What do you do when you're in a situation where you REALLY need your favorite Maatkit tools, but are not allowed to load software on the server running MySQL, AND you're not allowed to install software on the provided workstation, especially a workstation that's running software from a large corporation in Redmond? Portable Maatkit to the rescue!

DISCLAIMER: I've only tested a few maatkit tools, namely mk-find and mk-query-digest, but not completely. Some features and some tools may not function, such as mk-audit. Use your best judgment. I'm not responsible if your workstation or server looses all your data, your USB key bursts into flames, or your significant other leaves you. YMMV, use at YOUR OWN RISK!

Strawberry Perl has been out for some time now, and recently, a portable version of Strawberry Perl has been available. Download the the latest 5.10 version of …

I think many people truly realized how much they take the MySQL documentation for granted during the recent multi-hour outage from mysql.com’s data center. Apparently there is a lot of FUD floating around about the legality of mirroring the documentation, as presented by Justin Swanhart and asked by Mark Callaghan.

The manual page at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/copyright-mysql.html says:

You shall not publish or distribute this documentation in any form or on any media, except if you distribute the documentation in a manner similar to how Sun disseminates it (that is, electronically for download on a Web site with the software) or on a CD-ROM or similar medium, …

Well, I can tell you, I think the answer will a surprise to some of you. Do you like Greateful Dead? Hey, they are part of the story, at least according to some (I have research the subject by reading a bunch of books, but I have not myself interviewed anyone or done any actual research, but that said, I think my sources are credible).

The first real invention that brought things close to todays computers was the flip-flop in the 1920's, this set the scene for binary computers. But this flip-flop was electromechanical, made for relays and such, and although easier to work with than mechanical parts and pretty reliable, it was just to slow and complex, not to mention expensive.

So now we have digital computers, but still rather slow and clunky. We want electronic computers. But electronic in the 1930's and 1940's meant tubes. Which are WAY faster than relays, but a lot less reliable. Despite this, computers were built …

I'm not too hot on C++, I admit that, although I am hot on some of the advantages of C++! The way it is possible to program using a class as a"black box", where the developer of that "black box" decides what is public, what is protected and what is private.

The reason this is good thing is simple, it makes it possible to control what gets access in a complex datastructure, and how that is accessed, and that is determined by the developer of that complex datastructure, not the users. Without this, you would have to document what aspects of the structure should and can be used by anyone using it, and not even that might be enough, i.e. who needs to read the spec!

This is particularly important with Open Source software. If I work on an open source project and a simple C struct is available to me, I will use it. Hey, it's there and I can see it. And if there are any ill effects of using a particular member of the struct, …

Well .. management does!

Sun/MySQL executives have at many occasions made it clear that Windows is very important for them.
Jonathan Schwartz: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/winds_of_change_are_blowing
Robin Schumacher: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql_on_windows.html

This is a very clear signal from management! Windows is an important platform and it is important for MySQL too. And you will find similar statements from key executives of MySQL. But do MySQL developers care about the signals from their management? Not much! Management is farther away than a small town in Russia (Danish slang for ’something we need not care about’) and Windows users are at a small …

It is important to know and understand that while indexing columns in MySQL will generally improve performance, using the appropriate type of index can make a greater impact on performance.

There are four general index types to consider when creating an appropriate index to optimize SQL queries.

• Column Index
• Concatenated Index
• Covering Index
• Partial Index

For the purpose of this discussion I am excluding other specialized index types such as fulltext, spatial and hash in memory engine.

Example Table

For the following examples, I will use this test table structure.

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS t1;
CREATE TABLE t1(
  id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  user_name VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL,
  first_name VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
  last_name VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
  external_id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  country_id SMALLINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY(id)
) …

OpenSQLCamp 2009 is happening “in parallel to the Free and Open Source Conference 2009 (FrOSCon) on Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd August in St. Augustin, Germany …. close to Bonn and Cologne.”

I plan on being at FrOSCon and OpenSQLCamp. Where I go before and after that is up to *you*. Yes, that is right, perhaps I will visit a user group, such as France’s MySQL User Group. Or perhaps your company needs the type of services Pythian can offer — we can do the “traditional consulting” model where we look over your systems for performance tuning and security gains, or fix problems in an emergency. Even more of a win, we specialize in recurring engineering — we can supplement your existing IT staff with database expertise, and do all the database work your current …

I tried to go to mysql.com and Planet MySQL over my lunch break at OSCON 2009 to find the websites are down. Seems from conversions with fellow Drizzle colleagues this has been down for some time.

What does your site look like when your system is unavailable or down?

This is a question I ask clients. What redundancy do you have in place for DNS, for a site unavailable page, for a static copy of content?

I learned my first personal lesson several years ago when at The Planet, my server and 9,000 others were unavailable at least 40 hours due to explosion, fire at a data center. While I had copies of my site, and shared hosting options elsewhere, all DNS was also in the same unavailable data center. This was definitely a shortcoming of the Host Provider at the time.

For any commercial site, it is important that at …

Nice changes in this release. We have a lot of good changes including an advanced caching library, support for eaccelerator, support for memcached, an obfuscated client script to increase security, an optional compiled version of the client script for running on 64bit Fedora servers, as well as the usual bug fixes here and there. A full list of changes can be seen here: http://code.google.com/p/kontrollbase/source/list

As usual, you can download the new release here: http://kontrollsoft.com/software-downloads

I spoke to Daniel Abadi this morning about his HadoopDB announcement that came out a couple of days back.  I am sure this has been a busy time for Daniel and his team over in Yale as HadoopDB has been getting a lot of interest which I am sure will continue to build.

Some notes from our discussion:

• HadoopDB is primarily focused on high scalability and the required availability at scale.  Daniel questions current MPP’s ability to truly scale past 100 nodes whereas Hadoop has real examples on 3000+ nodes.
• HadoopDB like many MPP analytical database platforms uses shared nothing relational database as processing units. HadoopDB uses Postgres.  Unlike other MPP databases, HadoopDB uses Hadoop as the …