Brian Aker gives the “zinger” lightning talk about the newly announced “Drizzle”. This short (under 8 minutes) video captures Aker’s highlights of why he started the Drizzle project and how Drizzle is different from MySQL — both in what has been removed from MySQL and what features Drizzle can accomodate.

Play the video directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/576/play or download the 116 Mb file at http://technocation.org/node/576/download.

Yesterday I had a good conversation with Monty Widenius (a MySQL founder) about MySQL 5.1. Specifically, about the fact that MySQL 5.1 is not a GA (generally available) release.

My impression, which was wrong, was that it was difficult getting critical mass to download 5.1 and use it simply because it was not a GA release yet. I thought the paradox of needing to have a certain amount of usage before release was the barrier.

That’s not the case at all.
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Greetings from Wisconsin! Welcome to the 106th edition of the Log Buffer. Mr. Edwards is on a brief holiday and kindly asked me to fill in for him. So join me as we take a tour of some of this week’s database blogging activity.

I’d like to start by sharing the story of MySQL engineer Andrii Nikitin’s young son, Ivan. The short story is that Ivan is in need of a bone marrow transplant and that would also require travelling outside of their native Ukraine for the procedure. The family is asking for donations to cover the cost of the operation and trip, so please consider donating via the previous link.

Now, moving on to the database topics, we begin with my own area of (relative) expertise, Oracle. The big news this week is the July 2008 CPU, …

This week, database blogs seemed to talk about conforming to stereotypes as well as breaking them.

Fulfilling the stereotype of Microsoft software being unsecure, Microsoft released a very important SQL Server update that Aaron Bertrand notes patches “four elevation of privilege vulnerabilities.” That’s right, not one, not two, but four!!! At least there is a patch now……go forth and patch! Usually it is MySQL that throws ambiguous warnings or errors which are not an accurate representation of the actual error, but Bertrand also notes that there is A Little Management Studio Oops.

Contrary to stereotype, …

By “Good SQL Querying”, I am not referring to “how to make your queries more perfomant.” I am about to go on a mini-rant about how to make readable and self-documenting SQL queries.

One practice that will get me instantly going on a rant is using a comma join. There is NO reason to do the following:

-- uses the sakila sample database
SELECT first_name, last_name, address
FROM customer,address;

What kind of join did the original author intend? A CROSS JOIN? Or did they really want an INNER JOIN and forget the WHERE clause?

The answer: you do not know for sure; you can only guess. Had the query been

SELECT first_name,last_name,address
FROM customer INNER JOIN address;

you would know that the author intended an INNER JOIN; had the query been

SELECT first_name,last_name,address
FROM customer CROSS JOIN address;

you would know that the author intended a CROSS JOIN. I …

I was contacted by the folks at MONyog and asked if I would review MONyog. Since using MONyog is something I have been wanting to do for a while, I jumped at the chance. Of course, “jumped” is relative; Rohit asked me at the MySQL User Conference back in April, and here it is two months later, in June. My apologies to folks for being slow.

This review is an overall review of MONyog as well as specifically reviewing the newest features released in the recent beta (Version 2.5 Beta 2). Feature requests are easily delineated with (feature request). This review is quite long, feel free to bookmark it and read it at your leisure. If you have comments please add them, even if it takes a while for you to read this entire article.

While the webyog website gives some information about what MONyog can do, it is a bit vague about what MONyog is, although there …

In case you are attending Oracle Open World 2008, the biggest Oracle conference in the world, and interested in either (or both) MySQL or Oracle Enterprise Manager Extensibility — I posted a proposal for a new presentation:

Extending Oracle Enterprise Manager by Example — Creating MySQL Management Plug-In

I’ve started looking into Oracle extensibility several years ago and since then I’ve seen lots of improvements in Extensibility Guide and many new plug-ins have seen the light of the day. However, creating a new plug-in is still considered to be something special and not available to mere mortals.
In this presentation we will see how easy it is to create a new plug-in. What are the steps …

From 7:30 - 8:30 pm tonight, Wed. June 25th, in the Berkeley room of the Sheraton Boston, I will be hosting a Birds of a Feather conversation entitled “Pros and Cons of Managed Services”. This will go beyond MySQL and even beyond remote database management, and just deal with the overall pros and cons.

Come, share your good and bad experiences, and discuss why managed services may or may not be appropriate for your situation. I will try to take notes at the BoF.

(Note: I have no idea if they check badges for Birds of a Feather sessions or not)

If you are attending Usenix 2008 at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Boston, you can meet me and ask your burning MySQL questions at my “The Guru is In” session. On Friday, June 27th, 2008 from 2 - 3:30 pm in Constitution B, I will be helping folks out by optimizing queries and schemas, teaching general principles of working with MySQL databases, and answering (to the best of my ability) any other question they may throw at me.

The event details are at:
http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/tech/#fri

Hope to see you there!

At last night’s event, a lot of the questions were really implicitly asking, “Is open source better? Why?”

The first answer everyone comes up with is that it’s free, and that’s better.

However, that is neither necessary nor sufficient to deem it “better”.

If MySQL did exactly the same tasks Oracle did, but was free, there’s still a huge amount of money involved when migrating. Merely staffing the migration costs a lot of money.

Companies using open source technologies because they are free are (probably) making the right software choice for the wrong reason.

Firstly, open source does not have to be free — MySQL proves that. Their Enterprise source code is free to paying customers (and whoever paying customers distribute to, but that is not the issue).

Secondly, open source’s benefits far outweigh mere license costs, though the license cost is definitely the most tangible …