We timed our Use Case Competition to coincide with summer holidays, and are now prolonging the duration of the Use Case Competition with one month, until 30 September 2008.

To recap, here’s the original posting (with an updated deadline):

With 5.1 having officially been in Release Candidate status since September 2007 and soon approaching GA status, the MySQL Community Team launches a competition for the users of new features of MySQL 5.1:

Submit your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report to community(at)mysql.com by 30 September 2008 and have a chance of winning one of our prizes:

• 1st-3rd prize: A MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius
• 4th-10th prize: MySQL Community Contributor T-shirts
• 11th-20th prize: A Sakila mascot (MySQL’s pet dolphin)

You may phrase your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report freely, but the more colour you give it, the better your chances of winning.

By submitting the report, you also volunteer for appearing in our upcoming Use Case articles. We will consider any data you submit in your Use Case Report as public and quotable in our reports. However, you may ask us to anonymise certain aspects of your use case, should you otherwise not be able to participate in our competition.

This is the desired format of your submissions:

From: <you>
To: Community(at)mysql.com
Cc: <any of your colleagues you wish to inform>
Subject: MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report: <Feature> / <App Name>

MySQL Community Team,

At <company/organisation> we've used <new 5.1 feature> since <date>.

We're now on MySQL 5.1.<n> and we started development using
<new 5.1 feature> with MySQL.5.1.<m>.

Purpose of our appication:

Reason we need <new 5.1 feature>:

Development environment, OS, language:

Deployment environment, OS, hardware:

Relevant metrics on size/type of application:

Our comment on how <new 5.1 feature> meets our needs:
- comments on usability of feature
- comments on clarity of documentation
- comments on performance
- comments on bugs encountered [1]

Our greetings to the MySQL Engineering Team:

Name and email of submitter / developer:

Name of organisation:

Geographic location (city, country):

MySQL Enterprise customer: (YES/NO)

[1] If you’ve found bugs, then please follow our bug reporting instructions and share bug numbers from bugs.mysql.com in your use case report.

We’re looking for Use Cases on all new MySQL 5.1 features, but especially on

• Partitioning: Doc * Forum * Articles JonS & PeterG, RobinS, RS2, Giuseppe
• Row-Based Replication: Doc * Forum
• Event Scheduler: Doc * Forum
• Logs on demand / Table logging: Doc * Forum * Article Giuseppe
• Plugin API: Doc
• XML functions: Doc * Article: Bar & PeterG
• but also other improvements: Doc *Article Jay

Links:

• MySQL 5.1 Article Recap: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-5.1-recap.html

On Saturday, I spent a couple of hours running with Alexander Stubb. No, Alex is not our newest recruit to the MySQL Support Team, he’s the Foreign Minister of Finland (the guy in the yellow T-shirt below).

But let me rewind to the beginning. I have been increasing my running to over 1200 km a year, and when I heard that the Münchner Stadtlauf half-marathon doesn’t crash with Finnish midsummer (something never to be missed), I registered for it and finished it in 1:45:58. And I calculated I would have a chance at going below four hours at a full marathon, so I registered for the Helsinki City Marathon, which took place last Saturday on 16.8.2008 in my native Finland.

At a restaurant close to the Olympic Stadium just before start, I met with my long-time MySQL colleagues Patrik Backman and Giuseppe Maxia, as well as our fresh Sun colleague Peter Eisentraut, of PostgreSQL fame. When the time for the start (fairly late, three o’clock in the afternoon) approached, I went for the start area, and was pleasantly surprised to hear the race moderator interview our Foreign Minister.

To continue my pleasant surprise, Alex said he was not only going to be the starter of the marathon, but he was going to run himself. The interview was started in Finnish, and then went on to Swedish. “What’s your target time?” the interviewer asked. “Oh, I have one, but I haven’t published it” — he evidently had the same marathon goal communication policy as I. The interviewer swapped away from our two domestic languages to foreign ones, going over English and German to French. And Alex continued smoothly and fluently in his colloquial, youthful jargon in all of the five languages. He had a targeted and clearly unscripted message in all languages. In German, for instance, Alex shared how Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Germany’s Foreign Minister) the day before had found him to be slighly mad for going for a marathon, right after a week full of intense Georgia related negotiations.

