Thought I would share a few links that I read this morning. I don’t do a lot of link posts but these three came off my RSS, one after the other, and all three are worth sharing.

The first is Will Oracle kill MySQL? Come on people! I can’t believe people are still stuck on this FUD. Ronald gives some good reasons why that is not likely. The only thing this kind of FUD really does is drive people to Postgres (and that postgres derivative that starts with an E and ends with a DB). I’m glad Ronald was able to set the record straight.

InfiniDB – Open Source BI/Analytic Database

Recently ran across some blog posts about InfiniDB, a MySQL based DW and BI analytic database from a company called Calpont. I *think* InfiniDB is their only product. I could be wrong about that, though.
There are plenty of things to like about InfiniDB – Multi-threaded and designed for multi-cpu/cores, ACID compliant, recoverable, supports SQL standards and online DDL, MVCC, dynamic data compression, and FREE! What attracted me first though was the open source implementation of the columnar storage. That’s the current biggie on VLDB, think vertica or Oracle’s ExaData.

Open source the way it ought to be. Today, Percona announced a replacement for InnoDB that improves performance and fixes bugs. The new engine is called XtraDB.

According to Vadim at Percona:

It’s 100% backwards-compatible with standard InnoDB, so you can use it as a drop-in replacement in your current environment. It is designed to scale better on modern hardware, and includes a variety of other features useful in high performance environments.

The release is pure GPL (v2) and commercial support is available from Percona. If percona keeps this up, they just might become the new MySQL.

The source is available from Launchpad and from Percona.

I have added my previously posted mysql book review to the site under “Reference Information” -> “Book Review”.
LewisC
Technorati : book review, mysql

I have written a new book on SQL DML. This is a total beginner book: how to commit and rollback, how to query, how to add data, etc.

Probably not of interest to most of the people who read this blog but if you know of anyone completely new to SQL, this would make a great Christmas present. Only 14.95. It is completely vendor agnostic, although the examples all use Oracle and MySQL.

You can view the Table Of Contents, Preface and Index here. I plan to release some of the chapters for free on the blog and will make the PDF of the book available at a discount.

This is the last week to participate in a database usage survey. If you haven’t already done so, please take a few minutes to answer 25 questions.

LewisC

Technorati : database, mysql, survey

Less than two weeks ago, I posted my Database Survey. As of just a few minutes ago, I have had 215 responses. That’s pretty awesome. I’d like to get at least twice that though.

I haven’t looked deeply at it yet to see if there are any trends. I think it will be best to wait until the survey is closed. I did look at some of the responses, kind of as a quality check. Looks like MySQL is fairly well represented. I didn’t see any DB2 responses (for primary database).

Infoworld published the 2008 Bossies, Best Of Open Source Software. There are 8 categories and none of them are database:

• Collaboration
• Developer tools
• Enterprise applications
• Networking
• Platforms and middleware
• Productivity applications
• Security
• Storage

I had to look through several of them before I found the database category under Platforms and middleware. Slide 4 is the magic slide:

It says:

High Performance MySQL, Second Edition

Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More

By Baron Schwartz , Peter Zaitsev , Vadim Tkachenko , Jeremy Zawodny , Arjen Lentz , Derek J. Balling

Pages: 708

ISBN 10: 0-596-10171-6 | ISBN 13: 9780596101718

When I first read about this book, I figured many sections would be over my head. I was pleasantly surprised when I started reading it.

Hot on the heels of news that SquareSpace is using Oracle, comes news that LinkedIn is going whole hog with MySQL.

Actually, you could say that LinkedIn is buying into Sun. They are buying the MySQL Enterprise subscription and they’ll be running MySQL on Sparc servers and Solaris 10. They’ve signed up for Sun Professional Services, MySQL Professional Services, and Solaris Everywhere. I guess you could say that signed up for the full monty. Pun intended.

“Helping LinkedIn to scale their Web systems demonstrates the strength of combining the Sun and MySQL teams,“ said Zack Urlocker, vice-president of products, database group, Sun Microsystems.

I have added quite a few new words to the glossary and fixed several misspellings around the site.
My next steps will be to complete the Postgres and MySQL installation guides.  I’m also taking requests for what anyone would like to see written next.
LewisC

I didn’t get a chance to go to OSCON 2008. Bummer. But I can live vicariously through google. So, along with all of the announcements you’ve heard from OSCON, I know present the OSCON 2008 – Google popularity contest. This is a completely unscientific survey of google hits. I was searching blogs and news. I started with just news but the blogs hits really upped the numbers.

