I have put up a set of scripts on github: https://github.com/stewartsmith/bzr-to-git-conversion-scripts. Why do I need these? Well… if only bzr fast-export|git fast-import worked flawlessly for large, complex and old trees. It doesn’t.

Basically, when you clone this repo you can run “./sync-BLAH.sh” and it’ll pull BZR trees for the project, convert to git and clean things up a bit. You will likely have to edit the sync-BLAH.sh scripts as I have them pointed at branches on my own machine (to speed up the process, not having to do fresh BZR branches of MySQL trees over the network is a feature - it’s never been fast.). You’ll also want to edit the git remotes to point where you want git trees to end up.

I’ve done it for:

• Bazaar …

This post is about one of the new features included in the latest MySQL for Excel release to date (1.2.0) which can be Installed directly from our MySQL Installer.

Since the first release you were allowed to Import and Append data from Excel to a MySQL database, and also to import data from the MySQL database to an Excel Worksheet.
All these windows handle small previews of the data you were working with, and some settings about how the data should be treated can be found by clicking the Advanced Options button on them.

The problem many users found was that sometimes when they changed these options, the small previews did not reflected the changes being made on them, and they had to close and reopen the windows to see if their changes were what they actually wanted or how the data was being treated with the new format.

Now on this …

2013 was and we wish you a happy new year 2014!
Last year was amazing and we are looking forward to live 2014.

I’m honored to take part of two amazing events in 2014, the FOSDEM and PLMCE.
By my lowly contribution as committee member of these two events, I wanted to promote open source in general and MySQL in particular.
And the schedule of these events tells me that we won the bet!
(PLMCE schedule will be published next week)

MySQL raises interest more and again in 2014 and is still in the heart of major architectures ;-)
We are proud to promote community events, community projects and open source initiatives for many years!

…

So how would a DBA set up a system to expire the password of interactive MySQL users? Some kind folks have been reading the last few entries of this blog and asked me to flesh out how to go from concept to production and we will work this out together (feedback please!) over the next few postings.

The first step is to find out what information we have and then determine what information do not have. We have the account name, the password, and if the password is expired. But we do not know the interval for password expiration. We might want to keep track of when the last change was made, possibly keep a list of the last N passwords to check against to discourage reuse, and maybe have a black list of words not to use as passwords.

In the mysql.user table we find the account name, the password, and if the password is expired or not. But we need some new tables to hold the data we do not have yet. I have seen some …

MySQL is an excellent choice for a low cost embedded database. Over 3,000 ISVs, OEMs and VARs choose MySQL for this purpose and benefit from significant cost savings when compared to using a competing database product.

The MySQL for Developers training course teaches you how to plan, design and implement applications using MySQL. Expert Oracle University instructors teach you through realistic examples, interactive instruction and hands-on exercises.

This course brings you lots of interesting facts. For example, the 'libmysqld' library is effectively a MySQL server in its own right. it is shipped as part of the standard MySQL installation. Developers with C/C++ ability can embed this library easily within their applications and it can do most of what a …

In MySQL 5.5 metadata locks were introduced to ensure consistency for some operations that previously could cause problems. For example if a transaction SELECTed from a table and another connection changed the structure of the table before the transaction was committed; in that case the two operations would be written in reverse order to the binary log which could prevent replaying the binary log.

However there was no way to see who held metadata locks. SHOW PROCESSLIST would show who were waiting for metadata locks, and often you could guess who held it, but it wasn’t so always. Consider for example the following:

mysql> SELECT Id, db, Command, Time, State, Info FROM information_schema.PROCESSLIST; …

On last Wednesday morning I gave my talk at linux.conf.au 2014. You can now view and download the recording of it here:

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2014/Wednesday/28-Past_Present_and_future_of_MySQL_and_variants_-_Stewart_Smith.mp4

(hopefully more free formats will come soon, the all volunteer AV team has been absolutely amazing getting things up this quickly).

A role is a bundle of GRANTed privileges which can be assigned to users or which can take the place of users. When there are hundreds or thousands of users, administration becomes a horrible burden if the DBMS doesn't support roles. Our online ANSI-standard book has syntax descriptions. Other DBMSs do support roles, and MySQL has had a worklog task "WL#988 Roles" for many years. Earlier attempts to implement them included a Google Summer of Code project and a MySQL tool released by Google.

Now another google-summer-coder, Vicențiu Ciorbaru, has put together something which will be in MariaDB. MariaDB's official blog says this is …

This is part of the ongoing work on improving the transaction life cycle management. In 5.7.2 we split the transaction list into two. The read-only transaction list and the read-write transaction list. There was another "virtual" list, the auto-commit non-locking  read-only (AC-NL-RO) transaction list. The change in 5.7.2 was that by default a transaction was treated as read only and added to the read-only transaction list. Only when it was determined that the transaction was going to do an update we removed the transaction from the read-only list and moved it to the read-write transaction list. This initial add to the the read-only list forced the acquisition of the trx_sys_t::mutex. Acquiring the mutex during transaction start/begin has a cost. Promoting a transaction from read-only to read-write we had to acquire the trx_sys_t::mutex to add to the read-write transaction list and so that is not too expensive and unavoidable. There is another …

Benchmarking, and benchmarking the cloud, is incredibly error prone. I provided guidance though this minefield in the benchmarking chapter of my book (Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud); that chapter can be read online on the InformIT site. I also gave a lightning talk about benchmarking gone wrong at Surge last year. In this post, I’m going to cut to the chase and show you the tools I commonly use for basic cloud benchmarking.

As explained in the benchmarking chapter, I do not run these tools passively. I perform Active Benchmarking, where I use a …