Following my recent blogg on the performance of MariaDB and PBXT on Windows showed that these new kids still has some work to do. Another question I was thinking testing was if the overhead of Transactions really matters, they do have a performance advantage also (like: You don't have to persist until the transaction is done), and so does row-level locking. And what about Linux? We could see that MariaDB on Windows was less than optimal, maybe this was a Windows problem. And finally, the Windows box I was testing on was a real old clunky box.

Hardware setup
So now, here are the results on a Linux box with a 4 Core AMD CPU and 4Gb of memory. Still not an exceptional box, but a decent one.

The first test on Linux
Again, all engines have the default settings, no tuning has been done at …

There are 2 different possible situations you can face when you have to deal with MySQL and syslog:

1. MySQL is used as back-end for syslog to store the logging information. [6]
2. MySQL itself should report to the syslog.

In this blog article we look at the second situation: How can you make MySQL reporting to the syslog.

Since the version 5.1.20 MySQL is capable to log to the syslog [1], [2]. This is done by the MySQL angel process mysqld_safe.

You can enable the syslog when you add the syslog parameter to the MySQL configuration file (my.cnf) in the mysqld_safe section:

[mysqld_safe]
syslog

Currently MySQL is not capable to log to more than one logging facility at the same time. So you have to decide if you want to log either to the error log or to the syslog.

If you specify both, syslog and error-log, at …

There are 2 different possible situations you can face when you have to deal with MySQL and syslog:

1. MySQL is used as back-end for syslog to store the logging information. [6]
2. MySQL itself should report to the syslog.

In this blog article we look at the second situation: How can you make MySQL reporting to the syslog.

Since the version 5.1.20 MySQL is capable to log to the syslog [1], [2]. This is done by the MySQL angel process mysqld_safe.

You can enable the syslog when you add the syslog parameter to the MySQL configuration file (my.cnf) in the mysqld_safe section:

 [mysqld_safe]
 syslog

Currently MySQL is not capable to log to more than one logging facility at the same time. So you have to decide if you want to log either to the error log or to the syslog.

If you specify both, syslog and error-log, at the …

We are pleased to announce the availability of the 0.9.5.4 beta release of InfiniDB Community Edition.  This is our second beta release and is not recommended for production work.

This release includes a number of bug fixes that you can see at http://bugs.launchpad.net/infinidb.  Here are a few items of note that we have included in this release after valuable feedback from the community:

Increased maximum length allowed for char and varchar colRead More...

We are pleased to announce the availability of the 0.9.5.4 beta release of InfiniDB Community Edition.  This is our second beta release and is not recommended for production work.

This release includes a number of bug fixes that you can see at http://bugs.launchpad.net/infinidb.  Here are a few items of note that we have included in this release after valuable feedback from the community:

Increased maximum length allowed for char and varchar colRead More...

MySQL requires special consideration in the Oracle+Sun merger, otherwise both Oracle and MySQL users and vendors will literally pay the price. If you agree, please sign this petition now.

To be very clear, Open Query is in favour of the merger, we feel that overall it’s a good fit. We would also like to see it happen quickly, as obviously this is best for Sun employees and clients, as well as Oracle’s broad business prospects.  Read more

I've talked about this before, but I think it bears repeating as we enter a new year. Sun has still not released the MySQL documentation under the GPL license, or any other free license. It's still not legal to modify and republish the database documentation. This hurts projects like XtraDB, MariaDB, Kickfire, Infobright and other companies which either have forked the GPL licensed version of MySQL, or entered into a proprietary license agreement with Sun.

These companies can't update the documentation to reflect the changes and enhancements which they have made to MySQL. I can't take the docs and publish changes or annotations without violating the license agreement for the docs.

If Sun wants to claim that MySQL is true open source then they must open source the documentation. If Oracle wants to claim that there is plenty of competition in the database market, they should be forced to open source the documentation. …

Over three years ago I wrote about how you cannot use a stored procedure in a subquery. Well, it’s 2010, and I’m still annoyed by this and a handful of other things.

I was just working today on a report consisting of a series of queries, taking about a minute to generate. Some of the data would be created in a temporary table and queried against multiple times for performance reasons, and ultimately spit out into a CSV file for someone to examine later. I also would like to be able to return the result set, and perform queries on it, which is much faster than querying a view.

Fortunately, MySQL’s awesome SELECT … INTO OUTFILE can easily write CSV files to disk, so I’m covered there.

So when I …

In our last installment we found our hero investigating the tracing changes found in Connector/Net 6.2.  This time we’ll take a closer look at the format of the trace data and how developers can use that information to write new and interesting trace listeners.

Understanding the plumbing

The first thing we need to understand is a little about how the trace messages are routed.  The main method we are interested in is TraceSource.TraceEvent.  Here is the signature.

public void TraceEvent(
    TraceEventType eventType,
    int id,
    string format,
    params Object[] args
)

All the other TraceSource methods like TraceInformation eventually boil down to a call to …

For years, Connector/Net has been a key part of any MySQL & .NET developer’s toolbox.  Tracing is also a key part of a developer’s life and Connector/Net has always output trace messages. 

This first post is a review of .NET tracing systems and how we changed our trace output.  The second post will cover how developers can use the new tracing format to develop new applications.

Tracing in .NET 1.x

.NET shipped with a very simple tracing system.  You have a static class named Trace that has static methods such as Write and WriteLine.  An application can use code like the following to output a message to the trace log. 

Now that we have output our message, how do we direct it somewhere?  You do that with listeners.  There are a few standard listeners included in the framework (ConsoleTraceListener, XmlTraceListener, EventLogTraceListener) but you are …