MySQL Connector/Python v0.1.3-devel is now available for download from Launchpad.org. Please note that this is a development (i.e. alpha, unstable, ..) release and we welcome everyone to test and report problems.

Highlights for this v0.1.3-devel:

• Important memory leak fixed when closing cursors.
• Warnings can now be raised as exceptions.
• Fixing unicode usage and broken error message when MySQL chops them
• Client flags can now be set correctly when connecting
• Conversion fixes for BIT/YEARSET and Python to DATE/DATETIME
• Adding MySQL Client Errors and raising better exceptions based on errno.

Enjoy!

The Call for Proposals for the 2010 MySQL User Conference and Expo ended about 6 hours ago. However, birds-of-a-feather sessions (BoFs) have a separate call for proposals. From the MySQL Conference page at http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2010/, select the “Program” menu item, then “Birds of a feather sessions”, and you will be directed to the proper page. Which, for easy clicking, is http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2010/public/cfp/90.

The call for proposals for Birds of a feather sessions closes at 11:59 pm PST on Thursday, February 18th, 2010. Sessions can be added during the conference, but if you submit and your BoF is accepted it will be printed in the schedule.

Note: If you submitted a BoF proposal in the regular call for proposals, it’s much much easier if you submit the proposal again …

Have you ever wanted a handy reference of all of the various variables available in MySQL Proxy?

I’ve written a Lua script that outputs many of the available variables, which is really useful for coding Lua scripts for MySQL Proxy. In addition to the variables, it also generates output during each main function it enters in the Proxy, so you can follow the execution trace, and then see the value of each variable when it is within a particular function.

I’ve tested this on MySQL Proxy 0.7.2 and the newly available Proxy 0.8.0.

Here is a sample of the output, where I just connect, and then issue a simple query (SELECT * FROM world.city LIMIT 1):

C:Program FilesMySQLmysql-proxy-0.8.0bin>mysql-proxy.exe
 --proxy-lua-script=show-vars.lua

/* Entering function connect_server() */
   When the proxy accepts a connection from a MySQL …

In light of the official Oracle acquisition of Sun, I dug out a presentation video I realize I never officially shared with either the MySQL or the Oracle community. It’s the presentation I did at the 2008 Oracle Open World conference called, “So, you want to be an Oracle ACE?” and is a good resource for anyone who wants to contribute to anything — not just Oracle or MySQL, though certainly it’s based on my experiences with contributing to MySQL.

Oracle has lots of resources for the community. While I have joked about Oracle calling its conference “Open World”, I have also experience it, and the Oracle community first-hand and second-hand — through professional contacts such as my colleagues at Pythian who work on Oracle databases, and also through personal contacts such as my mother who has been to a few Oracle conferences herself.

…

Earlier today Oracle executives, in an event spanning more than four hours, presented their strategy for integrating Sun's assets with Oracle. I'll just update readers on the section related to Sun's open source assets.

read more

Dear Kettle fans,

Daniel & I had a lot of fun in Orlando last week. Among other things we worked on the User Defined Java Class (UDJC) step.  If you have a bit of Java Experience, this step allows you to quickly write your own plugin in a step. This step is available in recent builds of Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) version 4.

Now, how does this work?  Well, let’s take Roland Bouman’s example : the calculation of the the date of Easter.  In this blog post, Roland explains how to calculate Easter in MySQL and Kettle using JavaScript.  OK, so what if you want this calculation to be really fast in Kettle?  Well, then you can turn to pure Java to do the job…

import …

Release 1.2.2 of Tungsten Clustering is available on SourceForge as well as through the Continuent website.  The release contains mostly bug fixes in the open source version but there are also two very significant improvements of interest to all users.

• The manager and monitoring capabilities of Tungsten are completely integrated on the same group communications channel.  This fixes a number of problems that caused data sources not to show up properly in older versions.  
• We are officially supporting a new Tungsten Connector capability for MySQL called pass-through mode, which allows us to proxy connections by transferring network blocks directly rather than translating native request protocol to JDBC calls.  Our tests show that it speeds up throughput by as much as 200% …

Both UNION and UNION ALL use a temporary table to buffer results from all branches of the query. The temporary table buffers all rows before any are returned to the client. For UNION, a unique index is created on the table. For UNION ALL, a unique index is not created. The HEAP (MEMORY) engine is used as long as there are no LOB columns.

The HEAP engine uses fixed length rows. For variable length columns each row allocates the max size per column so a lot of memory can be wasted. When the temp table gets too big, it is converted to a MyISAM table. The switch is done when the size of the table is min(max_heap_table_size, tmp_table_size) (I think that equation is right, wouldn't it be nice if it were simpler?).

In some cases UNION ALL can be used to …

Oracle closes Sun acquisition. The state of the union at Red Hat. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Oracle has completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

# Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst discussed the current State of the Union at Red Hat.

# Oracle told eWeek Java will be “business as usual”.

# CNet published Scott McNealy’s farewell email to Sun employees.

# The WSJ reported that Larry Ellison …

To whom it may concern,
A MySQL stored function to calculate easter day
I uploaded a MySQL forge snippet for the f_easter() function. You can use this function in MySQL statements to calculate easter sunday for any given year:

mysql>  select f_easter(year(now()));
+-----------------------+
| f_easter(year(now())) |
+-----------------------+
| 2010-04-04            |
+-----------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Anonymous Gregorian algorithm
To implement it, I simply transcribed the code of the "Anonymous Gregorian algorithm" from wikipedia's Computus article.

You might ask yourself: "how does …