Over lunch I was talking to a --name removed to protect the innocent-- and they were saying.

"I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to change the port address, and it turned out all I needed to do was use --help!"

For any of the drizzle command line applications or the server you can just do a

--help

To find documentation on any of the command line arguments all you need to do is ask the program.

We print out the help, and only the help. Pretty much any modern unix application follows this standard, but since mysql never did, is somewhat un-intuitive to find that it works :)

Over lunch I was talking to a --name removed to protect the innocent-- and they were saying.

"I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to change the port address, and it turned out all I needed to do was use --help!"

For any of the drizzle command line applications or the server you can just do a

--help

To find documentation on any of the command line arguments all you need to do is ask the program.

We print out the help, and only the help. Pretty much any modern unix application follows this standard, but since mysql never did, is somewhat un-intuitive to find that it works :)

Mixing up some MySQL and SQL Server hacking activities can be fun. I’ve also noticed that when you work with different database platforms, it can bring additional clarity to certain concepts and techniques. One reason for that, I think, is that different terminologies and ways of explanations are used for people practicing on different platforms, and that tends to re-enforce or otherwise bring clarity to things that you may not have a good grasp to begin with.

Anyway, I am following Baron Schwartz et al’s High Performance MySQL book and thought the example of building your own hash index for URL lookup looks really useful and clever. On the topic of hash collison, the book discussed using words in /usr/share/dict/words as an example. By the way, High Performance MySQL 2nd Edition is a fantastic book, …

Recent Tips and News on Java EE 6 & GlassFish:

For more than nine years, I worked for MySQL AB and its successors, Sun Microsystems and Oracle. I handed in my resignation late June, two days before Sun’s German legal entity ceased to exist. Germany isn’t a country where you quit HP one day and join Oracle the next, so I had a long summer with plenty of so-called Garden Leave. Last Thursday was my last day, and I’m now outside MySQL AB, outside Sun Microsystems, outside Oracle.

Like all the many former colleagues who resigned before me, I did so with mixed feelings. Leaving the colleagues, finding freedom, I think you follow. The topmost feeling I have, the one I want to highlight right now, is gratitude. I’m very grateful for what MySQL AB has meant for my career, my personal development, my life experiences, my social life. Let me mention a small subset of the people that made my life at MySQL AB, and later Sun Microsystems, a truly memorable …

Announced at MySQL Sunday was the Release Candidate edition of MySQL 5.5.6. Also noted by Geert where he points out the default storage engine is now InnoDB.

However, for those from a background other then MySQL there is still a gotcha.

mysql> show global variables like 'autocommit';
+---------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+---------------+-------+
| autocommit    | ON    |
+---------------+-------+

Unlike Oracle for example, the default autocommit is on.

Doing some other boundary conditions, it is no longer possible to disable InnoDB on startup which you would of course expect.

$ bin/mysqld_safe --skip-innodb &
$ tail error.log

101003 15:33:32 [Note] Plugin 'InnoDB' is disabled.
101003 15:33:32 [ERROR] Unknown/unsupported storage engine: InnoDB
101003 15:33:32 [ERROR] Aborting

MyISAM however can’t be removed and …

It turns out that the overhead of dynamic linking on Linux amd64 is 2 CPU cycles per cross-module call. I usually take forever to get to the point in my writing, so I thought I would change this for once :-)

In MySQL, there has been a historical tendency to favour static linking, in part because to avoid the overhead (in execution efficiency) associated with dynamic linking. However, on modern systems there are also very serious drawbacks when using static linking.

The particular issue that inspired this article is that I was working on MWL#74, building a proper shared libmysqld.so library for the MariaDB embedded server. The lack of a proper libmysqld.so in MySQL and MariaDB has caused no end of grief for packaging Amarok for the various Linux distributions. My patch …

all-schemas is a powerful that helps developers/administrators run multiple SQL statements on all or selected databases on a MySQL db server.

This week I was one of the presenters at the first Surge Scalability Conference in Baltimore. An event that focused not just on one technology but on what essential tools, technologies and practices system architects need to know about for successfully scaling web applications.

While MySQL is an important product in many environments, it is only one component for a successful technology stack and for many organizations is one of several products that manage your data.

My presentation was on the common MySQL scalability mistakes and how to avoid them. This is a problem/solution approach and is a companion talk with Successful MySQL Scalability which describes design for successfully scalability …

opensource-db-tools is a set of open source command line scripts like maatkit that will help database developers and administrators perform day-to-day database tasks easily and efficiently.