The announcement last month of Oracle to acquire Sun continues to warrant a lot of discussion over exactly what Oracle will do with MySQL. Only time will tell what will happen with the official product, however it is important to remember that MySQL is GPL, there will always be a free version of MySQL available for popular LAMP stack products such as WordPress and Drupal and new and existing startup’s will continue to use MySQL.

This announcement will see Oracle resources begin to better understand and evaluate MySQL. As a resident MySQL Expert, I also have a strong background in Oracle having also worked for Oracle Corporation. I have also delivered several successful one day and half day workshops on MySQL/Oracle related content including:

• 2009 - Best Practices …

I recent visit with old Brisbane friend HiTCHO which I met at the Brisbane MySQL Users Group in 2005, has lead to this cool list of some hardware and software technologies he used that I am now considering or have already implemented or purchased.

Software

1. xmarks.com - Bookmark-Powered Web Discovery
2. Pulse - Smart Pen
3. Quicksilver Mac windows manager
4. MailPlane - Brings Gmail to your Mac desktop
5. Evernote - Remember Everything, with Firefox plugin and iPhone App
6. …

Mosso the Rackspace Cloud now has a Drizzle developer image much like the first Drizzle AMI on EC2.

The Mosso interface is definitely different, it’s a GUI, and I definitely prefer CLI, but it’s a simpler navigation for a new user. I suspect an API may be available.

I had an issue with the backup process, more the lack of feedback. The Knowledge Base didn’t help, so both calling and Live Chat directed me ultimately to the same person. I also found a bug in the backup process, that is being able to select an incomplete backup to try and launch a new server. I talked to Support about and apparently already known.

And in true open source form, the Drizzle version is actually one point higher then yesterday’s AWS image.

This weeks’ announcement Oracle to by Sun was a major talking point at the 2009 MySQL Conference & Expo. While it is too early to even speculate what the future holds with the official MySQL product, for myself a speaker on MySQL topics, Oracle Open World is now a target market.

In addition to many years of providing MySQL for the Oracle DBA Resources I have with the recent closure of call for papers submitted two sessions for consideration.

Integrating MySQL into your Oracle DBA management processes

Most large enterprise organizations use more then one RDBMS product to service business requirements. With the increase in MySQL usage for …

I have published the very first sharable Drizzle Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for AWS EC2, based on the good feedback from my discussion at the Drizzle Developer Day on what options we should try.

This first version is a 32bit Developer instance, showcasing Drizzle and all necessary developer tools to build Drizzle from source.

What you will find on drizzle-ami/intrepid-dev32 - ami-b858bfd1

Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid 32 bit base server installation:

• build tools
• drizzle dependencies
• bzr 1.31.1

From the respective source trees the following software is available:

• drizzle 2009.04.997
• libdrizzle 0.0.2
• gearman 0.0.4
• memcached 1.2.8
• libmemcached 0.28

Drizzle has been configured with …

At the 2009 MySQL Conference and Expo I presented to a full room on MySQL Monitoring 101.

This presentation focused on the following four goals.

• Know what to monitor
• Know how you can monitor
• Learn practices to diagnose problems
• Have a foundation of historical information

MySQL Monitoring 101 View more presentations from Ronald Bradford.

I have moved on to InnoDB: Innovative Technologies for Performance and Data Protection by Ken Jacobs at MySQL Conference and Expo.

With a brief history lesson of inception from 1994, inclusion in MySQL in 2000 and acquired by Oracle in 2005. Most of the work was done by one person. InnoDB is based on sound database computer science using Gray & Reuters definitive text on database design.

Some key points in Ken’s discussion.

• Adaptive Hash indexing for frequent queries on keys.
• In plugin Adaptive Hash is configurable
• Insert Buffering - Deferring secondary index writes
• Fast Index Create - doesn’t requires all indexes to be rebuilt
• Table Compression - Changing the page size

The InnoDB plugin available in …

I am now sitting in on MySQL and Search at Craigslist by Jeremy Zawodny at MySQL Users Conference

Some of the technical difficulties that required addressing.

• High churn rate
• half life can be very short
• Growth
• Traffic
• Need to archive postings, e.g. 100M but be searchable
• Internationalization and UTF-8

Some of the Craigslist Goals

• Open Source
• Easy and approachable
• be green with energy use

A review of the Internals server configuration

• Load Balancer (perlbal like)
• Read Proxy Array (perl+memcached)
• Web Read Array (apache 1.3 + mod_perl)
• Object Cache (Perl + memcached)
• Read DB Cluster …

Opening introduction from Colin Charles got us started. Karen Tegan Padir VP MySQL & Software Infrastructure was the opening keynote.

She comes from a strong tech background and is passionate about open source, the communities and how to make a successful product.

There isn’t a person that doesn’t go a day without interacting with a website or hardware system that uses a MySQL database.

The big news was the announcement of MySQL 5.4 - Performance & Scalability. Key features include.

• InnoDb scalability 16way x86 and 64 way CMT servers
• subquery optimization
• new query algorithms
• improved stored procedures, and prepared statements
• enhanced Information Schema
• improved DTrace Support

More information at …

I find it surprising that in the official Sun Announcement there is no mention of MySQL for two reasons. Firstly, this was Sun largest single purchase of $1 billion only 12 months ago. Second, MySQL’s largest competitor is Oracle.

While the Sun website shows the news in grandeur, the MySQL website is noticeably absent in any information of it’s owners’ acquisition.

On my professional side, as an independent speaker for Sun Microsystems with plans for upcoming webinars and future speaking on “Best Practices in Migrating to MySQL from Oracle”, this news does not benefit my bottom line.