Since the time that I’ve been using MySQL I have filed quite a few bug reports. Some of these have been fixed and many of the bug reports are actually new feature requests. While working with MySQL Enterprise Monitor I’ve probably filed more feature requests than bug reports.

That’s fine of course and my opinion of what is needed in MySQL or Merlin is one thing,  yours or the MySQL developers is something else. We all have our own needs and find things missing which would solve our specific problems.

If I have ten feature requests open and only one could be added to the software I’d also like to be able to say: this feature is the most important one for me.

However, it seems to me that there is no easy way in the mysql bug tracker at the moment to group together different types of new feature requests into groups of related features and then see the different types of …

Last week Solutions Linux / Open Source event was held in Paris.

Kuassi MENSAH (Head of Product Management Database Technologies, Oracle Corporation) presented the open source Oracle strategy. Linux, MySQL, virtualization, GlassFish, Eclipse, dynamic scripting languages ,... etc . It was well received by the audience. Knowing that MySQL organization will be kept safe in Oracle is perceived as a nice move.

Florian Haas(LINBIT) gave a tutorial on DRBD and did some demos with NFS and video streaming. And of course he reminded people that now since Linux 2.6.33, DRBD is officially integrated into the Linux kernel source. DRBD making the push for mainline Linux kernel is going to make HA easier.

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As anybody who has ever implemented a Storage Engine for MySQL will know, a bunch of the DDL calls got passed a parameter named “path”. This was a filesystem path. Depending on what platform you were running, it may contain / or \ (and no, it’s not consistent on each platform). Add to that the difference if you were creating temporary tables (table name of #sql_somethingsomething) and the difference if you were one of the two (built in) engines that were able to be used for creating internal temporary tables (temp tables that are created during query execution that do not belong in a schema). Well… you had a bit of a mess.

My earlier attempts involved splitting everything up into two strings: schema name and table name. This ended badly. The final architecture we decided on was to have an object passed around that would deal with various transformations (from what the user entered to …

Database replication is still interesting after all these years.  Two of my talks focused on replication technology were accepted for the upcoming MySQL 2010 Conference.  Here are the summaries.

• Clustering for the Masses - A Gentle Introduction to Tungsten for MySQL 

• Not Your Grandpa’s Replication-The New Wave of MySQL Replication and How It Helps Your Applications

The first talk is a solo presentation covering Tungsten, which creates highly available and scalable database clusters using vanilla MySQL databases linked by flexible …

I just created a portable release of the 5.0 beta code. Other than previous portable releases, this is not an installer any longer, but a simple ZIP file. Just unpack and run it.

How does HeidiSQL portable exactly work?
r3201 implements additional code into heidisql.exe, which checks for a "portable_settings.txt" file in the same directory. If present, heidisql.exe will read any settings from this file into a unique registry key, without interfering any running Heidi process or even other running portables. When you close the main window, settings will be written to the above mentioned text file and the registry key gets removed.

This way, the user is able to create its own portable with any build (ok, any later than r3201), just …

Here is in brief what's going on.

Last Friday (CET), big hardware troubles started on the server which db4free.net runs on. The server was unavailable and I didn't manage to start it up again by myself. I files a support ticked to my server provider, and by Saturday afternoon, the server was accessible again. Everything seemed to look fine, but Sunday, shortly after midnight, the same troubles started again.

My server provider gave me a new server, and thankfully, managed to get the old server to start up again. I backed up the user databases and copied them to the new server, so no - or at least almost no - data should be lost.

It will take me some time to migrate the entire service to the new server, so please be patient. I also want to use this "opportunity" to start offering MySQL 5.5, so my plan is to make the old server available on a different port, and start the entire service over on a fresh and …

As of late I have been getting a lot of questions around "Where did the MySQL developers go?'".

The answer is "elsewhere and nowhere".

The vast majority are still at Oracle, some have left, but plenty are still there. This got me thinking about "who wrote what". Innodb is a sizable piece of code and it continues to be at Oracle. Without Innodb, you don't really have a database that is 24/7. Innodb has been there for years.

What about the other pieces?

The optimizer guys are almost gone. They left a while ago to MontyAB.

Replication? They are all there minus the guy who wrote the first version (which is still pretty much what is used today). Him? He does consulting for different companies, but he left MySQL in 2002 or so. The execution/trigger system is a bit of combination. The "pre-stored procedures" stuff was all written back in the day, and little of it has changed, …

As Oracle bolsters MySQL development community with engineering and support resources, MySQL may be better able to fend off competition from the NoSQL movement.

I attended a panel session at the South by Southwest Interactive conference recently on the topic of high-tech startups in Europe.  The panel included Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL, now at Eucalyptus), Resham Sohoni (CEO of Seedcamp), Peter Robinett (Bubble Foundry) and Felix Petersen (Nokia).  It was interesting to learn about some of the initiatives, like Seedcamp, which are investing in and promoting startup companies like Erply, and Codility coming out of eastern europe. These companies are small, but they have big ambition and are leveraging open source and cloud infrastructures to keep their costs low.

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MySQl 5.5 is getting more and more solid, and one thing recently (at least I think so) pushed is the Audit plugin. Currently, this is only in the source repository (I tried from 5.5.4-m3). This prugin is actually quite useful, more useful than you might expect. Any event that would cause a write to the general query log will send a notification to a function in this API, and note that this will happen even if the general query log is enabled or not.

The stuff that gets passed to the notification function is a struct with similar data that gets written to an entry of the general query log, but don't let this limit you, also passed is a pointer to the THD class for the thread that caused the notification. And if you haven't looked a lot at the MySQL sourcecode, note that the THD class has MANY members, and contains all sorts of information.

If you wanted to create your own general log, that would allow filtering on, say, …