Do you remember Guy Adams? He was one of the winners of the “5.1 Use Case Competition”, ending up on position #2. Guess what: He has a webinar coming up tomorrow, by the title Deploying MySQL in a High Performance Satellite Network Management Environment by Parallel.
 
Guy works with Parallel Ltd. in Milton Keynes in the UK. You may also want to read up on Guy’s DevZone article. This is what you can expect of the webinar:

Join us for this informative technical webinar with Guy Adams, CTO at Parallel, whose flagship product SatManage is the worldwide leader in visualization and automation software that integrates NOC applications for satellite and hybrid networks. In this seminar Guy will talk about their migration from Oracle to MySQL, and the performance boost they gained from it. He will also talk about their application caching layer which provides a different but complementary philosophy to memcached, aiming to overcome of the issues with memcached in a data warehousing type application with CGI performance.

Timing: Tuesday, 3 February 2009, 10:00 am PST, 1:00 pm EST, 18:00 GMT.

The presentation will be approximately 45 minutes long followed by Q&A.

Links:

• http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-285.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/partitioning_manage_satellite.html

Here is my personal recipe for celebrating MySQL 5.1 GA (called “Five shot one“):

Ingredients:

• Kalashnikov vodka from Izhevsk, Udmurtia (Спасибо, Bar!)
• “PINGVIN” salted liquorice (tack, mamma!) — the salmiak for the dot
• Erdinger Weißbier (danke, Kirsten!)

Served in:

• Five Iittala shot glasses from Finland
• One HB 0,5 litre Weißbier glass from Hofbräuhaus, Munich

Thank you, MySQL Engineering Team!

I suspect that few of the readers of my blog have missed it, but MySQL 5.1 is GA. And I suspect it was no surprise to my readers, nor those of Giuseppe, the Community Team Lead. Nor those who read Sheeri’s blog, with the picture of Dups unmistakably setting GA date expectations at the OpenSQL Camp a number of weeks ago.

In addition to our communication, there has been some, ehmm, complementary communication on MySQL 5.1 GA, its history, its quality, and its timing. Some of that may have been a tad one-sided, painting the world in a bit darker colours than absolutely needed.

As an outside observer, it may be hard to read properly between the lines, and interpret what’s really going on behind the scenes. Now, Giuseppe has made all that quite a bit easier with his fresh posting.

With the delivery of MySQL 5.1 GA, our release policy sees a couple of changes in relation to that of MySQL 5.0.

First, initially we will deliver both MySQL Enterprise Server and MySQL Community Server in parallel. The bug fixes to the initial MySQL 5.1 GA releases will thus be delivered also in binary form for both MySQL Community Server and MySQL Enterprise Server.

Second, after a period of time, we will revert to the different release schedule for MySQL Enterprise Server and MySQL Community Server that we have been using. MySQL Enterprise Server will have more frequent binary releases. However, at this point, we do not have an exact date or a release number, when the first Enterprise only release will happen.

Third, we have done away with odd and even numbering. Whenever MySQL Community Server is released, it will carry the same release number as the corresponding MySQL Enterprise Server.

Fourth, MySQL Enterprise Server comes in more flavours than the MySQL Community Server. This will allow us to offer different optional pricing levels for our commercial subscriptions — where a customer will only have to pay extra for MySQL Enterprise support if he/she plans to use the higher-level features. Hence, MySQL Enterprise Server “Advanced” includes support for partitioning. However, do note that the MySQL Community Server provides the full partitioning functionality.

MySQL 5.1 is here! It’s announced! And it’s time for the overall winner, Position 1 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

1. Greg Haase (Lotame Solutions Inc., Elkridge, Maryland, USA): Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler to Prune Archive Tables. See Greg’s DevZone article, and his blog.

Thanks and congratulations, Greg! I absolutely hope you are in a position to take advantage of your free MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius.

Links:

• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/07/18/mysql-51-use-case-competition/
• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/08/26/mysql-51-use-case-competition-until-end-of-september
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/partitioning-event_scheduler.html
• http://blog.onefreevoice.com/

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is coming, and for downloading, it’s already available, as I hope you have noticed from Giuseppe’s blog. We continue our preparations, this time by announcing Position 2 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

2. Guy Adams (Parallel Ltd., Milton Keynes, United Kingdom): Using Partitioning to Manage Satellite Networks. See Guy’s DevZone article.