The interview formed a very good pep talk for us runners, and an opportunity for me to no longer have to be ashamed of the linguistic disabilities of our Foreign Minister (as used to be the case when I grew up, leading to a whole genre of jokes). I share Alex’s view that one can show respect by speaking the language of the audience (and Helsinki City Marathon has a very international audience).

So off we went, and the start went well. The weather conditions were perfect: Drizzle. And 16-18 degrees. Not too cold, not too hot. A few km after the start, I saw Patrik, Giuseppe and Peter amongst the spectators, and they took some pictures of me.

The race passed by the Parliament Building, went out through familiar parts of Helsinki (Mejlans, Tölö, Munksnäs) to Esbo close to where MySQL’s first Finnish offices were, and continued via the Nokia House to the absolute centre of Helsinki. That was the most enjoyable part of the running experience. I kept to my pace, and I felt like being on a train. I just went with the flow and didn’t feel any effort. But after a while, my left knee started to remind me of its existence. Past the 21,1 km half way mark, it evened out as my right knee also begged for some attention. But basically, everything went fine until a while beyond 30 km, when the energy reserves of my body were depleted.

“So why didn’t I drink more of the Gatorade offered?”, the running reader will ask. Well, I had prepared a perfect excuse for the scenario in which I would have to stop: When in India for the MySQL Camp in Bangalore, I had caught salmonellosis. Salmonella bacteria are not a nice companion if you run, but also not total inhibitors for running. That said, I chose not to upset my stomach any further by consuming potent, unfamiliar drinks. And the effect was that I dropped from 1606th position at 30 km to 1970th position in the goal (out of 5436 participants).

So this meant that the last few km weren’t all that enjoyable. But I still didn’t get cramps like the 55 year old male athlete who was screaming “aijaijai” less than a km from the goal, at as many decibels as his lung capacity allowed. Humbling.

I finished at 3:55:22. That’s my best marathon ever, about 45 min faster than my previous personal record. I didn’t feel well in the goal, rolling back a few of my latest drinking transactions just after crossing the finish line (honest, it was just water).

After the run, I went for something very typically Finnish: A sauna. And there can hardly be a better timing for a nice, warm bath than right after getting into the goal of a cool (at least temperature-wise) marathon run. My body is often out of balance in many ways after a marathon, including but not limited to shivering out of cold. Ah, was it nice to relax and do some joint bragging together with fellow runners in the Olympic Swimming Stadium. And after the sauna, there were still plenty of runners coming to the goal area. I felt zero superiority over them, as I still vividly remember my own first marathon with a time of 5:41. A marathon for an amateur must strictly be about competing against yourself. And if you (like me) start lousy enough, you’ve got an easy target to beat.

And, what happened with Alex Stubb?

Well, he had shared with us that he had finished a previous Helsinki marathon in 3:59 and a Brussels marathon a bit below 3:40. I suspect he might have targeted 3:30, and like me, he lost positions towards the end of the race. At any rate, he finished 688th with a fabulous time of 3:31:25. Extremely impressive for anyone, especially for a Foreign Minister!

(Yes, Alex did wear something slightly more appropriate than a suit for the marathon).

In an internal mail thread, I was asked whether there would be any “objections from an integration perspective” to some Sun initiated plans for a more organised French MySQL community.

My reply was that it’s great, if it’s something related to the self-organisation of the already very active French MySQL community (as witnessed for instance by the huge numbers that Véronique Loquet of Al’x Communication attracted to our Paris meetup in April). But if it’s about a centrally-imposed structure of “marketing towards the user base”, then I want to understand more and we need to discuss a bit further.

Based on the video link that Véronique sent me, it seems to be more of the former — or if it’s the latter, then they seem to have got it just right, for an event planned for 19 September 2008.

