For those of you that attended today’s webinar or for those of you who were unable to do so, we discussed and demo’ed many of the new exciting features in Workbench 5.2.

The presentation slides in pdf and audio are available –

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/display-od-472.html

If you are currently using MySQL Query Browser or MySQL Administrator, you’ll be pleased to know that their functionality is now in MySQL Workbench, creating a single, unified GUI for designing, developing and administering MySQL databases.

For more info visit:

• WB Downloads: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/
• WB Forums: …

I’ve previously talked about table metadata in Drizzle and how we use the table protobuf message to describe a table (see Drizzle FRM Replacement and others). The model in Drizzle is that the engine is responsible for its metadata. For schemas (you may be thinking ‘database’ but we’re moving to the Schema terminology in Drizzle) we also have a small amount of metadata.

The protobuf message is specified in drizzled/message/schema.proto and is incredibly short. In fact, here it is in its entirety:

Today, I twittered with Matthew Aslett from 451 group and pointed him to "Project Peter" which lead to a blog post by him (see tweet).

There's an interesting statement in his blog entry:

[...] on the theory that Oracle will not invest in the ongoing development of MySQL, which is something it has publicly committed to doing.

He links to an ad by Oracle. Come …

Peter took a look at Redis some time ago; and now, with the impending 1.2 release and a slew of new features, I thought it time to look again.

One of the more interesting features in 1.2 is the ability to operate in "append-only file persistence mode", meaning Redis has graduated from a semi-persistent to a fully-persistent system! Using the redis-benchmark script included, I ran the following command

./redis-benchmark

in five modes:

1 - In-Memory
I set "save 900000000 900000000" so nothing would be written to disk during the tests.
2 - Semi-Persistent
I set "save 1 1" so that changes would be flushed to disk every second (assuming there was at least one change the previous second).
…

Looking for instances particular column in a large schema can be a pain. Fortunately the information schema makes this pretty easy, if your columns have a consistent naming convention.

SELECT table_schema, table_name, column_name
FROM information_schema.columns
WHERE column_name LIKE '%some_name%';

Now, if we want to wrap this up into an easy to use stored procedure, we can do something like this:

drop procedure find_column;
delimiter //
CREATE PROCEDURE find_column(c varchar(255))
begin
        SET @a = CONCAT("%", c, "%");
        SELECT table_schema, table_name, column_name, column_type
                FROM information_schema.columns
                WHERE column_name LIKE @a;
end
//
delimiter ;

We need to use the concat statement in order to properly get the quotes in there without using the literal string “c” in the LIKE statement.

You can do a search as follows:

CALL …

Matt Asay is right, in my opinion, to point out the inherent bias in the case Monty Widenius et al have made against Oracle’s potential ownership of MySQL. I would go further, however, in stating that the case being made against Oracle is flawed by the fact that it is so self-serving. For instance:

• I previously noted that the Widenius/Mueller case against Oracle owning Sun/MySQL is entirely dependent on the theory that Oracle will not invest in the ongoing development of MySQL, which is something it has publicly committed to doing.

• The case against Oracle owning Sun is also based on the theory …

Doing some performance testing on some modern hardware comparing Innodb plugin 1.0.4 with stock Innodb. I'm running a sysbench transactions test (reads and writes) with 200M rows in my table (table size is around 46G, RAM is 16G, buffer pool is set to 12G).

I was puzzled to see the innodb plugin to be decent, but not really as great as I expected, I was doing about ~6100 RW operations a second (individual statements within transactions). Then I compared it to the stock innodb and shockingly I got ~7K ops. I thought about what I tuned that was different in the plugin and came up with the innodb_io_capacity.

read more

clus·te·ri·ous |ˈkləstərēəs;|
adjective
highly pleasant to MySQL Support Engineers: A clusterious issue a day, keeps the spouse away.
· clusterful : a hard day.

DERIVATIVES
clusteriously adverb
clusteriousness noun

ORIGIN MySQL Support Team: via Sun Microsystems.

Clusterious
noun
a rare variety of MySQL Support Engineers originally cultivated in Sweden.

Whenever any maintenance needs server restarts, there’s a list of unsolved bottlenecks or inefficient code that gets touched a lot at that time. I can understand that heating up the server can take lots of time (though lots of low hanging fruits there), but the way actual shutdown is done, even if there’s not much of dirty data to flush, sucks.

See, developers are perfectionists, and their perfectionism also includes the crazy idea that all memory has to be deallocated at server shutdown, as otherwise Valgrind and other tools will complain that someone leaked memory. Developers will write expensive code in shutdown routines that will traverse every memory structure and deallocate/free() it.

Now, guess what would happen if they wouldn’t write all this expensive memory deallocation code.

Still guessing?

OS would do it for them, much much much faster, without blocking the shutdown for minutes or using …

1. Scriblio -- open source CMS and catalogue built on WordPress, with faceted search and browse. (via titine on Delicious)
2. Useful Temporal Functions and Queries -- SQL tricksies for those working with timeseries data. (via mbiddulph on Delicious)
3. Optimal Starting Prices for Negotiations and Auctions --Mind Hacks discussion of a research paper on whether high or low initial prices lead to higher price outcomes in negotiations and online auctions. Many negotiation books recommend waiting for the other side to …