MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma is released

MariaDB 5.2 is finally released as gamma (RC). I had hoped to release this in July at Oscon but our new QA person, Philip Stoev, find at the last moment some problems with Aria recovery and virtual columns that we wanted to fix before doing the release.

The new features in 5.2 are quite isolated and as most have been in use by members in the MySQL community for a long time, we don't expect any big problems with 5.2 and we should be able to declare it stable within a few months.

5.2.2 gamma is based on MariaDB/MySQL version 5.1.50. It has the following new features:

Virtual columns

Columns that are an expression and are calculated on retrieval.
…

One of Drizzle’s great strengths is that it is not afraid to deviate from its MySQL origins.  Unfortunately the side-effect of this is that it can make migration from MySQL to Drizzle more difficult.  I have previous noted that drizzledump can do the schema migration for you.  Now I will go into more details with some other information that may be useful if you are considering migration.

The first thing I should point out is that the default storage engine in Drizzle in InnoDB, MyISAM exists only for temporary tables and we have some other options such as PBXT and BlitzDB.  As a kind-of side effect to this, there is no FULLTEXT indexes in Drizzle, so these have to be dropped as part of the migration.

When it comes to integer types we …

Here is the code structure

dbfuncs.php : is the file which contains classes and functions for firing queries on mysql and pgsql mysqlinsert.php : creates and fires inserts on mysql mysqlselect.php : creates and fires selects on mysql pgsqlinsert.php : creates and fires inserts on pgsql pgsqlselect.php : creates and fires selects on pgsql benchmark.php : script used to control concurrency and

There are a few things to note RIGHT NOW for those of us in the world of open databases.

The MySQL User Conference has opened their call for proposals and the IOUG Collaborate11 call for proposals closes tomorrow 10/1!  Get your proposals in.

OpenSQLCamp is 10/15 -> 17 and BG is sending Patrick as I mentioned earlier this week.  If you’re in the area, I can’t urge you strongly enough to go listen, present what you’re working on, learn and get help from some amazing people doing really cool things on and in open databases.  It’s an un-conference format that has always had incredibly informative sessions.  I’ve attended the conference a few times, and came away with new ideas and solution each time.  …

According to a recent book about MySQL, this is the recipe to convert an IP address into an integer, with the purpose of using it as server-ID.

1. Take for example 10.0.159.22
2. Using a calculator (!!!), convert each of the four numbers to hexadecimal (you get 0a.00.9f.16)
3. Then glue the four hexadecimal numbers together, after removing the dots, and, again with the calculator, convert them to decimal (0a009f16HEX=167812886DEC)
4. Use this number (167812886) as your server ID in the options file.

Brilliant, eh?

Had the authors searched the MySQL manual for "IP address", they would have found the INET_ATON function, which can be used like this:

select inet_aton('10.0.159.22'); …

Answering questions asked on the site.

Denis Kuzmenok asks:

I need some help with a query I'm fighting with.

I have these tables:

For the products with a certain product.parent, I need to select minimal and maximal price within the given site.region, and return first 10 products ordered by the minimal price.

Each parent has 100 to 10,000 products, and there are 10,000,000 records in price …

The Motley Fool had an interesting article yesterday about the OpenOffice spinoff, and what the impact to the open source community is starting to look like since the Oracle acquisition. While I’m not sure whether Anders has a crystal ball or is just consulting a magic 8 ball, I I’m sure it’s concerning to people to wonder what the support for MySQL will look like in the future.  I think there are some promising opportunities out there that might help relieve some of these anxieties.

The best resource the MySQL community has at its disposal is the same as it’s always been: fellow users. The ability to learn from the experience of other users and collaborate on how to make things better is the cornerstone of open source. This is true for customers running the Oracle stack as well. Oracle user groups …

The kind folks at O'Reilly sent me a fantastic book about MongoDB. This was a great read since it’s suited for people who do Operations and Development and Performance tuning (me). I've been using Cassandra for quite some time now (months lol) and the thing that has irritated me about Cassandra is the documentation for it. Cassandra documentation sucks, its hard to speed up on the internals. This MongoDB book is written by the most active participants that are developing MongoDB and the knowledge shows. What I like is it starts out on how to quickly get it up, add/get/update data to the DB. Then progresses to more advance topics-that talk about GridFS and MongoDB drivers. Personally I would like to see more elaboration of this facet in terms of motivation of why do this, what the win is and how it fits into the "Fast by Default" mantra. Each step is organized perfectly, …

I recently upgraded the firmware on my Draytek Vigor 2820n ADSL router to version 3.3.4 from 3.3.3. One thing that surprised me was that the change stopped me being able to access my public IP from behind the router. That is I have an internal LAN with RFC1918 addresses such as 192.168/16 and could access [...]

Seeing as it looks like 5.5 is shortly about to go GA I thought I’d give it a run and see how well it works. The only way really to test it is to give it a bit of load and look for things which break. That I did with the 5.5.6-rc community rpms, compared to the 5.1 advanced rpms I usually run.

My colleagues, Ben and Peter, found a horrible problem which means that I can’t use this even for any real usage on my real servers. See: bug#57095 for all the gory details. Thanks to them both for finding the problem and then digging down and figuring out the real cause. Sometimes developers work a long way from the database so their errors don’t translate into something I can really look at in the database. They delved into the problem and then found the cause and a nice easy test case which I could report to MySQL.

After a couple of days of running this was …