This is one of the best MySQL videos — at least the funniest — that I’ve seen so far!

As for the 19 Sep 2008 event, I hope I can make it, but it might be tough. Take a look at the video, and you know why (specifically why I hope to make it, not why it might be tough).

Text:

START TRANSACTIONS;
INSERT INTO plage (fille) VALUE ('mignonne');
DELETE FROM beaugosse WHERE cheveux LIKE 'Blond';
UPDATE geek SET serial = 'Lover';
REPLACE HIGH_PRIORITY INTO Love (FILLE, MEC) VALUES ('MOI', 'TOI');
COMMIT;

Glossary:

• plage = beach
• fille = girl
• mec = guy
• mignonne = beautiful
• beaugosse = handsome
• cheveux = hair
• moi = me
• toi = you

La communauté MySQL se donne rdv;
le 19/09/2008;
à la cantine;
à partir de 18H;

Plus d’informations bientôt sur lacantine.org

Geek: Victor Rieunier;
fille: Mathilde Mallen;
Production: QNTV;
Réalisation: Morgan;
Musique: amsteroller;

Links:

• Movie-teaser: http://vpod.tv/QuartierNumeriqueTV/526842

Here’s an update on Ivan’s status, both from a medical and contributions perspective. Three days ago, I wrote that Ivan has arrived in Germany. Instead of posting all my news on Ivan as new posting each time, I will at irregular intervals keep this page up to date.

Andrii, Ivan and the rest of the family have now started settling in in Heidelberg. Georg Richter has found an apartment for them close to the hospital, and they will move there in a few days.

The first round of tests and examinations (blood tests, bone marrow punctation) has been concluded, but I won’t share any speculations on this until we’ve got them confirmed. The examinations will continue, and the best case scenario is that a transplant could happen 8 - 10 weeks from now.

Currently donations for Ivan are at about EUR 90,000. Most of it comes from Sun Dolphins (former MySQLers) and to some extent from Sun Classic employees. And more than 25% represent donations from the MySQL Community! Thanks everyone! The German clinic expects at least an additional EUR 150,000 to be needed, though, so I encourge those of you who haven’t contributed yet to press the “Donate” button at the end of the article on our official Ivan page.

Links:

• http://www.mysql.com/about/help-ivan.html
• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/07/21/ivan-nikitin-has-arrived-in-germany/
  
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_marrow#Donation_and_transplantation_of_bone_marrow
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematopoietic_stem_cell_transplantation

Andrii Nikitin, his wife and their kids arrived in Germany today. Fellow MySQL Support Engineer Axel Schwenke gave them a ride from the airport to Heidelberg, where Ivan had his first medical checkup at the University Hospital.

Georg Richter has organised an apartment for the first days - until they get some furniture for the final one.

From what can be seen, they all do fine. About Ivan - that remains to be seen.

Footnote from our request to donate to help Andrii Nikitin’s son Ivan:

Donations are requested to help Andrii Nikitin, a MySQL support engineer in Ukraine, provide for his son Ivan who requires a bone marrow transplant operation. The cost of this operation is expected to be between €150,000 - €250,000 ($235,000 - $400,000). Please help us provide Ivan a chance to live.

Yes,  you can still help!

Link:

• http://www.mysql.com/about/help-ivan.html

This blog entry is about a specific storage engine in MySQL. The Federated storage engine enables data to be accessed from a remote MySQL database on a local server without using replication or cluster technology. When using a Federated table, queries on the local server are automatically executed on the remote (federated) tables. No data is stored on the local tables.

When we released MySQL 5.1.24, the Federated engine was not compiled in, pending decisions on our future steps. The reason for the removal was that we realised (albeit quite late in the game) that Federated has some bugs that expose the server to unnecessary risks. Fixing these bugs is a time consuming process, because the root cause lies in the design of the Federated engine.

The removal was a safety precaution, which made the server more secure. However, it also deprived some users of an engine that they had been using for some time (Federated was introduced in MySQL 5.0.3).