Thanks and congratulations, Guy! I hope you too are in a position to take advantage of your free MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius.

Links:

• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/07/18/mysql-51-use-case-competition/
• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/08/26/mysql-51-use-case-competition-until-end-of-september
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/partitioning_manage_satellite.html

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is getting closer by the minute! So it’s time for Position 3 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

3. Corrado Pandiani (Football Club Internazionale Milano Spa, Milan, Italy): Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler for online logging & real-time stats. See Corrado’s DevZone article, and his blog.

Thanks and congratulations, Corrado! I hope you are in a position to take advantage of your free MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius.

Links:

• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/07/18/mysql-51-use-case-competition/
• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/08/26/mysql-51-use-case-competition-until-end-of-september
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/pandiani-use-case.html
• http://blog.pandiani.com/category/mysqlen/

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is close, so close that we’re seeding the mirrors (I hope you noted Giuseppe’s blog entry)! So it’s time for Position 4 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

4. Volker Oboda (TeamDrive Systems GmbH, Hamburg, Germany): Using the Pluggable API for TeamDrive. See Volker’s DevZone article, and the Wikipedia article on TeamDrive.

Thanks and congratulations, Volker! Your MySQL Community Contributor T-shirt is underway.

Links:

• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/07/18/mysql-51-use-case-competition/
• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/08/26/mysql-51-use-case-competition-until-end-of-september
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/teamdrive_pluggable_api.html

With the GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 coming up, we have picked the winners in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

To keep you in suspense, let me first announce those on positions 5 to 10:

5. Fourat Zouari (TriTUX.com, Tunis, Tunisia): Using Partitioning for Data Warehousing. See Fourat’s DevZone article, and his blog entry from May 2008.

6. Ryan Thiessen (Big Fish Games, Seattle, Washington, USA): Logging Game Downloads with Partitioning. See Ryan’s DevZone article.

7. Christopher Lavigne (Breadboard BI, Inc., Pleasanton, California, USA): Using MySQL 5.1 for Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence. See Christopher’s DevZone article.

8. Jianzy Zhaoyang (Alibaba.com, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China): Using the MySQL 5.1 Event Scheduler for an Online Chat System. When Jian’s ongoing migration is done, he has promised a DevZone article.

9. Jakub Vrána (phpMinAdmin, Prague, Czech Republic): Managing Events in phpMinAdmin. See Lenz Grimmer’s blog entry.

10. Santo Leto (HoneySoftware, Trieste, Italy): 5.1 Use Case Reports. See Santo’s blog entries.

Thanks an congratulations, Fourat, Ryan, Christopher, Jian, Jakub and Santo! Your MySQL Community Contributor T-shirts are underway.

Links:

• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/07/18/mysql-51-use-case-competition/
• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/08/26/mysql-51-use-case-competition-until-end-of-september
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/tritux_partitioning_datawarehousing.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/big_fish_games_partitioning.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/breadboardbi_data_warehouse.html

Within minutes after Finland was just about to win 3:2 over Germany in the football world championship qualifications (but it ended 3:3), I got a bit of consolation for myself, my dual-citizenship son cheering for Finland, and my fellow countrymen using MySQL:

We have the next MySQL 5.1 Use Case article live, and it’s about FC Inter Milan. No Finns playing there (but stars such as Ibrahimovic, Materazzi, Luis Figo, and Adriano). And, from a MySQL perspective, the interesting point is that FC Inter Milan is using both MySQL 5.1 Partitioning and the Event Scheduler in an innovative way.

Thanks Corrado Pandiani for the story — let’s hope your good Use Case inspires others!

Links:

• FC Inter Milan Using MySQL 5.1 Partitioning and Event Scheduler: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/pandiani-use-case.html
• The MySQL 5.1 Use Case competition: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-5.1-use-case-competition.html
• FC Inter Milan: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter
• Finland-Germany 3:3: http://svenska.yle.fi/nyheter/artikel.php?id=138742