As followers of Free / Open Source Software know, there are several ways of being free.

As for free as in speech, look for Wednesday’s keynote at the MySQL Users Conference here in Santa Clara on the US West Coast. It’s by Rick Falkvinge, party leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. Or download MySQL Community Server, it’s free as in speech.

As for free as in beer, sure, again, just download MySQL Community Server, install it, and use it. Old news.

But what if you’re lazy enough not to want to download and install MySQL Server? What if you just want to use an instance of MySQL Serer, installed and provided by someone else, with a simple command like

mysql -h db4free.net -P 3307 -u [username] -p[password] ?

Well, in that case, register for a free MySQL 5.1 plus a free MySQL 6.0 at http://www.db4free.net/

Like it says on DB4Free’s first page:

The db4free project provides a platform for database users and developers from all over the world to exchange experiences, give hints to each other or to discuss. This offer also gives you the chance to learn to deal with databases without having to rent a server for money.

You just create an account, perhaps browse the db4free.net blog, and off you go.

You can run MySQL 5.1 (now in RC) and MySQL 6.0 (still in Alpha; includes Falcon).

Thanks for the beer, Markus Popp!

With 130 entries in the “MySQL” category and no MySQL-related subcategories, my blog had become impossible to search and navigate easily.

And thus I created a number of new categories for the MySQL entries within my blog. They’re listed in the left navigation bar, below the months, as well as below:

• MySQL Server, MySQL Cluster, Falcon
• Connectors: PHP, Ruby on Rails
• Tools: GUI, MySQL Workbench, MySQL Proxy
• Events: MySQL Users Conferences
• Licensing: GPL
• Architecture of Participation, Summer of Code, Virtual company
• Other: Release Policy, Documentation, Use cases

I hope this will make my blog more (re)usable.

(The picture is from this summer, when navigating the way up the Großvenediger, a 3662 m high mountain in the Hohe Tauern region of Austria.)

MySQL has introduced Previews as a new way of delivering features for early testing by our community.

Previews are for testing of features, not of versions. The two previews we offer today are the Falcon Feature Preview based on 6.0, and the GIS Feature Preview based on 5.1. However, the version number as such is not intended by us to set any expectations on when the feature will be in a production version. For instance, Falcon is going into the 6.0 code base, but the GIS geographical data won’t be in before 6.1 (although the preview is based on 5.1).

Previews are by definition a bit “rough around the edges”. They have no inherent level of maturity — they aren’t pre-alpha, or alpha, or beta, or RC, or GA. They are a new way to do “release early & release often” for those who want to get things early, without MySQL tying itself into a promise on the specific delivery release.

Falcon 6.0.4 is available immediately in the preview release and soon will be part of a formal beta. If you want it immediately, go get the preview version!

Our purpose of having previews is to make new features available for those who want early access. That way, we hope for more community testing. For our users, Previews are meant for testing only, absolutely not something to use in production. It’s a new way for us to release early & often for experimentation, learning, and testing.

Later on, I hope we will do other feature previews for storage engines or specific features.

Links:

• Falcon Feature Preview
• GIS Feature Preview
• Download MySQL 6.0
• MySQL 6.0 in a nutshell
• New features in MySQL 6.0.3
• Documentation: The Falcon storage engine
• Forge: The Falcon storage engine
• Forge: MySQL Tutorials (look for the Falcon header)

Last Sunday, just before the MySQL Dev Meeting in Heidelberg ended, we went to see a falconry. Strictly speaking, the German Raptor Research Centre isn’t a falconry (which is a commercial venture for raising falcons), but a privately funded research station dedicated to the preservation of birds of prey, or “Eagles, vultures & co” as they say on their home page at deutsche-greifenwarte.de. Their actions over the past 30 years have given concrete results for many raptors, such as the eagle-owl (”Uhu” in German and Swedish), which is no longer on the list of endangered species in Europe. The German Raptor Research Centre has successfully set out 37 sea eagles (Seeadler, havsörn) in Central Europe, an admirable investment in nature which now including second and third generation offspring has grown to about 400 eagles.

Through a donation in part from MySQL GmbH, in part from MySQL AB, but mostly from individual MySQLers attending the Heidelberg Dev Mtg, Jim Starkey and I had the pleasure of handing over a cheque of 4500 euros to Bettina Fentzloff, the wife of the research centre’s founder, Claus Fentzloff, who brought another falcon for the audience of MySQLers to admire. I hope the donation will enable the Deutsche Greifenwarte to give freedom (as in speech) to many birds of prey in Europe and worldwide!

Jim, as the creator of the Falcon engine, seemed to have a good hand also with the namesake birds.

Today at OSCON, MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius and I presented the “State of the Dolphin” lightning talk.

My slides for this preso weren’t too graphic, which makes them all the easier to reuse in this blog:

Use our new software!

• Use MySQL 5.1, it‘s soon going RC
• Use Falcon, it‘s soon going Beta (new transactional storage engine, faster than InnoDB on large servers)
• Use MySQL Workbench (ER Tool), Now Beta
• Use MySQL Proxy, just released
• PHPers: Use mysqlnd (Native Driver)

Go test MySQL 5.1!

• We‘re happy with the quality
  • More stable than 5.0 was four months after GA
  • RC happening very soon, GA within a few versions after that
  • A better MySQL 5.0 (thousands of small fixes)
• We‘re happy with the new functionality
  • Table / Index Partitioning
  • Row-based replication – Transfers data instead of commands
  • Full-text indexing parser plugins – Flexible full text search
  • Disk-based Data Support for MySQL Cluster
  • Replication Support for MySQL Cluster
  • XPath Support - helps any customer wanting to better navigate and search XML documents stored in MySQL
  • Internal Task Scheduler (Events)

Other goodies coming soon (5.2, 6.0, …)

• Global Backup API
• Falcon and Maria (MyISAM++) storage engine
• Further new storage engines
• Hash & Merge joins (faster subselects)
• Federated tables over ODBC
• Foreign key support for all engines

Participate in our Development!

• Report bugs! Test them! Submit patches!
• Hang out on Freenode IRC #mysql-dev
• Subscribe to commits@lists.mysql.com to see our code reviews
• Attend MySQL University, the foremost education for MySQL developers (of C/C++ code, not apps)
• MySQL Forge: List your MySQL apps! Upload your code snippets! Fix the missing documents!
• Go visit MySQL Forge Worklog
  • Voting for best features starting soon

Hiring!

We are hiring outstanding C/C++ developers with systems or database engineering experience.
Visit www.mysql.com/jobs or email resume to jpugh@mysql.com