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.)

A week ago, Mike Zinner and his team released the beta version of MySQL Workbench on http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/. MySQL Workbench is a visual database design tool that is developed by MySQL. It is the successor application of the DBDesigner4 project.

There are two different editions of MySQL Workbench at this point in time - an open source edition and a standard edition that is only available for paying customers.

This means that MySQL Workbench introduces a new concept for MySQL. Until now, MySQL products have either been open source or only available through a commercial subscription (such as MySQL Enterprise Monitor).

MySQL Workbench is the first MySQL product that will be offered in several different editions. For those interested in the logic of this decision, please read Mike Zinner’s post that may help you better understand. Mike compresses the difference as follows:

If you are a MySQL expert who has the knowledge and time to manually perform some steps, MySQL Workbench OSS will be the ideal choice for you. If you want to be able to do more in less time, you would like to have the additional safety-net or you simply want to give something back to the MySQL team - the Standard Edition is your logical choice.

The open source edition of MySQL Workbench is a fully featured, non-crippled database schema designer.. The open source edition is the code base the commercial edition is built on. It has the full feature set that is needed to efficiently design database schemata and is not crippled in any way. The commercial editions only adds modules to the open source edition to help the user save time.

The commercial edition of MySQL Workbench adds a number of advanced modules that help users to work more efficiently with the tool. These modules range from workflow optimizations to extended object handling. But you cannot buy it just yet. Commercial editions of MySQL Workbench will only be offered when they have reached production quality. The Standard Edition will be available on the MySQL online shop. Until then we welcome people joining the Beta Testing Program. If you are interested please email workbench at mysql dot com, and interact with the Workbench developers on the Workbench Forum and IRC channels.

Finally, we expect to be able to create a contributor community around MySQL Workbench. Regardless if you submit a patch for a bug or a new plugin to automate a given task - all users of the MySQL Workbench will benefit from your contribution. And in return you will benefit from the work that has done by other community members. You can start by reporting bugs and answer questions on the Workbench forum. And avid members of the MySQL Workbench community get a copy of the Standard Edition in return.

MySQL Workbench will be available on Windows, Linux and OS X. However, the first release will be on the Windows platform only. Support for other platforms will be added in a short time frame due to the clear separation of back-end and front-end code. Linux and OS X will benefit from the stabilized back-end code and are treated as first class platforms.

Condensed version: MySQL Workbench is a database design tool ready for you to download!

Lenz made a good summary of the DotOrg Pavilion exhibitors at the Expo part of the MySQL Conference & Expo ten days from now. To recap, the DotOrg Pavilion is a part of the exhibition area reserved for Open Source projects. Our attempt has been to collect the DotOrg pavilion to be a mecca for OSS enthusiasts, writers, speakers, and advocates. We are fortunate to have attracted some of the world’s most recognised free software organisations, and new up and coming projects.

A related type of reason to register for the conference are the BOF sessions. Birds of a Feather sessions are the informal evening sessions where people sharing an interest meet face to face. You can still organise your own BoF. There are sixteen BoFs already:

BoFs Monday evening 23 April 2007

• MySQL Data Warehousing and BI, Lance Walter, V.P. Marketing, Pentaho Corporation

BoFs Tuesday evening 24 April 2007

• Backup and Recovery of MySQL, Paddy Sreenivasan, VP of Engineering and Co-founder, Zmanda, Inc., Zmanda, Inc.
• Using Perl’s DBD::mysql, Giuseppe Maxia, QA Developer, MySQL AB
• SNMP/AgentX Management of MySQL Servers, Mark Atwood
• MySQL Replication, Lars Thalmann, Replication and Clustering Technology, MySQL, Jeremy Cole, MySQL Geek, Proven Scaling LLC, Mats Kindahl, MySQL AB
• Testing Tools and Techniques, Giuseppe Maxia, QA Developer, MySQL AB
• Scalable BLOB Streaming Infrastructure, Paul McCullagh, CTO, SNAP Innovation GmbH
• Performance Tuning and Optimization, Peter Zaitsev, Co-Founder, Lead Consultant, Percona Ltd, Tobias Asplund, Instructor and Performance Tuning Consultant, MySQL AB, Jay Pipes, Community Relations Manager, North America, MySQL AB

BoFs Wednesday evening 25 April 2007

• MySQL Cluster (NDB), Stewart Smith, Cluster Developer, MySQL AB
• Quality Contribution to MySQL, Giuseppe Maxia, QA Developer, MySQL AB
• Making It Real in the Enterprise: Migrating from Access to Enterprise Web 2.0
• All Things .NET, Reggie Burnett, Software Developer, MySQL AB
• MySQL and Java, Mark D. Matthews, MySQL AB
• Online Backup, Lars Thalmann, Replication and Clustering Technology, MySQL, Charles Bell, Senior Developer, MySQL AB
• Pluggable Storage Engine API, Brian Miezejewski, Principal Consultant, MySQL Inc., Brian Aker, Director of Architecture, MySQL AB, Trudy Pelzer, Project Engineering Manager, MySQL AB
• MySQL Monitoring and Advisory Service Unleashed—Come Make Your Mark!, Andy Bang, Director of MySQL Network, MySQL, Rob Young, Senior Product Manager, MySQL Network

Please check the “Birds of a Feather Sessions” message board located in the Conference Registration Area for up-to-the-minute changes and information.