The last keynote of Tuesday evening at OSCon 2008 was entitled “Temporarily Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…..Made Easy!”

Damian Conway is a speaker that should not be missed. He spends his time hacking perl to do fascinating and obscure feats of technology such as time travel. This video is just over an hour of rolling laughter that will entertain you into realizing what a genius Damian Conway is.

Now, most of my exposure is within the MySQL Community, so if folks could pass the links to the video along to other communities, that would be great.

(This video is at 1.0 Mb/sec. Watch the video online at http://technocation.org/node/571/play or download it at http://technocation.org/node/571/download. Please do not download the file if you are on the conference network, these links are not time sensitive.)

In http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/07/01/should-we-proclaim-mysql-community-edition-dead/, Peter Zaitsev wonders if MySQL’s community edition is dead.

The title of Peter’s inquiry is somewhat misleading, as the database itself works fine. He clarifies a bit with, “there suppose to be 2 yearly binary releases (which are overdue) and 4 predictable yearly source releases, which we have not seen either.” I thought it was clear that “2 per year” doesn’t mean “one every six months”. It’s been eight months, sure. And I don’t actually believe that MySQL is going to have one source release per month until November, to make up for the lack of source releases. However, it’s certainly possible, if not probable.

The fact remains, however, that if you’re just looking for stable, recent, binary MySQL Community release, you might not find it. MySQL offers two out of three — stable and binary Community releases. Not recent, but I think it’s okay to charge for the most up-to-date version. In my experience only about half of the production environments out there have switched to 5.0, and many are running 4.1 and 4.0 still.

At the low end, a license costs just under USD$600. The requirement to buy a license to get the most recent version is a mere inconvenience, not a business-stopper. It’s not like MySQL is forcing everyone to run on version 3.23 unless they pay $10,000 per license. Charging a modest amount for the most up-to-date version is not a bad thing.

It would be nice to have been aware of that ahead of time, but MySQL as a company has not been so great at organizing and having all its ducks in a row. In fact this is where I hope Sun can really help MySQL out, as it has a reputation (a deserved one, in my experience) of being more highly organized.

Have you heard of Hanlon’s razor? “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

(more…)

I have *never* had this happen to me.

Maybe it’s because it’s MySQL 6.0.4, maybe it’s because it’s on Windows, or perhaps I am just up working too late.

I have seen mojibake before, but usually it is unintelligible. But this? After I post this I am backing away slowly from my computer.

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 3
Server version: 6.0.4-alpha-community MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> use test;
Database changed
mysql> create table bits (val bit);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.09 sec)

mysql> insert into bits (val) VALUES (1),(0),(1),(1),(0);
Query OK, 5 rows affected (0.05 sec)
Records: 5  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql> select * from bits;
+------+
| val  |
+------+
| ?    |
|      |
| ?    |
| ?    |
|      |
+------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql>

Has your data ever smiled at you?

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!

In case you haven’t heard, on Monday, MySQL released the next RC of 5.1.25. It is available to the community, so download it now and take it for a spin!

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html.

Almost 2 years ago, in How Open Do You Have To Be To Be Open Source? I wrote:

Google and Yahoo! are not rich because they have secrets. They are rich because they started with secrets, but I believe they could safely let their secrets out with very little loss of revenue.

Matt Asay’s recent post Google’s slow transformation into an open, transparent company made me dig up that post, which by many standards is old in terms of time, but it’s only now that some of this change is actually happening.

Matt ponders,

It remains to be seen what, if anything, Google will actually open, but I trust its track record on living up to its word more than Microsoft’s, which also went through a flurry of “We’re now really open!” announcements lately that actually netted the industry…not much.

In interesting news, at last night’s Boston Sun/MySQL event (more on that in another post), the question was asked if the panel thought that Microsoft was really serious about open sourcing their software(s) and what that would mean for open source software.

I couldn’t wait to jump in with my answer — and even though I had to wait, I did eventually say what was on my mind.

If Microsoft opened all of their code tomorrow, how big of a *developer* community would they have? By that I mean, how many people would say “yeah, all right! I’m going to make this code better!” and how many would take a look at the internals and feel like they’d just been on a roller coaster?

Open source is the foundation of civilization. The title of this post mentions that, and now I will explain why.

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Contemporary software engineering models include many loosely-defined layers. Database developers might help with other layers, but for the most part a database administrator’s domain is the persistence layer.

