I don’t think there is a single good-quality MySQL init script for a Unix-like operating system. On Windows, there is the service facility, and I used to write Windows services. Based on that, I believe Windows has a pretty good claim to better reliability for start/stop services with MySQL.

What’s wrong with the init scripts? Well, let me count the reasons! Wait, I’m out of fingers and toes.

I’ll just mention the two annoying ones that I’ve run into most recently. Both are on Debian, though there is nothing especially broken about Debian’s init scripts. The first one comes from parsing my.cnf wrong and not treating pid-file and pid_file identically. The server treats them identically, thus, so should any other program that reads the my.cnf file (there’s this program called my_print_defaults… use it!). The second bug is because Debian uses two configuration files for start/stop services: the init script reads …

Inspired by a post from Juice Analytics.

We are a conflicted people. We love our TV and movie violence but worry that it ruins our children’s minds. We want to reduce healthcare costs, but don’t want to restrict the free market.

Conflicts like these leave little room for a satisfactory answer. Basic principles are in conflict and deeply-rooted desires run up against painful consequences. We

In a previous post on DynamoDB, I told you we were in the process of migrating to DDB and from MongoDB for our largest datastore. Now, we have moved a bit further on this and we, including myself, has pretty positive view on DDB, it really is a viable MongoDB alternative if you can live with the limitations. That said, there are many limitations, but I would like to put this differently. I would say this is an opportunity to simplify and get real good performance from your base level data, and combine it with other technologies where appropriate.

I wouldn't think that any serious application that use a database could live with DynamoDB only, unless the application developers were prepared to do just about everything database related, beyond the most simple, themselves. For example, you might need a secondary index, DDB doesn't provide you …

MySQL Connector/Net 6.3.9, the latest maintenance release of our 6.3 version series, has been released.  Connector/Net is our all-managed .NET driver for MySQL.  This release will be the last release of our 6.3.x series and contains more than 25 fixes from the 6.3.8 base.  Users looking for additional fixes or features should upgrade to our most recent version.  You can see the list of changes and read more about the connector at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/connector-net.html

Version 6.3.9 is appropriate for use with versions of MySQL 5.0-5.5.

It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.3.html#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror …

We have a lot more storage space available these days, and a lot more data to work with, so Big Data and Big Analytics is getting much more mainstream now. And there are conclusions and insights you can get from that data, any data more or less, but Web data in particular brings a new dimension when combined with more traditional, domain specific data. But this data is also mostly in the shape of plain text, like your blogs, twitters, news articles and other web content. And this in turn means that to combine your organized structures sales data for 20 years with Web data, the Web data first needs to be analyzed.

Web data also brings in a new difficulty: the data is big, and it's not organized at it's core, so you can not easily aggregate or something like that to save space (and why would you want to do that?). It's not until after you have analyzed it that you know what data is interesting and what is not. And to be frank (but …

Over the weekend I came across an extremely curious issue with MySQL. It seemed that no matter how many times I tried to set the wait_timeout, it would always show the value of interactive_timeout. I even tried restarting mysql, to no avail.

Eventually I figured it out. When I was in an *interactive session*, wait_timeout displays as the value of interactive_timeout. Otherwise, it showed the appropriate value. Here’s what I found, when interactive_timeout was set to 600 and wait_timeout was set to 14400 (this is on an analytics server, so setting the value that high actually makes sense):

[root@mysql1 ~]# mysql -e "show variables like 'interactive_timeout'"
+---------------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+---------------------+-------+
| interactive_timeout | 600 |
+---------------------+-------+

[root@mysql1 ~]# mysql -e "show variables like 'wait_timeout'" …

Collaborate 2012 started on Sunday but for me I began on Monday. I enjoyed Bob Burgess, SalesForce, presentation on shell scripting for MySQL Administration today. It preceded my presentation in the same room, which I thought was an interesting coincidence since we got our conference credentials together.

I presented on portable SQL between Oracle and MySQL. The presentation went well. Before I took questions, I got to ask them because I had three copies of my new Oracle Press book to give away: Oracle Database 11g and MySQL 5.6 Developer Handbook. Handing out the books served as a nice ice breaker for the audience to ask questions about the presentation.

My favorite …

I came across an interesting error reported on #mysql the other day. When I went through it with the reporter it looks like we uncovered up to two bugs in InnoDB (or rather XtraDB as it was Percona Server). I thought it might be useful to go through the error message, including the stack trace, to show that you don't need to be a developer to track down some useful information.

read more

The MySQL sessions at Collaborate started strong after an amazing keynote by former astronaut Mark Kelly about working to become a naval aviator, astronaut, and helping his wife — Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords — after an assassination attempt on her life last year.

A rare moment when the Oracle demo pods where not wall to wall people.

First up was Set up MySQL in Five Minutes by Bob Burgess of Radian6. Most of the attendees to these sessions seem to be long time Oracle DBAs looking to add more MySQL skills or long time Oracle AND MySQL DBAs. Bob then had a second session and covered Shell Scripting for MySQL Administration where most of the crowd of twenty had already had lots of shell programming experience.

BYU’s Dr. Mike McLaughin …

This is a sneak peek of an exciting new data management technology. linq4j (short for "Language-Integrated Query for Java") is inspired by Microsoft's LINQ technology, previously only available on the .NET platform, and adapted for Java. (It also builds upon ideas I had in my earlier Saffron project.)



I launched the linq4j project less than a week ago, but already you can do select, filter, join and groupBy operations on in-memory and SQL data.

In this demo, I write and execute sample code against the working system, and explain the differences between the key interfaces …