To run these searches, I use “oscon 2008″ and the search term, for example:

“oscon 2008″ mysql

In the case of open source, I also quoted “open source”.

I’m using google’s about number. I didn’t sit and count each hit.

Have you heard of Drizzle? It was announced at OSCON yesterday and is all over the blogosphere. From the Drizzle FAQ:

* So what are the differences between is and MySQL?

No modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, ACL. Fewer data types. Less engines, less code. Assume the primary engine is transactional.

Also from the FAQ is that, right now at least, there is no intention to make this run natively on windows and they make the point:

* “This is not a SQL compliant relational…”

Very true, and we do not aim to be that.

It is a fork of MySQL that takes it backward to pre-5.0 in features but hopefully greatly reduces the bugs and instabilities.

EnterpriseDB announced the results of the survey they did a few months ago at OSCON. Now, take the results with a grain of salt as it was done by EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB is based on Postgres so there is a vested interest in making Postgres sound good. Results can be skewed depending on how the survey is worded, what options are available as answers and who the respondents are.

The results summary is available for free.

Some key facts:

500 respondents. The download page says “500 corporate IT leaders”. Or maybe, 500 open source developers.

Only 9% of respondents indicated that they preferred commercial solutions over open source solutions.

I was browsing the web on this lazy Sunday afternoon and ran across a good article on the Rarest Words blog. The author was trying to get Django installed and running with Postgres. From the author’s own admissions, he is not a Postgres fanatic.

Well, this and last year I hear everywhere that PostgreSQL is the way to go and that usage of mySQL in 2008 makes people puke… But without any real arguments (besides “Postgres is the way to go”).

After some not so compatible errors with these not so compatible databases, the author did get it working and ran some benchmarks. Postgres did not turn out faster than MySQL.

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

Sun just announced MySQL Workbench, a new database design tool for MySQL developers and DBAs. I’m a data modeling tool junkie. I like to play with any I can get my hands on. I’ve used almost every modeling tool that’s been built. My all time favorite is probably Erwin.

I decided to download MySQL Workbench and give it a try. Since I was playing with it, I figured I should write about it and while I am writing about it, I might as well write about a couple of other tools, that I have personally used, that you might like.

TOAD Data Modeler

The TOAD Data Modeler from Quest used to have a free version.

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

Do you know which open source feature is the most important? Do you know which open source database rocks and which one sucks? Is MySQL better than Postgres? Is Ingres worth considering? How does Firebird compare? Have you used, or have you considered using, an open source database?

Take a survey. It’s only 15 questions so it takes just a few minutes.

I’ll post a link where you can get the results once they have been compiled and prepared.

BTW, this isn’t my survey. I’m just passing on the link.

LewisC

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

I mentioned the other day that I was playing with a new GUI builder from an EnterpriseDB partner, Wavemaker. Wavemaker, in addition to providing the software, provides some training that is downloadable from the web site.

This training is a two day basics course in powerpoint format. I would guess that this is what they use for instructor led training and they just made this available to the public. Anyway, I decided to see how good the training was which in turn kind of tells me how easy wavemaker is to learn.

Day 1 includes 8 powerpoint presentations:

• Introduction
• Wavemaker Architecture
• Wavemaker Installation
• Wavemaker Studio Overview
• Page Designer Basics
• Wavemaker Data Model
• Service Components
• Data Widgets

Seeing as how I was already making some simple pages with the tool, I blew through the intro, the architecture and installation.

This post isn’t really PostgreSQL specific. It also happens with MySQL and Ingres (and any other 32 bit driver).

I am running Vista 64 on one of my machines. I installed Postgres 8.3 and the ODBC drivers. When I tried to setup an ODBC connection, the windows ODBC administrator program ODBCAD32.exe did not list Postgres. I noticed that it also did not list MySQL or Ingres even though I knew I had installed drivers for those databases also.

After a bit of research, I tracked down the issue. My ODBC drivers did in fact install. Microsoft, in all their wisdom, has 2 versions of odbcad32.

I’ve been playing with various GUIs off and on over the last couple of months. I find that I drop to mysql.exe quite often no matter which tool I use. My favorites until recently have been the MySQL GUI Tools and NaviCat.



I was using the Lite edition of Navicat. I actually started using navicat with postgres a few years ago. I like it but the lite version is limited in some annoying ways. It’s nice in that it runs (at least the mysql version) in Linux and windows. I don’t use a mac so that doesn’t really do anything for me.

