Colin Charles Agenda

Today Giuseppe pointed me to Hot skills: MySQL 5.1, an article in ComputerWeekly.com.

The takeaway from the Gartner report quoted?

• Gartner published a report titled “The Growing Maturity of Open-Source Database Management Systems” in November 2008, and found that there was a 50% increase from 2007 to 2008 in the usage of open source DBMS’s in production.
• “Gartner says the major open source DBMSs are now available for installation as packages, without involving the source code, and include tools to help support administrators and managers.” I’d like to state that, MySQL has always been available in packaged format, and you don’t need to fudge with the source code if you do not want to. In fact, its available on all your distributions as well.
• “Gartner still has reservations: open source DBMSs should be used “primarily for non-mission-critical applications and those that do not require high availability”. However, they add, “If the technical capabilities of the staff are strong, use of an open-source DBMS in mission-critical environments is possible now”.” I’d like to affirm that its being used in mission critical environments daily, and no one worries otherwise. Customers from Google right to Cisco, Nokia, and more, use MySQL, without hiccups.

The report states that MySQL DBA’s pull in around £30,000 to £40,000 a year. The recommendation for training, is:

Start with Sun’s aptly named “Getting Started with MySQL” and the MySQL tutorial, or search for free independent online tutorials.

I can highly recommend attending a training session (MySQL for Database Administrators or MySQL for Developers), and then focusing on getting certified. Of course, the book on the left, the MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide (MySQL Press) is also invaluable.

Good luck in becoming MySQL certified, and prosper with your hot skill for 2009!

Executive summary: There is now a MySQL Room on FriendFeed, as well as a identi.ca group for mysql. Community members, developers, dabblers, users, etc. should find these extra avenues useful, in addition to the forums, mailing lists, and even the Forge. Join them now!

There has been a recent uptake of Twitter amongst the MySQL community… Early adopters have been around for ages, even (as we’re slowly approaching Twitter’s third birthday).

However, I’ve been noticing that slowly, there’s a little shift of the technical crowd, to identi.ca. I’ve had an account there for a while, but never really use the service much – but they’ve had updates this past week. They have group support now.

To post to the mysql group, just say:

!mysql message

The order doesn’t matter. Just have !mysql, in the body of your message. It reminds me of #hashtags on Twitter.

I don’t know how many pay attention to FriendFeed, but there is also a MySQL Room on FriendFeed. I think its a lot more discussion friendly than identi.ca, and would like to see it used more. We always during the Conference & Expo tend to use IRC, but maybe now, we’ll use FriendFeed. Good archives, good conversation, good tracking (one can use twhirl – an Adobe AIR app), I see it as a big win.

All in all, Twitter seems like the .com boom of the early 90’s, when businesses discovered Usenet, however identi.ca seem like those private lists, where the cool kids from Usenet migrated to.

I’ve been collecting a bunch of tabs, MySQL related, that I think people might have missed during the holiday period.

Contrarian Minds: Marten Mickos – this is a great interview with former CEO of MySQL, now SVP of the Database Group, at Sun Microsystems. Its got a bit of interesting history, and thoughts about the future. There’s also some interesting photography.

Facebook is now at 150 million users. They grew quite a bit recently, it was just 140 million about a month or two ago.

Flickr has seen traffic reaching ten terabytes. As you know, Flickr runs MySQL, and they make use of InnoDB. Recently, Chief Operations Officer, John Allspaw, showed how fragmented one of their databases was. Reminds us all, that running optimize from time to time, is useful. Flickr is also using MySQL 5.0.51 currently.

Flickr make extensive use of Ganglia. I found that there are Ganglia graphs for MySQL metrics available now. Interesting stuff.

Today, Dinesh pointed us out to the fact that MAMPU/OSCC saves RM40 million with open source. That’s about USD$12 million dollars!

I quote, from the report:

Savings on licensing fee alone by adopting OpenOffice.org have already exceeded RM12 million, which is based on the total installed seats of 12,760 at public sector agencies.

Also, from the same report:

The top three applications being considered by most Public Sector Agencies are:
1. OpenOffice.org — Office Suite
2. Firefox — Web Browser
3. MySQL — Database using Open Source Technology

That is impressive. OpenOffice.org and MySQL both come from Sun Microsystems Inc. Of course I’ve known this for a long time coming, but seeing it in B&W (ok, a colour report!) is of course, most useful. Go on, and read their first quarterly newsletter. More savings to come, I’m certain in 2009.

Raj Kissu is in the papers today. He completed a Google Summer of Code 2008 project with MySQL, hacking on blob streaming for phpMyAdmin. In fact, his project was so good, he has commit access to the phpMyAdmin tree :-)

Today, The Star had an article about him (and two other students), titled For the love of code. He said:

But Raj has already heard ­inquiries for his project. “A ­company that has developed a transactional engine using MySQL server have clients who want to test BlobStreaming,” he said.

Kudos Raj. I think we’ll see more great work from Paul McCullagh and Barry Leslie, as more happens with Scalable BLOB Streaming for MySQL happens.

In fact, Barry Leslie from PrimeBase will be speaking about blob streaming in his talk titled BLOB Streaming: Efficient reliable BLOB handling for all storage engines, at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009. What are you waiting for – register now and save! See you at CE2009!

I’ve always been more of a GNOME guy, and when running Linux, I use Rhythmbox to play my music. However, Amarok 2.0 might just change that.

They’ve chosen their database – it is none other than MySQL. The release notes state:

Some features, such as the player window or support for databases other than MySQL, have been removed because either they posed insurmountable programming problems, or they didn’t fit our design decisions about how to distinguish Amarok in a saturated market of music players.

If you want to know why the decision was made, read MySQL in Amarok 2 – The Reality. It has a lot to do with the fact that MySQL can be embedded, and performs well. Its a generally useful read to see why SQLite and PostgreSQL was not chosen.

MySQL… powering the music of today!
(wonder as I may, if we will ever get any Enterprise customers, who make heavy use of Amarok over many computers, etc… – I’m thinking modern night clubs, lounges, et al)