Thus, we were left with the dilemma of more security versus more features. After much internal discussion, we reached a compromise. In 5.1.25, we reintroduced Federated as it was, but in the meantime we prepared a change for 5.1.26 which was just released. Federated is now compiled in, but disabled by default. This means that normal users won’t be exposed to the possible side effects of using Federated tables. Users who require the Federated engine will be able to use it, by adding an option (–federated) to the mysqld command line or to the configuration file. Existing users of the Federated engine must be warned that using Federated can be risky, and it is not recommended for production.

We have a list of outstanding bugs affecting the Federated engine in our Bugs database.

Notice that the 5.0.x server is not affected by this decision. However, to allow security conscious users to disable Federated, we plan to introduce a similar configuration option in 5.0.66 and later releases.

We realise that the situation with Federated is undesirable. Therefore, we plan to replace Federated with a better designed, more robust engine, and we will welcome feedback about this task from the community and from our customers.

And as followers of MySQL Forge know (thanks Brian Aker for reminding me), there is already an initiative from the community, called FederatedX:

FederatedX Pluggable Storage Engine for MySQL is based off of the Federated Storage Engine, and is an attempt to moved the Federated Storage Engine forward to fix bugs, add new features and develop new concepts that are easier to achieve as a pluggable storage engine.

Thanks, Patrick Galbraith and Antony Curtis!

As for our general Federated plans: Please address your suggestions to community-contributions(at)mysql.com

Links:

• MySQL 5.0 manual entry on the “Federated” storage engine: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/federated-storage-engine.html
• MySQL 5.1 manual entry on the “Federated” storage engine: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/federated-storage-engine.html
• MySQL Forum dedicated to the Federated to the “Federated” storage engine: http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?105
• Community-based FederatedX storage engine on Forge: http://forge.mysql.com/projects/project.php?id=265
• FederatedX shortlog: http://hg.patg.net/federatedx-storage-engine/
• Bugs related to the “Federated” storage engine: http://bugs.mysql.com/saved/bugs_federated

I usually haven’t been posting much about PostgreSQL even after joining Sun, so if I do, it must be something special.

And it is. Josh Berkus is leaving Sun, and Peter Eisentraut is joining.

Josh says:

After two years as Sun’s PostgreSQL Lead, I’m leaving to pursue other opportunities. This does not mean that Sun is dropping PostgreSQL; far from it. Instead my fellow core team member Peter Eisentraut is taking over my role leading the PostgreSQL team at Sun. With Peter’s experience in Oracle migrations and location near major Sun PostgreSQL customers, as well as many years leading the international team of translators for PostgreSQL documentation, he’s going to do a great job with Sun’s PostgreSQL development team. Probably better than me.

Peter says:

On July 22nd, 2008, I will be joining Sun Microsystems as PostgreSQL software engineer. Sun has been a valuable contributor to the PostgreSQL project for a number of years now, and I am looking forward to joining them in this effort. I am glad that I will be able to continue my personal role in the PostgreSQL project with the support of the great resources that Sun provides.

So, I expect that I will have more time to contribute to PostgreSQL development from now on, and both Sun and I have a sizeable backlog of projects and ideas that we would like to realize. Time to get started!

Over the years. I’ve met several times with both Josh and Peter. I’m sorry to see Josh go, but I have a feeling he won’t disappear from the FOSS database circles — so we’ll meet again! And I’m happy to get to work closer with Peter, whom I’ve just met a couple of times at German or French FOSS database events. And I heard Peter is evening me out in the balance of people moving between Germany and Finland, so let’s see where we’ll see each other next.