There is a new wiki comparing MySQL to PostgreSQL. Because it’s a wiki, hopefully it can be kept updated so that it’s current AND accurate.
The wiki is MySQL vs PostgreSQL.
Personally, I’d like to see this grow into a universal comparison site that the community could keep updated.
LewisC

There is a new wiki comparing MySQL to PostgreSQL. Because it’s a wiki, hopefully it can be kept updated so that it’s current AND accurate.
The wiki is MySQL vs PostgreSQL.
Personally, I’d like to see this grow into a universal comparison site that the community could keep updated.
LewisC

postgresql mysql

Holy simoleans, Batman. I wake up this morning, write a nice little Oracle tip and then next thing I see is Josh’s post about Sun->MySQL. That was totally unexpected to me.
I browsed over to PlanetMySQL to get the scoop and what do I see, Sun buys MySQL for $1 billion to take centerstage in the web economy. I don’t often agree with Matt but on this topic, I think I have to. This just makes a lot of sense for everyone involved. Sun, MySQL and MySQL users.

I was browsing around the web and ran across this article at xml.com, XML Moves to mySQL. Being a heavy XML user, I had to read the article. It looks like MySQL is expanding the built-in support for XML.



This article isn’t very detailed but it links to Using XML in MySQL 5.1 and 6.0 at mySQL.com which is very detailed.



I like the ability that is built in to support loading XML from files. That’s a feature I wish Oracle would work on. Even in 11g, that functionality is still limited.



MySQL also adds ExtractValue() and UpdateXML() support.

According to this article in ComputerWorld, MySQL to get injection of Google code. Google has signed an agreement to contribute to MySQL (oddly enough called a contributer license agreement) and will contribute source code for a variety of technical items.
In a way, this can be considered a very strong endorsement of MySQL by Google. Google even has an engineer dedicated to working with MySQL and the MySQL development team. I didn’t realize that Google was such a heavy user of MySQL. Google will contribute some code related to replication and monitoring.

I recently wrote a blog entry (on my Postgres blog) about hiding SQL in a stored procedure, Hiding SQL in a Stored Procedure. I decided to see if I could convert that same concept to a MySQL stored procedure.



It doesn’t work exactly the same. For one, the syntax is a little different. I expected that and the syntax differences really aren’t that bad. Minor tweaks really.



The second issue is the major one. While I could write the proc and return a result set, I am not, as far as I can tell, able to treat the procedure as a table.

Bob Zurek of EnterpriseDB posted a blog entry today titled, “We slammed into a brick wall with MySQL“. If you read his blog entry, the information he is referencing is in this press release, FortiusOne Migrates GeoCommons Intelligent Mapping Website to EnterpriseDB Advanced Server.
If you read that press release, it says:

“We slammed into a brick wall with MySQL,” said Chris Ingrassia, chief technology officer, FortiusOne. “As an example, MySQL’s rather limited and incomplete spatial support dramatically impacted performance. We were looking for an affordable database solution, but we required enterprise-class features and performance that MySQL simply couldn’t deliver.

Do you do GEO? If you do, you’ve probably at least heard of PostGIS, the Postgres GIS extension. PostGIS just gave EnterpriseDB a big win over its open source competition.

FortiusOne leads the market towards the next generation of Web mapping. Its breakthrough Intelligent Mapping technologies offer rich information visualization on maps and unprecedented access to geographic data. FortiusOne innovations include: high-speed Web-based geographic analysis tools, a flexible and scalable Web services platform supporting the special needs of geographic data, and an innovative application of social networking techniques to geographic knowledge creation.

FortiusOne’s main product is GeoCommons.

I remember the first time I downloaded MySQL. I think I was using Mandrake Linux. Anyway, the install was fairly painless but once it was installed, I had no clue how to run queries.



I was coming from an Oracle background and was used to SQL*Plus. I was also familiar with PostgreSQL and psql. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to get into MySQL.



So, for you developers and brand new users, you can easily start MySQL and start using it. This is not meant for a production installation, just for playing on your laptop or desktop.

I stumbled across a free MySQL magazine while reading the 64th edition of Pyhthian’s Log Buffer at Diamond Notes (a MySQL DBA Blog).
The magazine is MySQL Magazine. There are currently two editions, Summer 2007 and Fall 2007.

They’re in PDF format and, at least for a MySQL beginner like me, are very useful. The Summer 2007 edition has a very good “Securing MySQL Server” article. One improvement I would like to see om the site would be to have a table of contents in the HTML. That way I wouldn’t have to load the PDF just to see what’s inside.