The DOAG 2010 Conference + Exhibition is to be held from the 16th to 18th November in Nuremberg this year. DOAG stands for "Deutsche ORACLE-Anwendergruppe", in English: the German Oracle User's Group.

We will be adding a MySQL track to the conference this year, much like Ronald and Sheeri did for the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010. Volker Oboda (of PrimeBase Technologies) is organizing the track and I will be helping to review the submissions. More information is available in German on Volker's MySQL Blog.

So, if you are planning to be in the area, please consider submitting a talk. The deadline for …

Oh my. I was outside painting my house for a few days, and when I return back online I discover that now everyone is having an opinion on the open core business model. Since some participants are still trying to promote it as a valid open source business model, let's see what everyone is saying and highlight any pitfalls being offered...

read more

This year's OSCON takes place July 19-23, 2010 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Meet with MySQL experts at the Oracle booth and hear the updates on MySQL enhancements and innovations, as well as other key open source initiatives from Oracle.

There’s lots of buzz lately about the so-called “open-core” business model of Marten Mickos’s new employer. But this is nothing new. Depending on how you define it, InnoDB is “open-core,” and has been for a long time. The InnoDB Hot Backup (ibbackup) tool was always closed-source. Did anyone ever cry foul and claim that this made InnoDB itself not open-source, or accuse Innobase / Oracle of masquerading as open-source? I don’t recall that happening, although sometimes people got suspicious about the interplay between the backup tool and the storage engine.

The Maatkit article on Wikipedia was removed some time ago, after being deemed not notable. I believe this is no longer the case. It’s hard to find a credible book published on MySQL in the last few years that doesn’t mention Maatkit, there’s quite a bit of blogging about it from MySQL experts and prominent community members, and the toolkit is certainly in wide use – it’s important enough that notable companies are supporting its development.

We have been using MySQL 5.1 on a few servers for which partitioning is a much better way to purge old data than delete. We have been working to upgrade more servers despite claims that some of us may have made in the past about using MySQL 4.0 or 5.0 forever.

We spent a lot of time to confirm that MySQL 5.1 was stable and performant using benchmarks and our production workload. mk-upgrade from Maatkit was one of the tools we used. Concurrent dump/reload tests were done to measure performance and check for data drift after reload. A custom tool that replays production workload was run to compare performance between MySQL 5.0 and 5.1. We started with MySQL 5.1.38 and now are at MySQL 5.1.47 with several backports for bugs that will be fixed in more recent 5.1 releases or in …

My closing presentation at the dedicated MySQL track at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 discussed various techniques and best practices for improving the ROI of developer resources using MySQL. Included in the sections on Design, Security, Development, Testing, Implementation, Instrumentation and Support were also a number of horror stories of not what to do, combined with practical examples of improving productivity.

Increasing MySQL Productivity View more presentations from Ronald Bradford.

In announcing SkySQL Monty says, "I have seen a lot of the people that originally worked at MySQL AB and who joined Sun together with me, go away in different directions. More than 50 % of them have already left Sun/Oracle." I feel like there should be a "citation needed" after this statement. Being quite sure that he does not have access to that sort of internal HR information, I'm concerned by Monty's use of seemingly "made up" numbers to describe the attrition rate of MySQL employees following the Oracle acquisition. This is an obvious attempt over-inflate the claim of how many ex-MySQL support engineers there are in the job market and the strength of SkySQL's assets. I know of only a small hand full (fewer than 10) support engineers globally have left the support organization since the Oracle acquisition was announced. Supports retention is, on average, much higher than other parts the MySQL organization and support continues to hire new staff as …

SkySQL joins the ranks of the businesses that have been created sense the passing of MySQL AB.

It is great to see more companies come online around the technology. Last week O'Reilly announced the dates for the O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo, April 11-14, 2011. I continue to see a lot of enthusiasm around the community. At OSCON I have a tutorial on Drizzle occurring (along with ones on Gearman, and libMemcached).

In the fall SQL Camp will be coming to Boston. SQL Camp began its life as being MySQL only, but quickly became a clearing house for all topics SQL (and even some non-SQL).

For a long time long types like BLOB, TEXT were not supported by Percona InnoDB Recovery Tool. The reason consists in a special way InnoDB stores BLOBs.

An InnoDB table is stored in a clustered index called PRIMARY. It must exist even if a user hasn't defined the primary index. The PRIMARY index pages are identified by 8-bytes number index_id. The highest 4 bytes are always 0, so index_id is often notated as o:<4 bytes number>, e.g. 0:258. The pages are ordered in a B-tree. Primary index is used as a key. Inside a page records are stored in a linked list.

InnoDB page by default is 16k. Obviously if a record is too long, a single page can't store it. If the total record size is less than UNIV_PAGE_SIZE/2 - 200 (this is roughly 7k) then the full record is stored in the page of PRIMARY index. Let's call it internal. In InnoDB sources they have type FIL_PAGE_INDEX*. If the record is longer than 7k bytes, only first 768 bytes of …