Links:

• Josh Berkus’s blog “Database Soup”: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/database-soup/
• Josh Berkus’s blog entry on leaving Sun: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/database-soup/sun-rise-sun-set-26078
• Peter Eisentraut’s blog: http://people.planetpostgresql.org/peter/
• Peter’s blog on joining Sun: http://people.planetpostgresql.org/peter/index.php?/archives/30-New-Job-at-Sun.html
• Terri Molini’s blog on Peter joining Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/ontherecord/date/20080720

With 5.1 having officially been in Release Candidate status since September 2007 and soon approaching GA status, the MySQL Community Team launches a competition for the users of new features of MySQL 5.1:

Submit your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report to community(at)mysql.com by 31 August 2008 and have a chance of winning one of our prizes:

• 1st-3rd prize: A MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius
• 4th-10th prize: MySQL Community Contributor T-shirts
• 11th-20th prize: A Sakila mascot (MySQL’s pet dolphin)

You may phrase your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report freely, but the more colour you give it, the better your chances of winning.

By submitting the report, you also volunteer for appearing in our upcoming Use Case articles. We will consider any data you submit in your Use Case Report as public and quotable in our reports. However, you may ask us to anonymise certain aspects of your use case, should you otherwise not be able to participate in our competition.

This is the desired format of your submissions:

From: <you>
To: Community(at)mysql.com
Cc: <any of your colleagues you wish to inform>
Subject: MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report: <Feature> / <App Name>

MySQL Community Team,

At <company/organisation> we've used <new 5.1 feature> since <date>.

We're now on MySQL 5.1.<n> and we started development using
<new 5.1 feature> with MySQL.5.1.<m>.

Purpose of our appication:

Reason we need <new 5.1 feature>:

Development environment, OS, language:

Deployment environment, OS, hardware:

Relevant metrics on size/type of application:

Our comment on how <new 5.1 feature> meets our needs:
- comments on usability of feature
- comments on clarity of documentation
- comments on performance
- comments on bugs encountered [1]

Our greetings to the MySQL Engineering Team:

Name and email of submitter / developer:

Name of organisation:

Geographic location (city, country):

MySQL Enterprise customer: (YES/NO)

[1] If you’ve found bugs, then please follow our bug reporting instructions and share bug numbers from bugs.mysql.com in your use case report.

We’re looking for Use Cases on all new MySQL 5.1 features, but especially on

• Partitioning: Doc * Forum * Articles JonS & PeterG, RobinS, RS2, Giuseppe
• Row-Based Replication: Doc * Forum
• Event Scheduler: Doc * Forum
• Logs on demand / Table logging: Doc * Forum * Article Giuseppe
• Plugin API: Doc
• XML functions: Doc * Article: Bar & PeterG
• but also other improvements: Doc *Article Jay

Links:

• MySQL 5.1 Article Recap: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-5.1-recap.html

Blogs are good for many things. One of them is not easy aggregation. So I decided to make this digest blog of the 71 blog entries I’ve written so far in 2008.

The first category is Sun-MySQL acquisition and integration. To be specific, the first blog entry in this category didn’t even touch upon Sun; on 7 January 2008, I noted that nearly all of us 400 MySQLers met in Orlando, Florida. Then and there, on 16 January, we announced that Sun acquires MySQL. The same day, I spoke to the MySQL founders Monty and David on their Sun feelings, and bragged that we “taught Sun a lesson“, with links to our singing of “Helan går” on stage.

At the end of that week, I shared that I was appointed MySQL’s Ambassador to Sun, and reflected about the most action-packed week of my MySQL life until then.

Then, the Sun ambassadorial visits started. I picked Finland first, and took two new Sun colleagues to the student corporation where we spent most of the 1980s.

Then, I announced our Integration Kickoff in Menlo Park 29-31 January 2008. I spoke about Jonathan’s Hippocratic oath. Our co-founder Monty met with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and CTO Greg Papadopoulos. Josh Berkus of PostgreSQL fame joined the three-day mtg.

Follow-up activities started, such as a study group on MySQL culture. On 26 February 2008, the deal was closed, and MySQL became officially part of Sun.

