The MySQL Query Analyzer ("Quan") is designed to save development time on query coding and tuning by expanding on all of the good things found in the Slow Query Log, SHOW PROCESSLIST; EXPLAIN plan, and 5.1 profiler all with no dependence of any of these atomic things. To this end, we integrated Quan into the Enterprise Monitor so developers can monitor security, performance, availability AND all of their queries across all their MySQL servers from a single, consolidated view.

The MySQL manual for str_to_date states:
If str contains an illegal date, time, or datetime value, STR_TO_DATE() returns NULL. An
illegal value also produces a warning.

Surely "I'm_not_a_valid_date" is not a valid date, time or datetime value.

mysql> select str_to_date("I'm_not_a_valid_date","I'm_not_a_valid_date");
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| str_to_date("I'm_not_a_valid_date","I'm_not_a_valid_date") |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| 0000-00-00                                                 |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The problem here is that values in the format string which are not preceded by the percent sign (%) are treated as constant characters which must match the input string exactly. Normally these characters are used as delimiters. For example, …

My colleague Lenz might have forgotten to post before he disappeared on a well-deserved vacation but we've enabled Russian as a choice in PlanetMySQL. Feel free to start submitting your Russian language blogs.

Russian Language PlanetMySQL: http://ru.planet.mysql.com
New feed submissions: http://ru.planet.mysql.com/new

We haven't completely translated all the strings yet (that's my fault, I need to stringify the vote stuff) but we're getting there!

(EDIT: LenZ is not on vacation... in fact he is at PHPDay2009 in Verona, Italy... sorry LenZ)

Keep it. Make sure it gets correctly positioned in the coming months.

It appears that with the Oracle acquisition, the reason-to-exist for Falcon is regarded as gone (a non-Oracle-owned InnoDB replacement), previously seen as a strategic imperative - much delayed though.

But look, each engine has unique architectural aspects and thus a niche where it does particularly well. Given that Falcon exists, I’d suggest to not just “ditch it” but have it live as one of the pluggables. What Oracle will do to it is unknown, but Sun/MySQL can make sure of this positioning by making sure in the coming months that Falcon works in 5.1 as a pluggable engine, perhaps also creating a separate bzr project/tree for it on Launchpad.

Then the good work can find its way into the real world, now.

One interesting and useful paper on real-world concurrency by Bryan Cantrill and Jeff Bonwick.

Abstract: In this look at how concurrency affects practitioners in the real world, Cantrill and Bonwick argue that much of the anxiety over concurrency is unwarranted. Most developers who build typical MVC systems can leverage parallelism by combining pieces of already concurrent software such as database and operating systems (i.e., concurrency through architecture), rather than by writing multithreaded code themselves. And for those who actually must deal with threads and locks, the authors include a helpful list of best practices to help minimize the pain.

One interesting and useful paper on real-world concurrency by Bryan Cantrill and Jeff Bonwick.

Abstract: In this look at how concurrency affects practitioners in the real world, Cantrill and Bonwick argue that much of the anxiety over concurrency is unwarranted. Most developers who build typical MVC systems can leverage parallelism by combining pieces of already concurrent software such as database and operating systems (i.e., concurrency through architecture), rather than by writing multithreaded code themselves. And for those who actually must deal with threads and locks, the authors include a helpful list of best practices to help minimize the pain.

It been sometime since we benchmarked MySQL/Galera with sysbench, using it mostly for testing. Our recent visit to Percona Performance Conference showed that sysbench is probably most widely used tool for MySQL benchmarking in the community and besides it is the only benchmark I know that correctly measures response times. So I just gave it a shot with our 0.6 release.
I ran OLTP test on 1-4 large EC2 instances. At first I tried 100K row table and it was good except that the deadlock rate was too high to my taste:

nodes   users   trx/s   deadlks 95%lat
--------------------------------------
4       40      840     28.13   0.099
4       60      866     86.34   0.150
4       80      781     194.8   0.240

Note how deadlock rate escalates with the number of concurrent connections. But what is 100K rows by modern standards? Kids play. So I tried 1M rows. And it just shows that Galera cluster is cut for big tables:

In preparation for an upcoming demo, we decided to use Sphinx for the full text search. We want to do this with Drizzle but hit an obvious problem - Sphinx does not know how to speak to Drizzle to grab documents for indexing. At least that was the case until last night when I created a patch to do so using the new libdrizzle library.

You can download the patch here: sphinx-0.9.8.1-drizzle.patch

I’m releasing this patch BSD, so do with it what you want. I’m hoping Andrew (the Sphinx author) will include this in the main package in an upcoming release. :)

So for now, to get things working, we first need to patch the sphinx-0.9.8.1 source and build/install:

Slashdot news post from today: Monty is doing MySQL refactoring and doing MySQL alliance.
Oh come on... MySQL is a trademark by Sun, to start with. Monty's product is MariaDB. MySQL started refactoring half a year ago. Does a MySQL engineer have to explain this kind of things to a journalist?

The following was in the just released monthly bug report for the Falcon storage engine:

“With the news that Sun has aggreed to be purchaced by Oracle, Some inevitable changes will occur. Once the acquisition is made, the need for Falcon as a MySQL storage engine will be re-evaluated. Until then, Falcon will continue to improve stability and performance. The team will also evaluate other technical niches that may be unique to Falcon.”

I for one would be very disappointed to see Falcon not supported by Oracle. I know they have worked very hard to create a next-generation storage engine.  While it could be argued that InnoDB can fill all use cases, I believe that choices are a good thing and having one less choice is not a good thing.

Good luck all on the team. You have been nothing but kind and generous when answering my dumb questions via email and in person. You can count my vote for “keep it!!”.