I already mentioned this repository several times on my blog. It is the repository where I’m trying to keep bleeding edge stuff for MySQL. I’ve been updating it recently and we’ve got new package there and some interesting updates I want to mention.

MariaDB and MySQL

First thing to mention is that this repository contains MariaDB builds. MariaDB is fork of MySQL and their goals are certainly interesting. For list of differences, try upstream page. As I consider it interesting, I’m keeping eye on it Maybe our users may benefit from it. But currently it is also a source of possible problems in this repository as it contains MySQL as well. I tried to modify both …

I happened upon this old LinuxJournal article about how the University of Zululand in South Africa used MySQL and other Free Software to make do with a 128 kbit (and later 768 kbit) internet connection for their staff and students.

This made me remember the trip I made to another African country, Burkina Faso, 15 years ago:

With the huge amount of work and numerous difficult obstacles facing my work on the MariaDB project, it can be …

Monty turns his attention to the East. The value of JBoss to Red Hat. And more.

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For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# Monty Widenius predicted that the EU will clear Oracle-Sun “any moment”, turning his attention to Russia and China.

# Meanwhile the release candidate of MariaDB 5.1 is now …

It’s worth noting that if you’re using MySQL 5.0/5.1, with SSL enabled, and you’re using yaSSL as opposed to OpenSSL, you’re vulnerable to CVE-2009-4484. Its a buffer overflow, that works over TCP, via the MySQL port, 3306. Lenz furnished us with some information, and the patch is available. You’ll see this rocking when MySQL 5.1.43 gets released.

It affects Debian (presumably, it will also affect Ubuntu). Red Hat/CentOS is spared, because instead of using yaSSL, OpenSSL is used.

MariaDB …

In the Autumn, I wrote about some experiments I did using KVM and virtual machines to build and test MariaDB binary packages on a number of different platforms. In the period since then I added some polish and refinements, and the system is now running well for some time. We build and test packages for Debian (4 and 5), Ubuntu (8.04 to 10.04), Centos 5, and generic Linux; amd64 and i386 architectures.

To better control the startup and shutdown of the virtual machines, I created a small wrapper script around KVM called runvm. This wrapper encapsulates the steps needed to boot up a virtual machine, run a series of commands inside it, and shut it down gracefully afterwards. Some special care is taken in the script to ensure that the …

Today I caught a tweet from Kara Swisher referencing some exclusive news she posted on Boomtown about VMware’s upcoming deal to buy Zimbra from Yahoo! This is would be VMware’s second acquisition of an open source ISV in under a year. In August 2009 VMware …

The Planet MySQL has been abuzz with opinions for or against the acquisition of Sun (and in particular MySQL) by Oracle, but I do not have a strong opinion to chime in with in support of either groups. The reason is that I do not know anything about antitrust laws, which is the legal basis for the EC blocking or not blocking the deal; and also I do not know what the alternative is to Oracle buying the MySQL part of Sun.

However, that does not mean that I can not join in the speculations about Oracles reasons for wanting MySQL in the first place ;-)

I think it is basically a matter of obtaining control over MySQL.

The horror scenario for Oracle is that MySQL (or Postgress or another Free Software program) does to the proprietary databases what Linux has done to the proprietary Unixes. Which is essentially to kill them, slowly but surely. This is not an …

Numeric types in MySQL have two varieties: - “precise” types such as INTEGER and DECIMAL; - the IEEE-standard floating point types FLOAT and DOUBLE. As a rule of thumb, the first group are for exact, “counted” quantities. The INTEGER types represent whole numbers, and DECIMAL represents “fixed point” decimal, with a preset number of places after the decimal point. Various widths of INTEGER are available in MySQL, from 8-bit TINYINT to 64-bit BIGINT. Calculations with integer types are fast, as they usually correspond to hardware register sizes. DECIMAL is commonly used for quantities like decimal currency where the number of digits of precision is known and fixed. For example, exactly counting pennies in two decimal digits. Computation with DECIMAL is slower than other types, but this is unlikely to impact most applications. In the other category are FLOAT and DOUBLE, which are the 32 and 64-bit IEEE standard types, which are usually …

I have now published the Buildbot configuration file that we use for our continuous integration tests in our Buildbot setup. Every push into main and development branches of MariaDB is built and tested on a range of platforms to catch and fix any problems early (and we also test MySQL releases before merging to easily see whether any new problems already existed in MySQL or were introduced by something specific to MariaDB).

The configuration is included in the Tools for MariaDB Launchpad project.

Now, the Buildbot configuration file is not something that most …

One of the things that I am really happy about in MariaDB is that we have our releases available as apt (and yum for Centos) repositories. This is largely thanks to being able to build this on the OurDelta package build infrastructure (which again builds on things like the Debian packaging scripts for MySQL).

Something like the Debian apt-get package system (which is also used by Ubuntu) is one of the major innovations in the Free Software world in my opinion. Debian has spent many years refining this system to where it is today. Want to run the mysql client, but it isn't installed? Just try to run it on your local Ubuntu host:

    $ mysql
    The program 'mysql' can be found in the following packages:
     * mysql-client-5.0
     * mysql-client-5.1
    Try: sudo apt-get install <selected package>
    -bash: mysql: command not found

Installing …