Please note: I also reviewed a newer edition of this book.

I've been using phpMyAdmin since... Hmmm... Well... The times before I used to code in PHP. So when offered to review Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 by Marc Deslisle, I didn't expected to learn anything new, but I was bwrong.

The book is full of information for all kinds of users from beginner to professional. I only gallopped through the first chapters covering setup, basic usage etc. while luckily not covering basic SQL topics, so if you are new to phpMyAdmin and know basic SQL, this book may be the right one for you. Since phpMyAdmin has evolved in the last years and is still evolving, …

Everyone's favorite MySQL load relief system, memcached, has just hit the next major stable release: 1.4.0

This release sports a new binary protocol, major performance improvements, and many new statistics. Major kudos to the work of other people (Trond, Dustin, Toru) who put most of the effort into this new release.

Check out the release notes and give it a shot on your site. Please let us know if you've deployed it and any feedback you might have :)

Everyone's favorite MySQL load relief system, memcached, has just hit the next major stable release: 1.4.0

This release sports a new binary protocol, major performance improvements, and many new statistics. Major kudos to the work of other people (Trond, Dustin, Toru) who put most of the effort into this new release.

Check out the release notes and give it a shot on your site. Please let us know if you've deployed it and any feedback you might have :)

Prior to updating pages in place, InnoDB writes the data to a sequential log. If there is a crash when the pages are updated in place the writes are replayed using the data from the sequential log. Note that this log is space reserved in the system tablespace and is not the InnoDB transaction log. This guards against partial page writes (torn pages, fractured writes).

This feature has a cost. Is it needed? I am not an expert on Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server but I don't think they have anything equivalent to this. All of them can detect partial page writes by storing a checksum on each disk page or by storing a counter at the start and end of the page. But how do they recover from partial page writes?

The real problem that must be solved is recovery from anything that may cause page corruption on disk. There are many sources of corruption and I think that partial page writes are far from the most frequent. Oracle provides tools that can …

Since I have been a home recently, I put some time correcting bugs in WaffleGrid and adding new features. Thanks to gdb, I have been able to understand a silly bug that was affecting WaffleGrid with sysbench but, weird enough, not with dbt2. Everything is in the way connections are established. I will blog more about that soon.

Regarding the new features, it is now possible to choose which tables you want to push to memcached. For that purpose, two new parameters have been introduce:

innodb_memcached_table_filter_enable = 0 | 1   (default to 0)

to enable the filtering and

innodb_memcached_table_list = db1/table1,db2/table2   

to list the tables. This feature is filtering based on the space id so, innodb_file_per_table has to be set. Right now, the association table space_id is done only at startup so, the table has to exist. Also, since an alter table change the space_id… you need to restart MySQL …

Now that I have your attention, this is actually an update to my last post.  In about four hours I have an interview with Brian Aker for the new podcast I am putting together in conjunction with Open Source Database Magazine.  While I have enough questions for a good interview, I am always looking for more possibilities. Yesterday I said I would randomly choose a name from people who emailed me or commented on the post with a question for Brian about Drizzle and the winner would receive a free copy of MySQL Administrator’s Bible. While I have received some response, it has not been overwhelming. So here is your last chance!! Send me an email (bmurphy AT …

I was yesterday, for the second time, on a call with the US Department Of Justice regarding how the Oracle / Sun deal could affect Open Source software, in particular MySQL and Java.

I told them that I still think that my original scenarios from April are still valid. What has been worrying me lately is that Oracle has been quite vocal regarding their plans for most things related to the deal, like Sun hardware and Java, but has not said anything related to their plans regarding MySQL.

During the MySQL conference and at other conferences afterwards I have been approached by numerous MySQL users that have been very worried about the future of MySQL. From this it's clear that most MySQL users are very interested to know what Oracle is up to, but those that have tried to inquire Oracle about this, myself included, have …

Prometric is beginning to offer the MySQL Exams as part of the Sun catalog. Currently only the Associate and Developer exams are listed but the DBA 5.0 and cluster exams are on the way.

I find myself …

I was randomly browsing for some stuff and I stumbled across this post on binary literals. It proposed the following as an option for C++ which the article admits as being inefficient:unsigned long const mask = std::bitset<6>(std::string("111100")).to_ulong();I was thinking that C++ templates must be able to offer something more efficient...template <int N>struct Binary{ enum { value = Binary

In one of the servers we have an issue that happens to one of the servers that some itemsthat have the status of "freeing items" and "Sending data" are just stuck there, causing alot of locks on the server, and the load of the server drops to almost 0.The server then wouldn't restart, and the only solution is to kill the mysqld process, andfix the crashed tables that result from the kill.How to