The new licensing that was announced by Oracle earlier this month caused some FUD in the community that was addressed last week in an updated graphic comparing support and binary options and blog post from Oracle.  However, one of our customers sent me this earlier this week –

We are now re-evaluating whether we want to renew our MySQL Enterprise License.  As hard as I tried, I am still confused at what we get from the license we paid other than professional support.

In other words, I don’t know whether we are paying for the binary (for features not found in the Community version) or for the Service? I thought they are two different things. But it is just not clear on their Website.

Do you have some insight …

Percona XtraBackup 1.4 is now available for download.

Version 1.4 fixes problems related to incremental backups. If you do incremental backups, it's strongly recommended that you upgrade to this release.

Functionality Added or Changed

• Incremental backups have changed and now allow the restoration of full backups containing certain rollback transactions that previously caused problems. Please see Preparing the Backups and the --apply-log-only option. (From innobackupex, the --redo-only option should be used). (Yasufumi …

We have been asked about when you should expect the SkySQL price list to go live:  This will be in January 2011.

While we're on the topic of pricing: We do plan to maintain an aggressive pricing policy, as witnessed by our limited-time Gold offer to purchase a SkySQL™ Enterprise Platinum support subscription at the historical MySQL® Enterprise Gold subscription price of just USD 2999.

An update of MySQL from 5.0 to 5.5 on CentOS 5.5 64bit has not resulted in a good experience. The mysqld process would then crash every few minutes with the following message.

101120 8:29:27 InnoDB: Operating system error number 22 in a file operation.
InnoDB: Error number 22 means ‘Invalid argument’.
InnoDB: Some operating system error numbers are described at
InnoDB: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/operating-system-error-codes.html
InnoDB: File name /tmpfs/#sql6cf3_5c_0.ibd
InnoDB: File operation call: ‘aio write’.
InnoDB: Cannot continue operation.

The work around was to change the tmpdir=/tmpfs (which was a 16G tmpfs filesystem) to a physical disk.

The referenced URL didn’t provide any more information of help. Unlike Bug #26662 O_DIRECT is not specified as the flush method.

One significant new feature of MySQL 5.5 is the Performance Schema. I recently performed an upgrade from 5.0 to 5.5, however my check of differences in the MySQL variables via mysqladmin variables failed because we now have a new record long variable name “performance_schema_events_waits_history_long_size”.

The full list of new performance_schema variables are:

> | performance_schema_events_waits_history_long_size | 10000                                                                                                                  |
> | performance_schema_events_waits_history_size      | 10                                                                                                                     |
> | performance_schema_max_cond_classes               | 80 …

There has been a lot happening in the MariaDB community recently, and there has been growth. Here are some of the highlights. Thank you to all our current contributors, and to others that want to contribute, shoot community[at]askmonty[dot]org an e-mail.

MariaDB 5.2.3 binaries for Solaris and Debian Sparc

Our Sparc community contributor, Mark, has continued to make popular binaries for Solaris 10 and Debian Sparc. He’s kept up to speed with MariaDB 5.2.3, so please visit him and download the binaries.

MariaDB 5.2.3 on the openSUSE Build Service

Community contributor Michal Hrušecký has packaged MariaDB for openSUSE and its available via the …

Dear MariaDB users,

The development team have been busy bees, and have freshly released MariaDB 5.1.51. MariaDB is a branch of the MySQL database which includes all major open source storage engines, myriad bug fixes and many community patches.

This release of MariaDB 5.1.51 includes MySQL up to version 5.1.51. It also includes XtraDB up to version 5.1.51-12. For more information, do not hesitate to read the release notes, and for more detailed changes, do hop on over to the changelog.

MariaDB is available in source and binary form in a variety of platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, CentOS 5, and Solaris x86. These are …

MySQL Connector/Python doesn’t buffer results by default. This means you have to fetch the rows when you issued a SELECT. This post describes how you can change this behavior.

Why buffering result sets?

Buffering or storing the result set on the client side is handy when you, for example, would like to use multiple cursors per connection and you’de like to traverse each one interleaved.

Keep in mind that with bigger result sets, the client side will use more memory. You just need to find out for yourself what’s best. When you know result sets are mostly small, you might opt to buffer.

MySQLdb by default buffers results and you need to use a different cursor to disable it. oursql does not buffer by default. This is good to …

Introduction

In his presentation about PBXT at the DOAG Conference 2010 Paul McCullagh was speaking about memory resident PBXT tables. They will be available in version 1.1 of the PBXT Storage Engine Plug-in. Memory resident PBXT tables should have similar characteristics like normal MySQL MEMORY tables. But in addition to the MEMORY tables they are transactional and can handle BLOB and TEXT attributes.

An alternative to this feature would be the MySQL dynamic …

To get the HTTP Header informations for specific clients connections use ngrep and a pattern or a regular expression that will match the packets.

install ngrep (example for debian / ubuntu):

apt-get install ngrep

These examples dumps HTTP header for any connection matching the string “images” on port 80.

user@host:~# ngrep -qi -W normal '/images/'  port 80
interface: lo (127.0.0.1/255.255.255.255)
match: /images/

T 10.1.1.199:62073 -> 127.0.0.1:80 [AP]
GET /images/globe_blogs.gif HTTP/1.1..Host: frederikkonietzny.de..User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; de; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3
.6.12..Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8..Accept-Language: de-de,de;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3..Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate..Ac
cept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7..Keep-Alive: 115..Connection: keep-alive..Cookie: …