One might have thought Microsoft was back rattling the patented software sabres against Linux and open source this week, reading some of the recent reports regarding Redmond’s patent infringement suit against automotive navigation and GPS player TomTom. However, upon further review, it seems that Microsoft is making a point to say that these suits are not aimed at the Linux OS or open source. In response to my own query, the company offered this:

First, to answer your earlier question on how the suit with TomTom involves the Linux Operating System, three of the infringed patents read on the Linux kernel as implemented by TomTom. However, open source software is not the focal point of this action. …

Question: “When I use procedure analyse() on my schema it suggests TINYINT for the columns which have the data type VARCHAR. Based on the performance and data requirements, which one is better?”

Answer: TINYTEXT and TINYINT and VARCHAR are quite different. For reference I would refer you to the mysql manual page about data types.

However, procedure analyse() will read the values you have in your columns and if they consistently fit a pattern that would be better suited to another data type then it will suggest the correct one. As in, if your column is VARCHAR(1) and your data is similar to “1,4,7,5,2″ etc then TINYINT would be a better suited data type since you are dealing with numbers and not variable characters. Similarly, if you have the same varchar column, but your data is “a,b,t,h,o” etc then TINYTEXT or CHAR would be better …

Today I gave my first MySQL University session as a speaker, talking about Backing up MySQL using file system snapshots. The talk went quite well (at least that was my impression) and we had ~10 people attending. The slides (PDF) and a recording of the session are now available from the Wiki page. Unfortunately the recording lacks the audio track, which is a bit of a bummer. We've submitted a support request with the DimDim folks, so hopefully they can provide us with a complete recording.

There was one question during the session that I was not able to answer myself, so I'm asking for your …

Shortly after I blogged about my upcoming talks and events, I got informed that one of my session proposals for the next09 conference was accepted. This event will take place in Hamburg, Germany on Tuesday and Wednesday (5th and 6th of May), so at least there isn't much travel involved.

My talk about "Working for a Virtual Company: How we do it at MySQL" has been scheduled for 9:00 am on Wednesday morning, parallel to a keynote by Brian Solis from FutureWorks. I'm not sure how many people will actually show up, but I look forward to giving a talk about a less …

The PBMS engine now works with Drizzle. Well actually it has been working with Drizzle for several months since I have been using Drizzle as my 'host' server while adding new features to the engine. I will tell you about the new features in future posts.
Hooks for a 'blobcontainer' type plug-in have been added to Drizzle that allow a plug-in to catch insert. update, or delete operations on BLOB columns in any table and handle the BLOB storage itself. The plug-in gets called above the storage engine level so it is independent of the storage engines. This is very similar to the way that PBMS works in MySQL 5.1 with engines other than PBXT where it uses triggers to perform the same function. But the way it is done with Drizzle is a lot more efficient.
So in Drizzle the PBMS engine is both a 'blobcontainer' plug-in as well as a storage engine. 
Surprisingly little needed to be done to the PBMS engine to get it to build with …

drizzle group - Identi.ca

Join us - you know you want to.

Keep up to date with what’s happenning in Drizzle land.

Doing something with Drizzle? just add “!drizzle” to your identi.ca update.

We had a great turnout for the Scaling MySQL Meetup last night. Chris had a pleasant surprise as he brought in Kevin Knapp as a co-speaker. We wanted to record the event, but due to technical difficulties with Webex, we … Continue reading →

I will be giving a webinar on march 9th about  common performance issues and how we in the MySQL Professional Services team go about fixing them.   So stop on by and say hi!  You can register here:

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-298.html

One of Denmark's largest banks, Jyske Bank, today announced that it has selected Sun's MySQL database to power its online banking product, Jyske Netbank Erhverv, in order to be able to serve a larger number of concurrent users, while improving the reliability and performance of its service.

I can’t stress enough that people look at SQL statements that are being executed against your production MySQL database, and you optimize queries when you can.

Often it’s the improvement to the large number of similar queries executed that can optimize resources. In this example, we take a very simple query, and by removing an unnecessary order by, we eliminate MySQL internally creating a temporary (in memory) table.

So what’s the big deal.

• The query is simpler to read and understand
• Memory required for the connection is not assigned
• A number of internal steps are no longer required (4 of 21 logging messages, not an ideal measurement, but an indication). In this case, it was easily a 10% performance improvement for each query.

This query is executed 10-100 times per second, so the improvement in performance is significant.

mysql> explain select max(mdate) …