When I was younger and had lots of free time, I used to do video editing as a hobby. At that time I developed a rule that is true for many projects in general (it was also true for writing a book some years later). The rule is: When you think you are 90% done, you are only 50% done. With video-editing, this meant that when the video was more or less ready, you are still 50% away from the final goal of actually having a master copy on tape. The latter 50% would be spent on checking ending credits, watching through the video a couple of times, and in those time, rendering even simplest of effects. Using a Windows PC for video editing was in those times a shaky effort in itself, so even when mastering you had to sit there and watch through the whole tape to make sure there were no glitches.

Producing a MariaDB release has been a similar process. In our company meeting in August we were discussing "final steps" to produce a final Beta, …

Changes (as compared to 8.14) include:

Features:
* Added an option to execute SHOW WARNINGS automatically if the ‘warning-count’ is not 0. The output will appear in MESSAGES tab. Note: this is not implemented for HTTP-tunneling.
* Improved the memory handling in GRIDS with BLOB/TEXT columns. This fixes some slugginess when scrolling a GRID containing such data.

Bug Fixes:
* A dump containing VIEWs created on an early 5.0-server could fail to restore on recent servers. The underlying reason is a bug with the ‘default’ column in the output of SHOW FULL FIELDS on the early 5.0 servers. But we can avoid using this information and this is what we did now.
* Copy database/table from a 3.x or 4.0 server to a more recent server failed with column names containing special characters.
* If a sqlyog.ini files exists in installation folder it should …

Olio0.2 is comming

Olio0.2 is comming

Dear Commissioner Kroes,

Last week, former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos wrote you a letter urging approval of Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems1, asserting that Oracle’s ownership of MySQL (as part of the Sun acquisition) will increase competition in the market.

As a long-time MySQL user, a former MySQL AB staff member2 and a participant in or consultant to a wide range of other open source and free software projects3, I found Mårten’s conclusion to be optimistic at best.

Oracle’s ownership of MySQL will lead to what the commission fears – greater costs and less choice in the DBMS market.

In making this point, I’ll challenge the three …

My recent poll What alert monitoring do you use? showed 25% of the 58 respondents to bravely state they had no MySQL monitoring. I see 1 in 3, ~33% in my consulting so this is consistent.

There is no excuse to not have some MySQL Monitoring on your production system. At the worse case, you should be logging important MySQL information for later analysis. I use my own Logging and Analyzing scripts on every client for an immediate assessment regardless of what’s available. I combine that with my modified statpack to give me immediate text based analysis, broken down by hour chunks for quick reference. These help me in troubleshooting, but they are …

In one of my previous posts I was writing about how to read other processes memory [1]. As an example I tried to get the value of the hard coded MySQL internal InnoDB variable spin_wait_delay (srv_spin_wait_delay).

In this example we were using gdb or the operating system ptrace function to retrieve this value. This method has the disadvantage that it is pretty invasive.

When I was working on a customer support case I had the idea to solve this by the much less invasive method of User-Defined Functions (UDF).

UDF were introduced in MySQL 5.0 3.23 [2]. They provide the feasibility to enlarge the MySQL functionality by adding external code.

The clue is now that you also can use this external code to do some MySQL internal stuff.

My idea was …

All to often people force themselves into using a database like MySQL with no thought into whether if its the best solution to there problem. Why?  Because their other applications use it, so why not the new application?  Over the past couple of months I have been doing a ton of work for clients who use their database like most people use memcached .  Lookup a row based on a key, update the data in the row, stuff the row back in the database.  Rinse and repeat.  Sure these setups vary sometimes, throwing in a “lookup” via username, or even the rare count.  But for the most part they are designed to be simple.

A classic example is a simple online game.  An online game may only require that an application retrieve a single record from the database.  The record may contain all the vital stats for the game, be updated and stuffed back into the database.  You would be surprised how many people use …

Thanks for everyone that attended today's webinar, "MySQL for the SQL Server DBA"...we had a great turnout and lots of great questions!

As I mentioned, the slides and a playback file will be made available here shortly

I think one area that begs a more in-depth look is MySQL Replication and how it can be used as a replacement or building block for creating similar setups like SQL Server Replication, Log Shipping, Database Mirroring or Windows Failover Clustering.

Our schedule is pretty tight for the next few weeks, er months...but we'll see about squeezing it in somewhere.

In regards to using MySQL w/ Windows Failover Clustering, we do have a paper that walks you through the fundamentals here. But, we will go deeper on …

This probably won't be a very well written post since I am working frantically on a proof of concept using Pentaho Data Integration / Kettle for the etl in a new data warehouse project. I have just a couple days to get it to work or I'll end up having to use perl...which will make me hurl.

I want to use a mysql stored procedure for the transformation input, which is easy to do with the "Table Input" step ( just CALL the stored proc in the SQL section), but the field names of the result set don't show up downstream in subsequent steps. When I right click on a downstream step and select "show input fields", an "I Can't find any fields" messagebox pops up.

Some may find this a minor annoyance, but it makes subsequent steps difficult to deal with if you cant visualize the structure of the data stream in the transformation.

I saw some posts recommending the use of a "Select Values" Step, but for some reason, I …