In the #maria IRC channel the other day I fielded a question someone had about a DATETIME column where they wanted to SELECT by the year. The answer (which is probably obvious to many of you) is to use the YEAR() function like so:

select * from t1 where YEAR(d) = 2011;

(The above assumes the table is named “t1” and the DATETIME column is named “d“.)

In my reply I provided a link to the Date and Time Functions section of the AskMonty Knowledgebase, but when I looked at the entry for the …

Disclaimer: the information in this post is the author’s personal opinion and is not the opinion or policy of his employer.

It was spring 2010 when we decided that even though Softlayer‘s server provisioning system is really great and it takes only a few hours to get a new server when we need it, it is still too long sometimes. We wanted to be able to scale up when needed and do it faster. It was especially critical because we were working hard on bringing up Facebook integration to our site and that project could have dramatically changed our application servers cloud capacity requirements.

What buzzword comes to your mind when we talk about scaling up really fast, sometimes within minutes, not hours or days? Exactly – cloud computing! So, after some initial testing and playing around with Softlayer’s (really young back then) cloud solution …

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on porting the per table and per session row stats from the tivo patch into mariadb. This is the show table_statistics functionality. I’ve been pushing the code to a branch on lanchpad as I get features working. Up to revision 2953 the row stats are working but the index stats aren’t. I think I have a reasonable implementation of the row stats code given my level of C++ skill. I’m changing the syntax a bit from how it worked in the tivo patch to make it be more compatible with how the original row stats code worked that was ported into mariadb.

In MariaDB 5.2 there are show table_statistics show index_statistics, and show user_statistics functions that return global stats collected by the server when …

I had a quick look at the source tree (I haven’t compiled it, just read the source – that’s what I do. I challenge any C/C++ compiler to keep up with my brain!) that’s got a tarball up on labs.mysql.com for the memcached interface to innodb. A few quick thoughts:

• Where’s the Bazaar tree on launchpad? I hate pulling tarballs, following the dev tree is much more interesting from a tech perspective (especially for early development releases). I note that the NDB memcached stuff is up on launchpad now, so yay there. I would love it if the InnoDB team in general was much more open with development, especially with having source trees up on launchpad.
• It embeds a copy of the memcached server engines branch into the MySQL tree. This is probably the correct way to go. There is no real sense in re-implementing the protocol and network stack (this is about half what memcached is anyway).
• The copy of the …

I tried to come up with a number of topics for this post, but none seemed to really convey what I really feel.. And really this blog is about all of them..

• A look at PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA.STAGES and PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA.STATEMENTS
• Graphing MySQL Statement Execution
• A MySQL visual EXPLAIN plan with PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA
• Tracing Sessions with PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA

If that doesn’t whet your appetite (and trust me, I need to, this post is long, but I feel is worth reading all the way to the end), then let me start out by asking the question:

Wouldn’t you like to be able to trace what a SQL statement did, either in the same or another session, on a production instance, after the fact? Wouldn’t you like to know where all of it’s time was spent, and some statistics on what it was doing specifically?

I know, …

Almost a year ago we launched the AskMonty Knowledgebase, a home for information on MariaDB and MySQL. When we launched, only employees had access to write articles, though anyone could ask a question. This was done for technical reasons. The good news is that that has changed, with the latest version we just pushed live, anyone with an account (or an open ID) can create and edit articles.

There is only so much content we can write so we want your contributions, from completely new articles to editing and improving what we already have. If you have questions on how to get started, you can join the Maria Docs group on launchpad and ask on the mailing list. Or you can jump into the #maria channel on Freenode …

This week, Sarah's off, and Sheeri interviews Brian Aker of Data Differential, mostly about the MySQL Ecosystem.

Among the topics discussed are whether the MySQL Ecosystem has peaked yet, the exciting talks coming up at the O'Reilly MySQL Conference including the state of the community keynote, and when the Drizzle software is going GA.

Some parts of the MySQL Ecosystem that were mentioned:
phpmyadmin
Percona Server
Percona free InnoDB hot backup tool

read more

As Hakan mentioned previously, the full text of SQL-99 Complete, Really by Peter Gulutzan and Trudy Pelzer, is now in the AskMonty.org Knowledgebase. Importing the text and formatting it for the Knowledgebase was a major project and I’m glad that it’s done.

Having the full text of this book freely available is a great thing for anyone who uses SQL because the book is about the SQL-99 standard and not about any particular database implementation. They do talk about different implementations, but those sections are clearly marked as such, and serve as examples of  how some databases implement (or diverge from) the standard.

The question now is: What’s …

OpenDatabaseCamp, also known as OpenSQLCamp - http://planet.mysql.com/entry/?id=26922 will be held in Sardinia, Italy on May 6-7-8, 2011.
Google Group for OurSQLCamp: http://groups.google.com/group/opensqlcamp

Manual chapter for subqueries in MySQL - http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/subqueries.html

The WorkLog entries for “subquery” http://forge.mysql.com/worklog/search.php?t=tds&k=subquery&v=0&s=0&p=0
All are low/medium priority. out of 29 worklog items, 9 are complete, almost all are scheduled for 6.0. Of the remaining 20, 1 is in progress, 4 are …

I was happy to see the announcement yesterday from Tokutek regarding their addition of MariaDB to their list of supported platforms for the TokuDB storage engine.

One particular item in the press release caught my eye: “Our customers are choosing MariaDB more and more frequently for their most demanding database applications.” We’ve added many new features over the past year in our various 5.1 and 5.2 releases, but beyond the new goodies we’ve focused a lot of energy on removing bugs and improving performance. We’ve known for a while that MariaDB is the …