The MySQL Connect conference is taking place September 29-30 in San Francisco. We asked a few questions about the event to Oracle’s VP of MySQL Engineering Tomas Ulin.

Hi Tomas, to start with, what is MySQL Connect?

A: MySQL Connect is a conference delivered by Oracle, with and for the MySQL Community. We’ll have over 60 technical breakout sessions, Birds-of-a-feather sessions and Hands-On labs running throughout the two days, plus the keynotes. So it’s a fantastic opportunity to learn a huge amount in only two days, and to network with Oracle engineers, users, customers and partners.

When will the program be available online?

A: The call for papers ended May 6 and we got an amazing response. The content committee has been working …

One thing still missing from the basic MySQL stuff is some more JSON oriented features. After some use of JSON (here at Recorded Future, JSON is THE data format), I have begun to accept this format, and have even begun to appreciate it. JSON really is a useful, flexible format that even it reasonably well standardized and has suport in most languages.

CSV used to the the obvious data exchange format for RDBMSes, but in the case of NoSQL, I sense that JSON is beginning to take that role, not only in the obvious JavaScript focued NoSQL databases such as Mongo. JSON is more object focused then CSV, is more standardized, has some better features and is in general more flexible.

Of course, a format with nested objects and arrays such as JSON would be hard to import into MySQL in the general case, at least if you want to expand arrays into lookup tables, and foreign keys constructs for keys etc. But export should …

I’m excited to attend the MySQL Innovation Day at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores next Tuesday. There are some great sessions planned on MySQL advances, including:

• InnoDB online operations
• Global transaction IDs for replication and failover
• NoSQL interfaces to InnoDB and NDB
• PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA improvements
• Optimizer enhancements

This is a great opportunity for MySQL users to get details straight from MySQL developers on upcoming features.  While the focus is entirely on what is being done in Engineering to drive MySQL forward, I’ll be around to chat about MySQL Support at the community reception in the afternoon.  If you’re a MySQL Support user, or just interested in learning more about the value MySQL Support can offer, stop by and say …

So what plans do you have next week ?

MySQL will have an event for you regardless of your location next week.
We start the week off in Germany at the Spring International PHP Conference. (June 3rd - 6th).  Ulf Wendel will be presenting two sessions: MySQL DB Cluster Usage made easy and  Extending MySQL: developing Server Plugins.

June 5th we have Oracle's MySQL Innovation Day at the Oracle Conference Center.  This event can be attended in person or via a webcast. The registration numbers are great so far so join everyone else who is attending and get an idea of what to expect at the …

Background Knowledge

Using the character set UTF-8 allows for the use of any language, can represent every character in the Unicode character set and is backward compatibility with ASCII. Not to mention is can handle any platform and be sent through many different systems without corruption. With such advantages this is why so many are making the switch.

The following instructions were done on Debian Squeeze v6.04 AMD64 operating system using MySQL v14.14 Distrib 5.1.61.

Solution – Server Configuration

At present MySQL is configured by default to use “latin1″ character set. Here’s how to change MySQL configuration to use UTF-8 character set and collation.

1. Check MySQL’s current configuration, run the following two SQL statements.

   1 2	SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%collation%'; …

The US Department of Homeland Security (you know that fast growing entity that didn’t exist pre-2001, that no politician wants to be responsible for shrinking for fear of being blamed in case anything happens) has been forced to release their list of keywords they monitor. An article was published by the Daily Mail online: Hundreds of words to avoid using online if you don’t want the government spying on you

Relevance for this blog? Near the bottom, in the category “Cyber Security”, we spotted a keyword “Mysql injection”. How exciting!

Here’s a challenge for you: can you write an innocuous story containing as many words as possible from this list? You can post it as comment here. I will send the winner a copy of the “Manga Guide to Databases” book, which – …

If a billing system were a person, it would be sociable. The chatty kind. Billing cannot be alone, it is in its nature to be surrounded by other (hopefully friendly) systems. The ‘talking’ part between billing and other projects is what we call integration.

Integration is always a very large part of any billing project. It isn’t hard to figure out why. The billing system will have (or produce) quite a bit of very important information, such as, how much does a customer owes? Since when? Is a customer late in making a payment on her latest invoice?. Very high up in the integration food chain is CRM: Customer Relationship Management systems. And to keep up with this chain of unrelated things... especially important among CRM systems is SugarCRM.

Now that I’ve mentioned SugarCRM, let’s talk about it a little bit. SugarCRM is open source, just like jBilling, so it is also not really open source - ok, it is. You can …

Continuing my little tour of possibly overlooked new MySQL 5.6 features, I came across this oft-requested gem:  For eons, MySQL has supported TIMESTAMP columns that could be automatically populated at row insertion and/or row update time.  It’s a handy feature to have, but it has suffered from a pretty significant limitation – only one TIMESTAMP column per table could be automatically updated, forcing you to choose whether leverage this functionality for record creation or last updated time – or bypass the MySQL feature and write the logic to maintain a TIMESTAMP or other temporal column via your application code.  Well, all that has changed with 5.6.5, and you can now do this:

mysql> CREATE TABLE v (
->  a INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL …

MySQL Cluster Manager 1.1.6 is now available to download from My Oracle Support.

Details on the changes can will be added to the MySQL Cluster Manager documentation . Please give it a try and let me know what you think.

Note that if you’re not a commercial user then you can still download MySQL Cluster Manager 1.1.5 from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud and try it out for free. Documentation is available here.

MySQL 5.6 Replication - Global Transaction IDs

On Wednesday (16th May 2012), Mat Keep and I presented on the new replication features that are previewed as part of the latest MySQL 5.6 Development Release.

The replay for that webinar (together with the chart deck) is now available from here.

In addition, there were a huge number of great questions raised and we had a couple of  key engineers answering them on-line – view the Q&A transcript here.

A reminder of the topics covered in the webinar…

MySQL 5.6 delivers new replication capabilities which we will discuss in the …