• Presentation


• Application


• Business Logic


• Persistence (also called Storage)

The Daily WTF has an article on The Mythical Business Layer makes the case for not separating the business layer and the application layer:

A good system (as in, one that’s maintainable by other people) has no choice but to duplicate, triplicate, or even-more-licate business logic. If Account_Number is a seven-digit required field, it should be declared as CHAR(7) NOT NULL in the database and have some client-side code to validate it was entered as seven digits. If the system allows data entry in other places by other means, that means more duplication of the Account_Number logic is required.

It almost goes without saying that business logic changes frequently and in unpredictable ways. The solution to this problem is not a cleverly coded business layer. Unfortunately, it?s much more boring than that. Accommodating change can only be accomplished through careful analysis and thorough testing.

I will call this merged business/application layer the “functional layer.”

The serious scaling requirements posed by most applications these days call for partitioning, clustering, sharding or some other term for “dividing up the data so it does not become the bottleneck”. Enter the “architecture layer”.

“Wait a minute,” I hear you asking. “Isn’t that just the persistence layer?”

Yes and no. To me, there’s a difference between the storage and the architecture of said storage. The database schema for storing a user profile is a persistence layer issue. Figuring out which database instance to go to is an architecture layer issue.

This is an important distinction for me. Many folks are coding the architecture layer directly into the functional layer. A “save_profile()” API function might call an ORM to deal with the persistence, or it will have MySQL (or other database) connection handling and queries. However, the database will grow, and at some point you will find yourself wanting to split the data [more].

This type of information, like the presentation layer, needs to be separate. Why should the application care whether save_profile(’Sheeri’,'hair color’,'blonde’) accesses database1 or database2? More importantly, why should there be major code changes to the functional layer if the architecture changes? Just like no functionality has changed when you change your website color from blue to red, there is no functionality change when you go from splitting data between 2 database servers to splitting among 3, or 10.

For me, the persistence layer is about how the data is stored. Which, explicitly and for the record, I also believe should be separate from the functional layer — if you store hair color and eye color in one table or 2, the functionality of the application has not changed; all that’s needed is a change in how that data is stored and retrieved.

The architecture layer is all about where the data is stored. Early forms of the architecture layer are configuration files, though most would not call that a “layer”. Database administrators should be able to change the architecture of the database system without requiring mucking about in the application’s functional code.

Thoughts?

(If you want $100, you will have to read the entire blog post. Sorry for the tease, but I did not want folks to miss out on the opportunity to win!)

By now it is no surprise that I won one of the three 2008 MySQL Community Member of the Year awards. And folks may know that I won the same award last year.

One interesting fact you may not know: during the 2006 MySQL Awards Ceremony, where Giuseppe Maxia, Roland Bouman, Markus Popp and Rasmus Lerdorf won community awards, I thought to myself,

Next year I want to be on that stage, collecting that award.

Well, I did that and then some! (note that the image below is both of the awards, side by side, with no photoshopping).

But this post is not about me. This blog post is about you. More specifically, I am going to detail in this blog post the secrets to my success. This year, I thought to myself, “how can I make it so I am not on this stage receiving this award next year?”

So here is my challenge to you. I will open source my methods, and in return I will give $100 to each 2009 MySQL Community Member of the Year (in whatever form they want, whether it’s US cash, a $100 Amazon.com gift certificate, a donation to an organization, whatever).

April 2006 - March 2007

• 154 blog posts


• 3 User Group/conference presentations


• Organized 12 User Group meetings


• Produced 2 Videos


• Produced 11 Podcasts (started Nov. 2006)


• 1 Grant


• Google Summer of Code mentor– full disclosure, the $500 mentor incentive went directly to MySQL and helped pay for the new MySQL Forge servers, so my only payment was a T-shirt.

April 2007 - March 2008

• 94 blog posts


• 4 User Group/conference presentations (+1 lightning talk)


• Organized 11 User Group meetings


• Produced 6 Videos plus all the videos from the mysql user conference (available at http://technocation.org/content/2007-mysql-user-conference-and-expo-presentations-and-videos


• Produced 14 Podcasts


• 2 Grants

Besides the above, other ideas for community involvement are:

• Forum/list involvement


• Volunteering for the Documentation team


• Helping to organize user-based conferences
(my brain wants to call them UDC’s — “user defined conferences”).

I have only listed non-technical ways to win the award, and only what I could think of. The sky is the limit!