...you're traveling on family holiday, and each time you wish to suggest you should check up on the tourist information center, you repeatedly come up with: "Let's ask at the INFORMATION_SCHEMA and see what we can get".

Also, doing so while wearing an OpenSQL Camp T-shirt doesn't help.

Check out the following tutorial that teaches you how to become a popular MySQL blog author:

Complete strip: tales-of-the-trade-make-your-mysql-blog-popular-full.png

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2011-02-10 through 2011-03-07:

• Nicholas Piël » Benchmark of Python Web Servers
  Nicholas has done an in-depth benchmarking of several WSGI servers in an effort to document their differences. He takes into account the type of server and which version of HTTP it supports.
• My 10 favourite Programming Quotes | Ginktage
  If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. –  Edsger Dijkstra

Bug reports can be fun. They can also be terrible. Either way they can be entertaining. On the Drizzle IRC channel today I saw a couple references to MySQL bug reports: it is stop working and Does not make toast (which reminds me of the Mozilla bug report about the kitchen sink). Got any other favourites1?

1 This one’s for Jay.

Related posts:

If you’re like me, you’ve gotten tired of writing endless test cases for parsers that can understand the thousands of variations of text output by SHOW INNODB STATUS. I’ve decided to solve this issue once and for all by patching MySQL and InnoDB to output XML, the universal markup format, so tools can understand and manipulate it easily. Here’s a sample snippet:

<status><![CDATA[
=====================================
100320 15:46:24 INNODB MONITOR OUTPUT
=====================================
... text omitted, but you get the idea ...
]]>
</status>

PS: Yes, this is a late April Fool’s joke.

Related posts:

Apparently the message from the comic below was not well conceived.

Following the strip I’ve added some spoiler notes.

This is not about bashing NoSQL. Apparently some people feel this way.

This is about:

• Trying to judge/analyze NoSQL as if it were a single entity, thereby asking “should I use MySQL or NoSQL”?
• The fact Wikipedia defines NoSQL as a “movement” (who’s the leader?)
• The fact that people are still arguing on how “MySQL” should be pronounced.

In an application such as a database server, instrumentation is like sex: it’s not enough to know how often things happen. You also care about how long they took, and in many cases you want to know how big they were.

“Things” are the things you want to optimize. Want to optimize queries? Then you need to know what activities that query causes to happen. Most systems have at least some of this kind of instrumentation. If you look around at… let’s not pick on the usual targets… oh, say Sphinx, Redis, and memcached. What metrics do they provide? They provide counters that say how often various things happened. (Most of these systems provide very few and coarse-grained counters.) That’s not very helpful. So I read from disk N times, and I read from memory N times, and I compared rows N times… so what? I

Someone recently posted this to an email list as a sample of an interesting SHOW INNODB STATUS output:

mysql> SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS\G
          _______  _______
|\     /|(  ____ \(  ____ \
| )   ( || (    \/| (    \/
| |   | || (_____ | (__
| |   | |(_____  )|  __)
| |   | |      ) || (
| (___) |/\____) || (____/\
(_______)\_______)(_______/

 _______  _______  _______ _________ _______  _______  _______  _______
(  ____ )(  ___  )(  ____ \\__   __/(  ____ \(  ____ )(  ____ \(  ____ \
| (    )|| (   ) || (    \/   ) (   | (    \/| (    )|| (    \/| (    \/
| (____)|| |   | || (_____    | |   | |      | (____)|| (__    | (_____
|  _____)| |   | |(_____  )   | |   | | ____ |     __)|  __)   (_____  )
| (      | |   | |      ) |   | |   | | \_  )| (\ (   | (            ) |
| )      | (___) |/\____) |   | |   | (___) || ) \ \__|

WARNING: nearly every word of this post is intentionally false. This is an April Fool’s joke.

There is so much misinformation out there about how MySQL works. If you’ve talked to someone from PostgreSQL, you’ve surely heard some of it: “MySQL doesn’t even have transactions,” for example. And this from a PostgreSQL user, who uses a database that doesn’t even run on Windows.

But even within the ranks of people who supposedly know MySQL’s workings, lots of people just get things dead wrong. I wanted to set the record straight here, so I thought I would give a little walk-through of how MySQL executes a query.

Let’s see it in action from start to finish.

SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE COUNT(col1) FROM users
WHERE userid IN(

If you are a programmer, you, by definition, belong to the elite [awesome] human breed called geeks. If you know how to code in Python or Ruby, you might even think you’re pretty hot shit. But none of that compares in hotshitness to what you are about to learn.

Allow me to introduce LOLCODE – perhaps the most serious and, for some, cryptic, programming language. It is Turing-complete and uses an advanced compiler called Brainfuck (I’m still totally serious, and by the way if you’ve never heard of

I follow only a few comics in my feed reader: Get Fuzzy, Dilbert, XKCD, and now The Adventures of Ace, DBA. It’s kind of XKCD-ish, only it’s about Oracle and it doesn’t have the extra punch line when you hover your mouse over the picture. And it’s proof that a DBMS (even one I don’t use) can be pretty damn funny.

MySQL’s version numbering is getting harder and harder to understand. In fact, it’s getting surreal.

Let me state up front that there’s probably a lot I don’t know here. But if I don’t know, how on earth can the general public figure it out?

Before we begin, let’s define terms: GA is completely done, ready for use. RC is a release candidate: don’t change anything, just fix bugs because we’re charging towards a release here. Beta is possibly unsafe code, use at your own risk. Alpha is known to have significant bugs, but if you’re curious please play with it.

Now for the releases/versions game. Let’s recap:

• 5.0 has version numbers that leapfrog each other in features and functionality. SHOW PROFILES — now you see it, now you don’t.
• 5.1

I was just searching for something and found this MySQL bug report:

Other JDBC drivers I have used make toast for breakfast... MySQL Connector/J doesn't make toast, it can only pour a bowl of froot loops...

...Thank you for taking the time to write to us, but this is not a bug... I believe you should look into a device called a \"toaster\" to make your toast.

Was really surprised today when heard really funny rap song about “kill -9″ Unix command:

• Video is here.
• Lyrics is here.
• Audio record is here.