General

At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, the closing keynote was Jacek Becla speaking on "The Science and Fiction of Petascale Analysis". See the slides on the Forge at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008ThursdayNotes#The_Science_and_Fiction_of_Petascale_Analytics

At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Mårten Mickos handed out the 2008 awards for Application, Partner and Community Members of the year See all the blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008TuesdayNotes#State_of_MySQL.

This morning I was looking for something on Ohloh and realized I should “stack” maatkit. Since I couldn’t find “maatkit” nor “mysql toolkit” in Ohloh, I created a new project for it at:
http://www.ohloh.net/projects/10083
If you’re on Ohloh, stack it!
www.ohloh.net is a neat social networking tool for open source software. Instead of searching freeware lists, search ohloh, and you can find reviews, # of people using the software, and direct links to download pages. My profile is at:
http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/8446http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/8446
and you can see my stack at:
http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/8446/stacks/default

I think the briefest way to sum up the difference between a good developer mindset and a good sysadmin mindset is “a good developer thinks, ‘how will this work?’ and works accordingly. A good sysadmin thinks, ‘how will this break?’ and works accordingly.”
Developers think in terms of “edge cases” and “off by 1″ errors, which start from a default of things working. This is good as a design skill; developers need to think algorithmically, pondering a main way of something functioning and then dealing with anomalies.
However, sysadmins tend to install systems and maintain them with scripts, as opposed to building new software — usually. Sysadmins deal with systems when anomalies happen, so they must have a mindset of “how will this break?” vis-a-vis — “how will this break and how can I be notified of the breakage before my boss/the customers call?” which leads to “what if the notification system breaks?”

(The Executive Summary: I left my job last week, and I start working at The Pythian Group on Monday. Go to their website if you’d like to work with me, or with people just as knowledgeable as me.)
I get inquiries all the time about consulting. Folks are madly searching for experienced MySQL DBAs. The lure of a new environment is always tempting, however, working for any one environment has its quirks. In October I realized I was coming up on having worked 2 years at my job. That’s not a very long period of time, but it certainly was long enough for me to learn the environment and get stuck in a rut — mostly my rut was doing more systems work than database work.

Welcome to the 72nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) is over, and Lucas Jellema of the AMIS Technology blog notes the OOW Content Catalog has been updated with most of the presentations available for download.
On his way home from OOW, Chris Muir of the appropriately titled One Size Doesn’t Fit All blog notes how OOW and the Australian Oracle User Group Conference and OOW compare with regards to 99% fewer attendees in AUSOUG Perth conference - from 45k down to 350.

So, the article at:
http://mysql-dba-journey.blogspot.com/2007/11/mysql-and-vmware.html says:
Don’t get seduced to the dark side unless you understand all the issues.
And that’s wonderful and all, but….what are all the issues? What are some of the issues? Is it related more to VMware, or more to MySQL, or more to MySQL on VMware? Is it something like “VMware isn’t stable” or more like “load testing on vmware isn’t always going to work because you won’t have full resources”?

Peter makes an interesting post about the MySQL company’s trademarks at http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/10/26/mysql-support-or-support-for-mysql-mysql-trademark-policies/
The point is that Peter is not selling “MySQL Support” — he is selling “Support *for* MySQL”. “MySQL Support” is the name of a product that MySQL offers. Even if some other consulting company used the name before the MySQL company ever did, MySQL still has the rights to the name.