A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Sharing an auto_increment value across multiple MySQL tables. In the comments, a few people wrote in to suggest alternative ways of implementing this.  I just got around to benchmarking those alternatives today across two large EC2 machines:

(Measured in transactions/second – higher is better)

What is the conclusion?  With the exception of my original option2, they actually all perform fairly similar.  The Flickr and Option1 tests perform marginally better.  Test “arjen2″ is option2, but with a MyISAM table — it suffers a little because EC2 can be a little high for latency, and there’s …

Dear Perl and MySQL developers, admins and enthusiasts,

I’m please to announce the release of DBD::mysql 4.018! This release includes some code cleanups, added documentation as well as new features (database handle attributes) that allow you to be able to ascertain the server and client versions (Thank you to Robert M. Jansen). An example below, from the test for this new feature, shows you how you can use these new handle attributes:

print "$dbh->{mysql_clientinfo}\n";

5.2.0-MariaDB

print "$dbh->{mysql_clientversion}\n";

50200

print "$dbh->{mysql_serverversion}\n";

50200

You can obtain the latest DBD::mysql release source from Github:

git clone git://github.com/CaptTofu/DBD-mysql.git

Or CPAN:

http://search.cpan.org/~capttofu/DBD-mysql-4.018/lib/DBD/mysql.pm

The file:

file: $CPAN/authors/id/C/CA/CAPTTOFU/DBD-mysql-4.018.tar.gz
size: 133427 bytes
md5: …

One of the Department of Energy's flagship open government initiatives, Open Energy Information (OpenEI), was on display at the recent National Science Festival. Ryan McKeel, an engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, talks about how OpenEI provides access to data, models and tools in the following clip:

OpenEI is "open" in any number of important ways, including open source and open linked data, as Debbie Brodt-Giles, the OpenEI project leader, notes in an Amazon case study (OpenEI is hosted on Amazon's Web Services platform). "Key platform software for OpenEI includes Apache, Semantic MediaWiki, MySQL, and …

This is not a technical post, but rather an informative appeal to ALL of you MySQL users.
If you encounter a bug whilst working on MySQL look it up on bugs.mysql.com and if you find it:
DON’T STOP THERE!! Comment on the bug report, explaining you too found the problem and would like it fixed! Feature requests and bug fixes are scheduled depending on popular request and if you don’t voice your needs, nobody will do anything about them.

Especially if you have an enterprise license, (you have more say because you pay for it!) file a ticket with support for them to put further pressure on development.

Some statistics:

MySQL / Sun / Oracle have had around 55,000 bug reports and feature requests over the years (since 2002), 10% of which are duplicates … waste of time for support people and …

1. 12 Months with MongoDB (Worknik) -- every type of retrieval got faster than their old MySQL store, and there are some other benefits too. They note that the admin tools aren't really there for MongoDB, so "there is a blurry hand-off between IT Ops and Engineering." (via Hacker News)
2. Dawn of a New Day -- Ray Ozzie's farewell note to Microsoft. Clear definition of the challenges to come: At first blush, this world of continuous services and connected devices doesn’t seem very different than today. But those who build, deploy and manage today’s websites understand viscerally that fielding a truly continuous service is incredibly difficult and is only achieved by the most sophisticated …

LWN.net has a nice article on their front page on Drizzle's and MariaDB's recent beta and RC releases. it is behind a paywall for a few more days, but using the link below you can already read it.

LWN.net: New releases from MySQL descendants Drizzle and MariaDB

For years, MySQL has been the highest-profile open source relational database system, but with the Sun (and, later, Oracle) acquisition of MySQL's corporate parent MySQL AB, the development community has split in several directions. Now, a few years later, both of the leading community-driven forks of MySQL, Drizzle and MariaDB, have made important new releases.

...

read more

Following on from my post yesterday on the various states of a Storage Engine, I said I’d have a go with the Cursor object too. A Cursor is used by the Drizzle kernel to get and set data in a table. There can be more than one cursor open at once, and more than one per thread. If your engine cannot cope with this, it is its responsibility to figure it out and return the appropriate errors.

Let’s look at a really simple operation, inserting a couple of rows and then reading them back via a full table scan.

Now, this graph is slightly incomplete as there is no doEndTableScan() call. But you can see in which order things are meant to happen. In this case, “store_lock()” means that store_lock() has been called, …

I am currently working on a project to deploy new website builds to a
small number of servers. I needed something simple and reliable that could
be built in a very short period of time. I decided to whip something up in
bash with the intent of refining it in Python later.

As I began to write this code, I realized that it probably would have been
quicker to do it in Python from the start. I decided to stick with bash as
somewhat of an academic exercise. The vast majority of these deployment
scripts were trivial; check the code out of git, create a manifest, package
it up, spew it to the servers, etc, etc. The problem came during the last
step. We decided to use a symlink to point to the active build out of a
number of builds that could be available on the server at any given time.
Since all of our servers should be running the exact same version of the
build, it …

Query Optimizer is a part of the server that takes a parsed SQL query and produces a query execution plan. MySQL Query Optimizer uses (as one of its parameters) the stored key distribution (Cardinality) mechanism to determine the order in which tables should be joined, when you perform a join on something other than a […]

Over the weekend I updated my Drupal 7 test appliance in SUSE Studio to the Drupal 7.0-beta2 release, which was released on Oct. 23rd. I also added phpMyAdmin upon a user request, to provide a web-based method to work with the MySQL instance, if needed.

In addition to the lightweight "headless" appliance (which can only be accessed and configured via a remote network connection), I've now also created a GUI-based version. This appliance starts a minimal GNOME desktop and a Mozilla Firefox browser, which in turn opens the …