Then, the MySQL World Tour started, first on IRC. The week of 10-14 March was the most hectic one. We used what I called Decadence Airlines. My blog link evidently caused Google to identify NetJets if you google for “Decadence Airlines”. We started in Sweden, didn’t get immigration cards in Moscow, shot with Kalashnikovs in Izhevsk, saw oodles of churches in Kiev, and downgraded from Decadence Airlines to Lufthansa when flying from Hamburg to Munich.

We then had a great meeting with Sun Fellows and Distinguished Engineers at Tech@Sun.

April, May and June I largely spent with commercial Meetup-Mashup meetings worldwide: Paris and Milan in Europe was followed by Tokyo, where I observed clothing sizes and Finland Swedish cultural imperialism. In Beijing, my presentation was captured on video. Prague, Istanbul and St Petersburg were mentioned only on an aggregated level in my reflections on The Why and How To of Localising Presentations beyond English.

Moreover, Sun also did some anthropology studies of MySQL. And we were present at CommunityOne and JavaOne.

For business readers who understand Swedish, I pointed out my five Sun-MySQL integration columns in Forum för Ekonomi och Teknik.

I concluded the quarter through thanking Ingrid Vos and Véronique Loquet, who did MySQL’s PR in Germany and France for many years.

MySQL Community related blog entries is the second category. I did fewer of those than before, with Giuseppe Maxia the Data Charmer appointed our new Community Team Leader. But I did speak on the Open Source Yearbook at CeBIT, I did have lunch with Mayflower, I did promote MySQL Forge 2.0 and I did spend time with Jim Grisanzio in Japan, pondering the definition of Community. In Japan I also saw a demo of the Senna / Tritonn fast full text search engine, and I noted that our Community provided free hosting of MySQL 5.1 and 6.0 databases.

I recommended everyone to check out MySQL Workbench, our DB design tool, the successor of DB Designer 4.

We opened the MySQL Summer of Code, for which we accepted fourteen projects.

I met with Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu in Prague, and in St Petersburg I got all excited about using NetBeans as an IDE for developing and learning the C/C++ code that constitutes MySQL itself.

We concluded June by hoping to foster more participation through starting to use Bazaar for version control.

The MySQL Users Conference in April was a third big blog category. The UC started by Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green crashing the community pre-conference dinner party. We handed out the MySQL Community Awards for 2008. One of the winners, Sheeri Kritzer Cabral blogged and vlogged profusely. I shared my observations of the first morning’s keynotes through my 8mm fisheye lense. Photography was done by more talented people than myself, with Julian Cash doing light painting. And Barton George podcasted.

Other categories aren’t big enough to make up subcategories. In May, I had the debatable pleasure of re-stating that MySQL Server is Open Source. I described the separate / improved release model of MySQL Cluster.

I noted Sandro Groganz started a new Open Source marketing consultancy, and Symbian going FOSS.

I concluded the quarter by noting that our founders donated 200 000 dollars to the Software Freedom Law Center, and joking about the drawing on MySQL being born at Teknologföreningen.

That is, if you don’t count the category of personal blog entries. I noted that Germany smells good, with something at least resembling a ban on public smoking. I bragged about having run 1259 km in 2007 and about having run a half marathon in 1:46:05. And in the winter, I went skiing with Ötzi and my son Alexander, with whom I conquered K2 and the Wildspitze in Austria.

Looking forward to a busy second half of the year!

In October 2003, Mick Carney (the first MySQLer in Sales in France) convinced us to choose Véronique Loquet and her company Al’x Communication as MySQL’s French PR agency.

And what an excellent choice it was! Véronique and her Paris team have been with us now for nearly five years. Her contacts are excellent, as are her organising skills. She practically embodies PR for les logiciels libres (Free and Open Source Software) in France.

Véronique has visited the MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara several times, and of course introduced us to numerous French journalists, fixing plenty of meetings for Mårten, Zack, myself and others.

Being acquired by Sun Microsystems does have many more ups than it has downs, but one of the big downs is that we won’t be working with Véronique any longer.

Merci, Véronique! Tu vas nous manquer.

Links:

• Al’x Communication: http://www.alx-communication.com/