This Thursday (December 4th), Sergey Petrunia will highlight what's new in MySQL Optimizer, with a focus on MySQL 5.1. Since Sergey is one of the main developers in charge of MySQL Optimizer, you can expect to get some in-depth insights that only very few people could provide.

This MySQL University session will start at 14:00 UTC / 8am CST (Central) / 9am EST (Eastern) / 14:00 GMT / 15:00 CET / 17:00 MDT (Moscow). The virtual meeting room will open 15 minutes before the hour. Point your browser to this address.

Here's the MySQL University schedule for the rest of this year. Only two more sessions to go in 2008:

Real noisy fucker. So loud, that if it’s in the garage but the back door is open, I still hear it.

Being used for drizzle dev on Solaris… although a switch to OpenSolaris or Linux is likely imminent. Straight Solaris 10 is just too annoying.

MySQL 5.1 is GA. Let the fear and loathing begin. In a recent post Monty describes a number of problems that he feels should have prevented a GA declaration at this time. I like Monty's forthrightness immensely and his words have strongly influenced our work to develop the Tungsten Replicator. That said, I must respectfully disagree with his opinion.

It's hard to comment on overall quality of 5.1, though I have yet to hit any bugs personally after using it intermittently for almost a year. However, we have done a lot of work with MySQL row replication. Monty points out several bugs in the row replication implementation. Frankly, they would not hold me back. Row replication has so many advantages in eliminating …

Notes of one week with MySQL community in US and France

Background

I wanted to attend the first edition of the Open SQL Camp in Charlottesville, from November 14 to 16. For some mysterious reason, a four days plane ticket to any place in the US costs EUR 2,500, but if I stay 8 days, it costs EUR 800. Considering that I was in Frankfurt until November 8, the most sensible thing to do was flying to the US as early as possible and meet as many communities as I could. Among the ones I asked, Boston and New York answered enthusiastically, and then, serendipitously, I found an unexpected group in Baltimore, just before the last leg to Charlottesville.
I sent all groups a list of ten topics to choose from:
* MySQL 5.1 features
* Using MySQL partitions in practice
* testing with MySQL Sandbox
* MySQL Community How To
* Recent community additions to MySQL code
* Creative cross-language …

Admittedly, I'm not a big fan of Webex (in case you don't know what that is (lucky you!), it's a conferencing system), which might explain why Webex seems to hate me sometimes, but today Webex made me laugh. Or maybe cry, I'm not sure after having wasted more than an hour trying to set up Webex' Meeting Center on another computer. (I'm not sure if it's Meeting Center or rather Meeting Manager. Webex doesn't seem to be sure either.)

I'm exclusively running Linux on my computers (currently SuSE 10.3 and 11.0), and so I'm used to web sites not working properly, requiring some weird browser plugin that's hard or impossible to find, or requiring me to tune my browser settings. I'm mostly on Firefox (versions 2 and 3), but sometimes I use other browsers. Today, I had to use another browser.

The trouble started when I tried to set up Webex' Meeting Center, which is the requirement …

The MySQL Enterprise Monitor continuously monitors MySQL servers and alerts to potential problems before they impact the system. It helps eliminating security vulnerabilities, improves replication, optimizes performance, and more. Its newest feature, Quan (Query Analyzer), helps identify queries that could be tuned to improve performance. Quan enables database administrators to do the work that would otherwise require hours in just minutes, or even seconds, and it provides ongoing statistical information about the performance of your queries.

MySQL Enterprise Monitor is a commercial offering by Sun Microsystems, and so was the documentation. To help anyone (even if they're not customers) get a better and complete understanding of what exactly MySQL Enterprise Monitor is about and what it can do, we've decided to make its full documentation publicly available. This has been done now, and the docs are part of the MySQL Manual now; see: …

It has not hit the MySQL DevZone Frontpage yet, but I just finished an interview with Adam Donnison, one of our web gurus behind the mysql.com web site.

Adam talks about what his work environment looks like, his experiences with MySQL 5.1 on the MySQL web sites and why he enjoys working for a virtual organization like ours. Enjoy!