I spent my Saturday at the SCALE conference down in LA. Most conferences I find have a meme and for this conference that was "MySQL's longterm influence on the GPL".

MySQL was the company that had the most influence on how companies and investors viewed the GPL.

When MySQL said "we will only take contributions via a contributor agreement", this translated into investors expecting everyone to do this (though requiring contributor agreements destroyed outside MySQL development to the kernel, and left MySQL in a position where no substantial, or many, contributions ever occurred).

When MySQL pushed dual licensing, investors looked for this hook in every business model. I remember standing outside of a conference room in SF a couple of years ago and talking to one of the Mozilla Foundation people. Their question to me was "Is the nonsense …

Kyle Vanderbeek is going to take over as release manager for MySQLdb-1.2. We should have one more release candidate of 1.2.3 first, followed quickly by the final release.
Development on MySQLdb-2.0 has been progressing, and has recently moved to a Mercurial repository on SourceForge. This was imported from the SVN trunk. If you pull from the SVN trunk in the future, you may be disappointed.
2.0 is turning into a very major rewrite. I should have an alpha release soon. For now, the hg repository builds and passes all tests, but there are probably a few things that aren't thoroughly tested yet, particularly scrolling on cursors. I'll post more detail along with the alpha release.
Python3 support is not immediately in the works, and I probably won't work on it until I am close to a beta. At this point, I would target Python-3.1, maybe 3.2. 3.0 would probably work too.

Just the facts:
What: MySQL user community dinner
Who: me, you, and many MySQL community members
When: Monday, April 12th – Meet at 6:30 at the Hyatt Santa Clara or at 7 pm at the restaurant
Where: Pedro’s Restaurant and Cantina – 3935 Freedom Circle, Santa Clara, CA 95054
How: Comment on this blog post to add your name to the list of probable attendees

I was sad that last year there was no community dinner, and I missed the one the year before when Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green made an appearance. This year I am determined not to miss it, and so I am calling for a community (pay-your-own-way) dinner on Monday, April 12th, at Pedro’s – a Mexican restaurant that has vegetarian and vegan options. I think Monday is a better time because many folks arrive …

I’ve heard that the mechanic’s wife always has a car that needs repair or tuneup, the painter’s wife always had walls of peeling paint, you get the picture. What about MySQL DBA’s and their own databases? While I have many versions of MySQL for testing including for example the latest 5.1.44 which I was using for my previous post, what is running on my production server? Let’s see:

mysql> select version();
+-----------+
| version() |
+-----------+
| 5.1.25-rc |
+-----------+

That’s really old. And yes, to prove my point that we can be our own worst enemy, the previous version before 5.1.25 was 5.1.6. Yes, .6 which worked just fine, and never crashed once for my 20+ websites. While I have downloaded onto my production server several versions ready for upgrade including versions 5.1.30, 5.1,38, and 5.4.1 I’ve never actually gone through the upgrade process.

Continuing on from preparation in our MySQL latin1 to utf8 migration let us first understand where MySQL uses character sets. MySQL defines the character set at 4 different levels for the structure of data.

• Instance
• Schema
• Table
• Column

In MySQL 5.1, the default character set is latin1. If not specified, this is what you will get. For example.

mysql> create table test1(c1 varchar(10) not null);
mysql> show create table test1\G
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `test1` (
  `c1` varchar(10) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

If you want all tables in your instance to always be a default of utf8, you can changed the server variable character_set_server. This can be set dynamically.

mysql> set global …

March 1st Meeting
Workbench and Future

Workbench suddenly has a new bunch of features and that will be the main subject of Monday's meeting. This visual design, documentation, and all around database tool is quickly evolving into a 'must have' tool in your arsenal.

Plus, the North Texas MySQL Users Group Will be losing our home in a few months. We need to discuss if we will seek another, join the Dallas Oracle Users Group as a Special Interest Group or ???


Seven PM Sharp
Suite 700
16000 Dallas Tollway
Dallas Texas

The source version for MySQL Cluster 6.3.31b has now been made available at ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/cluster_telco/mysql-5.1.41-ndb-6.3.31b/

This replaces MySQL Cluster 6.3.30 and 6.3.31.

You can either wait for the binaries to be released or if you’re in a rush then you can find instructions on building the binaries for yourself in the earlier article: “MySQL Cluster 7.0.7 source released“.

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 6.3.31b (compared to 6.3.30) can be found in the MySQL Cluster 6.3.31b Change Log

The source version for MySQL Cluster 7.0.11b has now been made available at ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/cluster_telco/mysql-5.1.41-ndb-7.0.11b/

This replaces MySQL Cluster 7.0.10 and 7.0.11.

You can either wait for the binaries to be released or if you’re in a rush then you can find instructions on building the binaries for yourself in the earlier article: “MySQL Cluster 7.0.7 source released“.

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 7.0.11b (compared to 7.0.10) can be found in the MySQL Cluster 7.0.11b Change Log

I recently had the pleasure of logging into an AIX 5.3 machine for the first time ever, to debug a corefile.
Firstly, having the mysqld binary and core is not enough, unless you have an identical machine on which to study the corefile. Library mismatches can be a problem.. IBM was kind enough to provide the snapcore utility to solve this easily.
Snapcore will gather all the libraries and create a single archive contain libs, binary, core.
So we now have a file called something like: snapcore_555060.paxOn our dev box, extract the pax archive:
gunzip snapcore_555060.pax.Zpax -r -f snapcore_555060.pax
On your dev AIX box, make sure you have DBX installed!!
bash-3.00# lslpp -l | grep …

I recently presented a webcast hosted by O’Reilly and Webex.  In it I take you on a step-by-step installation of DRBD and MySQL.  I start by using Sun’s Virtualbox to create to virtual machines running CentOS.  I then explain how to configure them with virtual external drives to use for DRBD.  I next configure the network interfaces to support routed packets into and out of the boxes.  Then I install various packages with yum, configure drbd and finally install MySQL as the last step.  You can follow along at the command line and do it yourself on a Windows, Mac or Linux box.