where (dept_no = ‘d005′ or dept_no = ‘d006′) and (emp_no = 10010 or emp_no = 10011)”

/* Output produced by qot 0.1.6 GPL */
/*
Query: select * from dept_emp where (dept_no = ‘d005′ or dept_no = ‘d006′) and (emp_no = 10010 or emp_no = 10011)

selectivity:
all rows

used tables:
dept_emp (all rows)

ordering:
no ordering

related existing indexes:

…

Assume you have a table with about 300 000 rows, and an indexed column ‘col1′ with only 9 distinct values. Now you got a query like ’select * from t1 where col1 = const’. The questions are

- when the index is faster to full table scan and vice versa?
- does MySQL use the optimal plan by default?

These questions became very relevant now that QOT got server access and is able to gather various table metrics including selectivity. Besides index selectivity the threshold value obviously depends on the storage engine used, so for me it is also interesting to see how our PBXT engine compares to others in this aspect. Namely to InnoDB - an engine with similar transactional properties and MyISAM - a very fast engine for read-only scenarios.

For the test I took the …

jHeidi alpha 4r2 has been released to support the open source database Drizzle. Just use the slider on the connection dialog and the Drizzle profile will appear. Support extends to almost all of jHeidi's MySQL functionality, except for some import/export functionality and there is no user manager due to the plugin model that Drizzle uses.

Note that the JDBC driver for Drizzle is beta but is nonetheless pretty stable.

Special thanks to all those who came out for the MySQL Workbench Tutorial and Workshop sessions, I hope they were of use to you.

The materials are now online. A PDF of the slides is available here and a video of the slides and speaker is available here. These materials are also listed on my Presentations page.

Please note that the video is RTSP streaming MP4, allowing you to jump around the video at will. You’ll need Quicktime, VLC or another appropriate player to view it. I’m trying something new with the built in camera on my laptop, providing a video image of the speaker along with the slides. Let me know what you …

Whether you come to Monday’s Tutorial or the Workbench Workshops on Tuesday-Thursday I strongly recommend you bring a laptop. We’ll be doing a lot of hands-on in both and you’ll be missing out on a lot of the content if you don’t have a copy of MySQL Workbench in front of you (we’ll supply the copy of Workbench, in fact you get the SE edition free for a year just for attending).

You should also act now to register for a Workshop if you haven’t already as Tuesday is already “sold out”. Admission is free but we only have 40 seats in each daily workshop.

For those choosing between tutorial and workshop, I’ll say upfront that we’ll feature the same content in both the …