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 …

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 [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 …

One of the cooler things has been worked on in libmemcached lately is the ability to tinkertoy up Memcached servers.

What does that mean?

There are a lot of forks of memcached. Some commercial, some open source, some that are in house at a variety of companies. They all share a few common concepts though.

Protocol
Scale Out

The recognition of this lead me to want to create a set of libraries that anyone, could use to build these types of servers quickly. After talking to a number of vendors and users it became pretty apparent that something like this needed to be done. The goal is to make it easy for people to write protocol compatible servers in a way that they can focus on the …

I had trouble today on a client site using my MySQL power tools Maatkit and Statpack.

$ ~/scripts/statpack.py --files=mysql.status.091015.080001.txt,mysql.status.091015.090001.txt
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/rbradfor/scripts/statpack.py", line 563, in ?
    main()
  File "/home/rbradfor/scripts/statpack.py", line 527, in main
    locale.setlocale(locale.LC_NUMERIC, '')
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/locale.py", line 381, in setlocale
    return _setlocale(category, locale)
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting

$ cat /var/log/slow-query.log | ./mk-query-digest
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LANG = "e_US"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard …

Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 11.1 (LAMP)

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an OpenSUSE 11.1 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.