Robin Schumacher

I’ve always been a big proponent of data modeling and using modeling tools to create physical database designs (as an aside, I’ve never been much on logical modeling), so I’m naturally happy about our upcoming MySQL Workbench tool.  During my DBA years, I basically lived in my modeling tools and used them all the time for many different purposes.  I’ve just written a new dev zone article that talks about why modeling is important for creating high-performance databases, and how you can use modeling tools for change management/control purposes and how doing this can keep you from getting burned when DB changes go bad.  Check out the article and let me know what you think.

We’re pleased to announce that the Falcon beta is now out and available.  Falcon is MySQL’s new transaction storage engine, and offers a number of nice features for those developing applications that have transactional needs.  Falcon has all the standard transactional features you’d expect (ACID compliance, MVCC, crash recovery, etc) and some other items you will likely find helpful to have (user-defined tablespaces, SQL-based diagnostics for locking, I/O, and more.)

Please download the new Falcon beta (note that the Falcon beta is in the 6.0.4 alpha binary) and let us know what bugs you find or enhancements you’d like to see - your feedback is (as always) greatly appreciated! If you’re new to Falcon, you can check out the various tech white papers, getting started guides and FAQ’s on our 6.0 info page.