Call for action: Geo-spatial in MySQL needs your support

At the MySQL UC, I went to a talk on MySQL for Geospatial applications, as for those of who know me and have read my blog before, you know that this is a hot topic for me! I will try to drive this a bit more, more specifically, getting the "real" MySQL functions for Geospatial applications, that currently only exists in a MySQL Preview release, and have them firmly in the MySQL GA version. This will happen eventually, and we need to make sure sure it happens. The current preview release is maintained and updated, so it's not that far behind the main server, and the GIS functions themselves are stable enough.

If you have an interest in this, let me know. I will try to organize some kind of community around this somehow, at least that is my plan, but first, I want to know who you are. If you have a commercial project, then that is even better, as a commercial project might help get even more drive here. But I am interested in any project. And if you have tools, ideas, code or requirements, let me know and I'll try to organize.

Drop me an email at anders@mysql.com or just comment here and watch this space for more info.

/Karlsson

A User Conference non-announcement

WARNING! Certain amount of irony to follow!Do not read while driving or operating heavy machinery

Just so you know, those at and those not at the MySQL User Conference, no, MySQL / Sun / Oracle hasn't been acquired. It feels real strange to have been not-acquired for such a long time, about a year now, but I guess I have to learn to live with it. And the User Conference isn't over yet, so who knows what will happen. I mean, not MySQL has taken control of Oracle, Sun, InnoDB, TimesTen and many other application, but we still have a few more companies to get control over.

/Karlsson
Part of the MySQL team conquering the world

SQL Monitoring in the server

Some of you might have seen my post on the MySQL Audit API that is included with MySQL 5.5 m3 and some of you might not have. Well, the code that is part of that is real simple, it's more to show a concept than something you would want to run in your production servers. But it was an attempt to check if there was any interest in something like this. And there was.

So I will develop this further into something much more useful. I have had several comments and suggestions already, and keep those coming, and I am listening. What I will implement for sure in an upcoming first release is four things:

• More configurability and status.
• Means of turning the plugin on and off.
• More data provided through the INFORMATION_SCHEMA table.
• Some means of limiting and controlling what gets monitored, i.e. # of rows inspected, type of query executed etc.

I'm pretty excited about this, there are some cool things you can do with this. Also, I think this would be a great example of a plugin in general, as it will use quite a bit of the plug-in features. And before you ask: Yes, I will test performance and provide some numbers of the overhead of using this puppy.

So watch this space for more info.

Cheers
/Karlsson

NoSQL or not? Database history... Come and discuss with us at the UC...

At the upcoming MySQL UC, I have a BoF on Tuesday at 7 PM on the history of databases. One things that would be interesting to discuss there is NoSQL. Is this the next great wave? If you have read my Blog before, you know that I think this is not the case, although I do see the need and use for NoSQL technologies. But my main argument against it is that sacrificing functionality and general purposeness (if that is a word), is not how progress works. Performance increases in general, without the need to compromise functionality. But I may be wrong, it has happened before (at least I think I have been wrong before, but I'm not really sure).
But in addition to this, I'd like a general debate on database history. SQL has been around for a long time, but there are other technologies out there, most of them still around in some shape or form, at least on mainframes. Network and Hierarchical databases were the first to be somewhat standardized, in the sense that they were not specific to a particular application.

And the object databases, ORDBMS and other things, where are they now and where are they going?

See you at the UC!
/Karlsson

MySQL Audit plugin. Now documented

When I originally wrote the post on the MySQL Audit Plugin API, the API still wasn't documented, instead I got my information from the source and the samples. Just now, the documentation is available here, with some more specific information here.

I have a bug to report on the Plugin API though, which is that a user with root privileges can possibly uninstall the plugin, which will void any auditing. I'm not 100% how this works yet, but I am certain that for any serious use of auditing, you would possibly want the ability to not being able to unload a plugin. I'll get back to you on this.

/Karlsson