There is a raft of new Tungsten open source builds available for your replication and clustering pleasure. Over the last couple of days we uploaded new binary builds for Tungsten Replicator, Tungsten Connector, Tungsten Monitor, and Tungsten SQL Router. These contain the features described in my previous blog article, including even more bug fixes ( …

This isn’t news anymore - it has been over a month - but it would be odd not to mention this all, so here it goes: at the start of May I’ve left Sun Microsystems and joined Monty’s company.

The setup at Monty Program AB is quite similar - we have an IRC channel (#maria on FreeNode), a mailing list, bazaar trees on launchpad, Worklog and a Buildbot installation. It’s actually more open than at Sun/MySQL. At Sun, everyone is on internal IRC, external public can only see a subset of Worklog (the biggest problem with it is that it’s not possible to subscribe to …

Seen in #maatkit on Freenode: I never realized just how terrible recovering MyISAM from a crash can be Sad but true – it can be pretty painful. This is one of the reasons I pretty much recommend InnoDB (okay, okay, XtraDB) for most data unless it’s read-only.

Hi again!

Just a moment ago, I read this post by Peter Gulutzan. In this post, Peter explains a little trick that allows you to capture the SQL state in a variable whenever an error occurs in your MySQL stored routine code.MySQL CONDITIONs and HANDLERsFor the uninitiated: in MySQL stored routines, you can declare HANDLERs which are pieces of code that are executed only in case a particular CONDITION occurs. This device serves the same purpose …

If you receive a 1045 error, you may need to reset your password.  Here are the official instructions for resetting the password: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/resetting-permissions.html

If you find these instructions confusing, here’s another method.  

1.  Find the my.ini file (my.cnf for linux).  On windows, the my.ini file is typically in your install directory: c:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.1\my.ini   Open the file with notepad (or any text editor) and add the following entry under the [mysqld] section:

skip-grant-tables

Then, save the file and restart the MySQL service.  This has disabled the grant tables so you should be able to log into mysql without any password ( no more 1045 errors ).  Now, we need to reset the password.  

2.  Log …

I just filed a very annoying bug when trying to compile with plugin engines using the 5.1.xx source tarball.

Description

I am trying to test SphinxSE as a plugin instead of getting it statically linked and came across an annoying bug. When using the configure --with-plugins option only once, the engine is statically linked. When using it twice, the first engine is created as a plugin, and the 2nd one is linked statically. Here are a couple of examples:./configure –prefix=/usr/local/mysql-5.1.33 –with-plugins=innobase –with-plugins=sphinx

plugin_innobase_shared_target='ha_innodb.la'   <-- plugin
plugin_innobase_static_target=''
plugin_sphinx_shared_target=''
plugin_sphinx_static_target='libsphinx.a'       <-- static
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql-5.1.33 --with-plugins=sphinx …

OK, you’ve released your open source product and built a huge userbase. Now your shareholders/investors are pressing you to monetize that userbase. How do you do it? There are many ways to monetize open source. For simplicity, let’s segment the revenue sources according to who is paying:

Users :
Your users probably downloaded your product for free. Some are willing to pay for certified/approved distributions, maintenance, updates, support and more. Because open source turns your product and services into commodities, you will need to leverage your brand, and the expertise that it embodies, to maintain premium pricing.

Another good revenue source is certified education. If you’ve built a large userbase, businesses clearly see value in your product. As a result, employees and job-seekers will enhance their personal value and marketability if they are certified experts with your product. Assemble copyrighted educational …

One missing feature in our stored procedures and functions is that, if there’s an exception (error), you don’t know the error number or sqlstate or error message. The plan is there, of course, WL#2111 Stored Procedures: Implement GET DIAGNOSTICS but I haven’t ticked the architecture review box, and the best prospect for a volunteer is busy with performance schema work.

However, there is a way to get this in the next MySQL 5.4 (which is called mysql-next on launchpad and which will almost certainly become the September milestone). Use RESIGNAL.

For space reasons I’m only going to illustrate how to do this to find out the SQLSTATE. I think bright souls will realize it’s simple, though tedious, to extend this so you can get the error number too.

I …

Today’s trivial MySQL system variable:

old_alter_table

The interesting bit is that this is a system variable, and shows up in SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES, but is not documented on the Server System Variables manual page.

Instead, it is documented on the manual page for Server options.

Unfortunately, that documentation is very sparse. It tells us:

old-alter-table is an option that can be set in an option file (such as /etc/my.cnf)

old_alter_table is the name of the variable.

And….that’s it. It is neither a system nor status variable, there is no scope, and no entry for whether or not it is dynamic. These last 2 are baffling, though they show up in other variables in the …

OK, you’ve released your open source product and built a huge userbase. Now your shareholders/investors are pressing you to monetize that userbase. How do you do it? There are many ways to monetize open source. For simplicity, let’s segment the revenue sources according to who is paying:

Users :
Your users probably downloaded your product for free. Some are willing to pay for certified/approved distributions, maintenance, updates, support and more. Because open source turns your product and services into commodities, you will need to leverage your brand, and the expertise that it embodies, to maintain premium pricing.

Another good revenue source is certified education. If you’ve built a large userbase, businesses clearly see value in your product. As a result, employees and job-seekers will enhance their personal value and marketability if they are certified experts with your product. Assemble copyrighted educational …