The open source database, often the default.
The Latest Updates from MySQL AB feed reports MySQL Announces Application and Partner of the Year Award Winners. “In his morning Keynote presentation at the MySQL Users Conference, company CEO Marten Mickos announced the winners of the 2005 Application of the Year and Partner of the Year awards.”
Impressive. This should continue to dispel the myth that MySQL is for “little” or “simple” applications. These are world-class high-performance sites.
Computerworld News notes Open-source databases grow. “Momentum around open-source alternatives is swelling, with a number of developments in recent months illustrating the market’s growing maturity.”
Yesterday, I “attended” a web seminar put on by the MySQL folks titled “MySQL for DBAs:
How to be Successful as a Scale-Out MySQL DBA” It was an excellent overview of the many ways in which MySQL can be configured with different data engines, settings, configurations, replication or clusters for various High Availability (HA) situations using OnLine Transaction Processing (OLTP) or Data Warehousing scenarios. The web seminar was put on using WebEx, which gave the presenters the opportunity to maintain a Q&A and Chat off to the side during the presentation. WebEx supports Java clients in most browsers: I used Safari on my iMac. Audio, though, isn’t streamed, but rather delivered via a toll-free telephone connection. Overall, it was a good use of an hour of my time, getting me some good information and pointers on where to learn more. Sort of like a vendor presentation at a user group, but without the hours of driving on either end.
MySQL archives these presentations and makes them available at http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/
On the MySQL developer’s support site, Mike Hillyar has an article on hierarchies in relational databases. “Most users at one time or another have dealt with hierarchical data in a SQL database and no doubt learned that the management of hierarchical data is not what a relational database is intended for. The tables of a relational database are not hierarchical (like XML), but are simply a flat list. Hierarchical data has a parent-child relationship that is not naturally represented in a relational database table.”
As I pointed out last week in Chris Date’s interview, it may not be intuitively obvious that flat files linked with relations are appropriate for structures like this, but in fact this is what they were made for. Relational databases excel at storing complex structures, as long as the designer understands the structure they are trying to represent. Despite a questionable start, Mike goes on to write an interesting and insightful article.
A new version released today. Webmin is a great tool for administering a Linux, OS X or Windows (with Cygwin) machine remotely via a web browser. Based in Perl, it includes modules for many of the popular tools on the platforms: Apache, IPTables, Samba, MySQL, PostGreSQL. It’s a very handy way to familiarize yourself with the administrative options available with those tools, and often offers a simpler and easy to use interface than the tool itself does.
This article in eWeek points out some of the pros and cons in the PostGreSQL vs. MySQL debate.