0.7.0 is (finally) around the corner. We are only pushing some last minute build-fixes, but otherwise we are done.

If you want to help us getting a good 0.7.0 release out, please test the snapshot RPMs we did build with the help of OpenSuSEs build-service.

At http://software.opensuse.org/search?baseproject=ALL&p=1&q=mysql-proxy-snapshot you will always find the latest snaptshot packages that we build from the latest launchpad code (everything > r640 is current). We have native binaries for Fedora 9 and 10 and OpenSuSE 11.0 and 11.1 right now.

If everything goes well, we should have a 0.7.0 release …

The break-up of the MySQL codeline is finally attracting attention from polite society outside the open source database community. This attention has been accompanied by much speculation, some of it informed and some not so informed about what is driving the split. Since everyone else is chipping in theories about how and why, here's mine:

It's the economy, stupid.

First, MySQL AB seeded a huge market for the MySQL database. MySQL 5.1 for …

Yes we are still plugging away working on Waffle Grid, in fact I am testing the heck out of the plugin release this week. Some good news, great news, and bad news to report.

The good news on the testing is using the new Waffle Grid release, I am able to consistently get up close to 15K TPM, that’s up from 3K TPM without WaffleGrid ( 5x increase woohoo! ). This performance boost holds true through several tests, and based on this testing I am working on a set of recommended parameters for getting the most performance out of Waffle. I should have my recommendations for our User Conference presentation.

The great news is I have been able to get close to 20K TPM by disabling the read-ahead! This represents a huge boost in performance, over both the read-ahead enabled and the non-waffle tests. The bad news is in extended tests with the read-ahead disabled the plugin version takes a crap on me and consistently dies about 22-24 minutes …

We are pleased to announce the release of a new feature that you've been eagerly anticipating for some time now : the ability to increase the size of your disks!

You will need to perform two steps to do this:

1. Change the volume of your disk,
2. Run the necessary update on the file system itself.

This operation is totally automated for servers running under Gandi AI,  though it's only possible to do this on data disks for the moment.

For expert servers, only the volume change phase of the operation is done via our website. You will need to manually run the file system update on your own.

Please remember that you will need to have enough quota available in your account to expand your disk to the desired size.

You can view our prices at the following page: …

Here’s a little something that might trip you up occasionally. Have a look at this test scenario:

USE test;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS a;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS b;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS c;
 
CREATE TABLE a ( a INT );
CREATE TABLE b ( b INT );
CREATE TABLE c ( c INT );
 
SELECT a.a FROM a LEFT JOIN c ON c.c = a.a; -- Q1
SELECT a.a FROM a, b LEFT JOIN c ON c.c = a.a; -- Q2

Q1 and Q2 will produce the same result, right? Wrong! As of MySQL 5.0.12, per the SQL standard, JOIN has had higher precedence than comma ‘,’.

So, you get the following:

mysql> SELECT a.a FROM a LEFT JOIN c ON c.c = a.a;
Empty set (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> SELECT a.a FROM a, b LEFT JOIN c ON c.c = a.a;
ERROR 1054 (42S22): Unknown column 'a.a' in 'on clause'

This is because, in earlier versions, MySQL interpreted it as ( ( a, b ) LEFT JOIN c ). Now, it interprets this syntax as ( a, ( b LEFT JOIN c ) ). If you run into this problem, the fix is easy. …

Yesterday I started to say what the status is for “Globalization” tasks.
Today I continue.

Worklog WL#1875 Case insensitive Czech collation
Status: not passed architecture review
Version = 6.1
This fills a minor gap, since our Czech collations for the cp1250 and latin2 character sets are case sensitive.
This task adds appropriate _ci (case insensitive) collations.

WL#2555 Standard Japanese collation support
Status: not passed architecture review
Version = 6.x
JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard) JIS X 4061-1996 specifies a standard collation for Japanese characters, with multiple levels and special rules.

WL#2673 Unicode Collation Algorithm new version
Status: passed architecture review 2009-03-23
Version = 6.x
MySQL is using Version 4.0.0 of the UCA (Unicode Collation Algorithm). That’s superseded. We’ll make new collations for the more …

MySQL Sandbox is a great tool for quickly deploying test MySQL instances, particularly if your daily work involves diagnosing problems across multiple MySQL versions.

Once you’ve downloaded it, it needs no installation. Just have a few MySQL binary releases at hand, and begin creating sandboxes in just a few seconds:

./make_sandbox mysql-5.0.77-linux-x86_64-glibc23.tar.gz

or

./make_sandbox mysql-5.1.32-linux-x86_64-glibc23.tar.gz

Pretty simple, huh?

Suppose you have a parallel build around, say, 5.0.77-percona-highperf. The default syntax won’t work if you’ve already created a 5.0.77 sandbox, since Sandbox will use ‘5.0.77′ as the sandbox dir. In this case, you’ll need to manually specify a directory name:

./make_sandbox mysql-5.0.77-percona-highperf-b13.tar.gz -d msb_percona_5_0_77

Fortunately, …

Over the past week, I've been refactoring the way that the Drizzle kernel communicates with plugin modules that wish to implement functionality related to replication. There are many, many potholes in the current way that row-based replication works in Drizzle, and my refactoring efforts were solely focused on three things:

• Make an interface for replicating actions which occur inside a server that is clear and simple to understand for the caller or the interface
• Make an interface that uses only documented data structures and standardized containers.
• Completely remove the notion that logging is tightly-coupled with replication.

Let me expand on these two goals, and why they are critical to the success of a replication architecture.

Simple, Clear Interfaces Designed for the Interface Caller …

I have found that MySQL RANGE partitions on the primary key are a great way to achieve scale for insert-heavy InnoDB tables.  I have used this to maintain an excellent and predictable insert rate, to avoid some of the well documented problems with insert performance as table sizes grow (especially with large/many secondary indexes).  In addition purging old data is fast and non-blocking because you can just DROP PARTITION as a single very fast operation.

However, MySQL partitioning brings up an interesting little issue when you exceed the space you initially allocate for your partitions.  Here in our sample table we define 4 partitions to handle 100M records, and everything after that will fall into the “pmx” bucket.


CREATE TABLE partition_test (
`id` int unsigned primary key auto_increment,
`payload` varchar(35) not null default '',
`stamp` timestamp default current_timestamp on …

When we think about how government uses geographic information, we tend to think about USGS maps or census data, very centralized and preplanned projects meant to produce a very specific set of products. But Development Seed believes that there is a lot more that could be done if these types of data could be mashed up easily with each other as well as with alternate sources such as social networks. Eric Gunderson, President of Development Seed, will be speaking at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in June, and he recently took some time to speak to us about the potential benefits that open access to government data brings.

James Turner: Can you start by talking a bit about Development Seed and how you came to be involved with it?

EG: We're a strategy organization in Washington, D.C., and what …