Version 2 of the PBMS daemon is now ready.

Here are the major changes introduced with this version:

• PBMS is fully integrated with MySQL 5.5:
  PBMS is now provided as a patch for MySQL 5.5 which simplifies installation and provides numerous benefits.
  
  
  • All engines are "PBMS enabled":
    PBMS no longer requires that you have a "PBMS enabled" storage engine to be able to use PBMS.
    
    
  • The MySQL client lib provides the PBMS client API:
    You no longer need to link your application to a separate PBMS lib to use the PBMS 'C' API.
    
    
  • mysqldump understands PBMS BLOB URLS:
    When dumping tables or databases containing PBMS BLOB URLs mysqldump will dump the referenced BLOBs as binary data to a …

At today’s Percona Live event in NYC, Ivan Zoratti, SkySQL’s Director of Field Services, introduced v0.02 of SkySQL™ Provisioning, a Web-based system that provides a graphical user interface that allows users to uniquely select and configure components of the SkySQL™ Reference Architecture.

Introduced last month at the MySQL™ User Conference, the SkySQL Reference Architecture reduces the complexity and cost of deploying some of the most critical data infrastructure technologies around the MySQL and MariaDB™ databases.

What’s new in SkySQL Provisioning v0.02:

• Enhanced navigation, including new feedback and help features
• Multilingual support
• OLTP and data warehousing options
• Expanded support for the Centos, Red Hat, and Ubuntu platforms for standalone servers and MySQL Replication

Want to learn more about the new features in the SkySQL Provisioning? …

We’re seeing a spike of last-minute ticket sales for Percona Live New York. Meanwhile, we’re assembling bags and unpacking t-shirts at the venue. If you want to come, buy your ticket now — we’re rapidly selling out the remaining tickets!

Remember, if all the tickets are sold, you can still come to the evening event — free drinks and food! Free prizes, including a Gold Unlimited support contract from Percona!

Another week of industry hijinks has passed, which means it must be time for another edition of the Developer Week in Review.

Apple offers some cover

After developer complaints that Apple was leaving them out to dry, in regards to the Lodsys patent threats being aimed their way, the House of Jobs stepped up to the plate and announced that they considered iOS developers to be covered by the existing licenses granted to Apple by Lodsys for in-game purchases.

This is a bit of a good-news, bad-news story from an intellectual property perspective, as it doesn't offer any relief to non-Apple developers from the patents themselves. Apple paid off Lodsys, which in a sense increases the perceived validity of the patents. Other non-Apple-based developers (such as Valve's Steam), could find …

My list of reasons for never using or recommending Amazon’s MySQL RDS service grows every time I experience problems with customers. This was an interesting and still unresolved issue.

ERROR 126 (HY000): Incorrect key file for table '/rdsdbdata/tmp/#sql_5b7_1.MYI'; try to repair it

You may see this is a MyISAM table. The MySQL database is version 5.5, all InnoDB tables and is very small 100MB in total size.
What is happening is that MySQL is generating a temporary table, and this table is being written to disk. I am unable to change the code to improve the query causing this disk I/O.

What I can not understand and have no ability to diagnose is why this error occurs sometimes and generally when the database is under additional system load. With RDS you have no visibility of the server running the production database. While you have SQL access, an API for managing MySQL configuration options (I also add not all …

Last week at the OUG Harmony conference thanks to Dimitri Kravtchuk I learned that setting query_cache_size=0 does not disable and remove locking from the Query Cache. You actually need to also set query_cache_type=0. This appears to been a bug, seen in the presently still open MySQL bugs database entry #38511.

My recommendation to customers now is to set both variables on all existing MySQL versions if you are not using the MySQL Query Cache.

Thanks to the Performance Schema in MySQL 5.5 for uncovering this. More information in Dimitri’s detailed post at MySQL Performance: Using Performance Schema

Details of all MySQL presentations at …

One of the ‘things I wrote down during OSBC’ was this statement from Benchmark EIR, Rob Bearden:

“Misalignment between a business model and the community’s tolerance point will never be accepted. This will manifest itself in multiple distributions.”

At first glance the statement may seem obvious to anyone who has studied open source-related business strategies or communities, but I believe provides the context for further understanding the complexities of balancing the needs of a business for control and the needs of a community for openness.

As the following graphic demonstrates, the statement suggests that there is a window of opportunity within which the control point of the vendor, and the tolerance point of the community must be closely aligned:

…

If you ever, and I think many of use DBAs have, been in the situation where you are stuck with data in the database that isn't used and isn't accessed, data which may consist of rows that are no longer used, data rows that aren't references, because you don't use FOREIGN KEYs or they weren't applicable in this case. Or data that was once used, but no longer is.

And in many cases, this data is tucked in among your other good rows of data :-( One way of cleaning up the database in a case like this is to run standard DELETE statements, but there are a few issues with this:

• You may be accessing a lot of data, so this may take a while.
• You will be locking large amount of data for this.
• The join statement to get the data that is no longer used and / or no longer referenced is complex.
• There is no really good way to split this DELETE in smaller chunks, except using LIMIT, but if what …

The MySQL Documentation Team is looking for a senior technical writer. Main areas to cover are MySQL Workbench and MySQL Connectors. The position is for EMEA.

Candidates should be prepared to work intensively with our developers and support organization when writing documentation. Being a distributed team,  we meet mostly on IRC and coordinate our work through email and versioning systems such as Subversion. The base format we're using is DocBook XML, and we're not just writing but also processing and publishing all our documentation ourselves.

This means you should …

The MySQL Documentation Team is looking for a senior technical writer. Main areas to cover are MySQL Workbench and MySQL Connectors. The position is for EMEA.

Candidates should be prepared to work intensively with our developers and support organization when writing documentation. Being a distributed team,  we meet mostly on IRC and coordinate our work through email and versioning systems such as Subversion. The base format we're using is DocBook XML, and we're not just writing but also processing and publishing all our documentation ourselves.

This means you should …