Sometimes it is desired to use particular software versions in production, and not necessary the latest ones. There may be several reasons for that, where I think the most common is when a new version should spend some time in testing or a staging environment before getting to production. In theory each new version is supposed to be better as usually it contains a handful of bug fixes and even new or improved functionality. However there is also a risk of some regression or a new bug introduction as a side effect of code changes.

Quite often DBAs want the same MySQL version to be installed on all database instances, regardless of what actually is the latest version available in the software provider’s repository. There are several ways to achieve this:
* download specific version packages manually and then install them,
* have custom local repository mirror where you decide when and which version gets there, and just update …

A lot a great announcements were done today at the Visual Studio Connect event. And one of the things we are more excited about is hearing that there is a new edition of Visual Studio: Visual Studio 2013 Community.

As of today, Continuent is part of VMware. We are absolutely over the moon about it.

You can read more about the news on the VMware vCloud blog by Ajay Patel, our new boss. There’s also an official post on our Continuent company blog. In a nutshell the Continuent team is joining the VMware Cloud Services Division. We will continue to improve, sell, and support our Tungsten products and work on innovative integration into VMware’s product line.

So why do I feel exhilarated about joining VMware? There are three reasons. 

1.     Continuent is joining a world-class company that is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions. Even …

In a previous blog post (Importing related MySQL tables into an Excel Data Model using MySQL for Excel) we covered in detail how an Excel Data Model can be created containing tables and their relationships so the data can be analyzed in Excel via a PivotTable. In this blog post we are going to talk about one of the features included since MySQL for Excel 1.3.0 that allows you to create PivotTables for data imported from MySQL tables, views or stored procedures, or more importantly for the whole Excel Data Model if it is created.

Remember you can install the latest GA or maintenance version using the MySQL Installer or optionally you can download directly any GA or non-GA version from the MySQL Developer …

Now it's time to release something useful! At least I hope so. I have been going through how I came up with this idea and how I came up with the implementation in a series of blog posts:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4 

 But now it's time for the real deal, the software itself. This is an Alpha 1.0 release but it should work OK in the more basic setups. It's available …

Now it's time to get serious about replicating to MariaDB from Oracle, and we are real close now, right? What I needed was a means of keeping track of what happens in a transaction, such as a LOG table of some kind, and then an idea of applying this log to MariaDB when there is a COMMIT in Oracle. And thing is, these two don't have to be related. So I can have a table which I write to and also have a Materialized View that is refreshed on COMMIT on, and I need a log table or something. And when the Materialized View is refreshed, as there is a COMMIT, then the log can be applied. From a schematic point-of-view, it looks something like this:
This looks more complex than it is, actually, all that is needed is some smart PL/SQL and this will work. I have not done much of any kind of testing, except checking that the basics …

In time for Oracle OpenWorld 2014, we released Connector/Python 2.0. We also released a labs release Connector/Python 2.1 and we have a new feature: a C Extension which uses Connector/C.

This C Extension is an optional, an alternative to the pure Python MySQL Client protocol implementation. One of the reasons to implement it was to improve performance in some situations, for example, when huge result sets are returned. Pure Python is still default, if C Extension is not available.

The following post will get your through downloading and installing the MySQL Connector/Python 2.1.0 labs release.

Requirements

• Windows users out of luck; the labs release only compiles on Linux, OSX …

In time for Oracle OpenWorld 2014, we released Connector/Python 2.0. We also released a labs release Connector/Python 2.1 and we have a new feature: a C Extension which uses Connector/C.

This C Extension is an optional, an alternative to the pure Python MySQL Client protocol implementation. One of the reasons to implement it was to improve performance in some situations, for example, when huge result sets are returned. Pure Python is still default, if C Extension is not available.

The following post will get your through downloading and installing the MySQL Connector/Python 2.1.0 labs release.

Requirements

• Windows users out of luck; the labs release only compiles on Linux, OSX and other …

Both MySQL Connector/Python 2.0.1 and 1.2.3 are now available through the Python Package Index or PyPI. Leaving the previous version available is probably a good idea as you can always go back if needed.

Note that we still have no files hosted at PyPI.

In this third installment in this series, I'll explain why the smart solution I described in the previous post actually wasn't that good, and then I go on to explain how to fix it, and why that fix wasn't such a smart thing after all. So, this was the design we ended with last time:
We have Oracle replicating to a Materialized View, this to ensure that we can run triggers when the is a commit, and then triggers on this Materialized View updates MariaDB by sending a UDP message to a server that in turn is connected to MariaDB.

The issue with the above thingy was that a Materialized View by default is refreshed in it's entirety when there is a refresh, so if the table has 10.000 rows and 1 …