I have always been a strong advocate of good testing of any system. I started on a project last year with Drizzle to produce coverage tests to facilitate verifying syntax and helping in comparison with MySQL.

From my extensive experience in code generation from the past 20 years, I produced about 3 years ago when at MySQL Professional Services a Java based solution with a small meta language to automated the creation of a large number of tests. At the time is was some 475 tests and 200k lines of mysql-test syntax when I first looked at validating the Nitro Storage Engine.

A number of issues with mysql-tests including the support of multiple storage engines had me last year write a Proposed Testing Protocol for Drizzle for further discussion. …

Some weeks ago Luke Kaines stated his observation that “requiring copyright attribution is a greater sin than providing commercial add-ons”.

His perspective was based on the theory that requiring copyright assignment restricts the developer community, a theory that was apparently repeated by Dave Neary during the recent OSBC event (I missed that session due to our CAOS client lunch).

Daniel Chalef of KnowledgeTree provided some evidence of Dave’s perspective and also the contrary view that the assignment of copyright is critical not just for vendor-dominated projects but also for community projects such as The Mozilla Foundation, The …

A new feature to MySQL Version 5 was the introduction of SQL_MODE to support STRICT… or TRADITIONAL values.

This feature enabled a closer compatibility to other RDBMS products. MySQL by default performs a number of silent data changes which do not help in providing a level of data integrity if you come from a more traditional background. MySQL by default represents these as warnings, while with an appropriate SQL_MODE, these are in turn treated as errors.

How does Drizzle handle this? Very simple. There is no SQL_MODE. By default Drizzle handling a strict mode of producing errors for any invalid data. The following are some test case examples showing the varying conditions.

Test Case

select version();
create database if not …

Despite the constant rumours on which alien ant lord will be our overlord (or even if there is an invasion coming) the rest of us at Sun and MySQL plod along doing our work and meeting our targets... so with that said, here I am in Ames, Iowa. Let me tell you, getting to this campus involved a grueling very crowded 7-hour bus ride from Chicago, I think I got seat-butt-itis. I am now 1800 miles away from San Francisco and down to less than two weeks and only eight universities.

The biggest student presentation yet was at Purdue University last Thursday. I'm sure the free food and giveaways had something to do with it as well as the excellent organizing skills of Rakesh Veeramacheneni -- a name to match my own, but hey I'm not going to complain, especially not when I get 76 students and professors with standing room only.

In total I have now presented and met over 230 students, staff and faculty on my first week and a bit …

The first quarter of 2009 was very good for MySQL Certifications. 496 Exams taken and 208 certifications earned. But in regards to the current economic problems, how does this compare?

Not too badly, as it turns out!

A new article is up on Database Journal where I discuss some query optimizations that work well with MySQL applications.Five Query Optimizations in MySQL 

By transparently sitting between client and server on each request, MySQL Proxy offers many possibilities for query manipulation.

Many are explored in the cookbook, and they even include a histogram recipe. Still, I wanted to learn more about the proxy while working on a script that would let me get some stats on the queries executed against a server (or group of servers).

First things first, get a brief glimpse of the lua programming language since that’s what the proxy’s scripts are written in. Alternatively, you can jump straight into the sample scripts, extrapolate what you don’t understand of the syntax by making paralelizations against other …

Thanks to Kay, it is now much easier to contribute to the MySQL Proxy project. And it turns out you don't have to be a super C developer to help out.
Yes, you may think, you can report bugs, help answering questions, even submit Lua scripts. But there is another way you can contribute.

Blueprints
You can check out the blueprints for the Proxy and pick one that seems "simple" to implement. That's what I did. I went there and picked " …

The Sunday before the MySQL User Conference is always full of trying to meet up with new or old friends, even if your flight lands after dinnertime. With that in mind, the very first event of the week is MySQL Camp’s “Games Day”.

From 12 noon until midnight on the Mezzanine of the Santa Clara Hyatt Hotel (adjoining the Santa Clara Convention Center), there will be an informal games day. The list of games that are definitely appearing are on the MySQL Forge at:

http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2009SundayNotes

There is still one game I would like to see appear (Set), though there is plenty to keep folks busy — board games, a puzzle, decks of cards, even building toys. I’ll probably be knitting, so if you are the crafty sort and can bring your craft with you that’s …

You could set this up simply by adding the no_proxy option to the .curlrc file of the MEM  user to make the change permanent. Remember that to turn off the proxy for all connections, you would use:

$ setenv  no_proxy  '*'