MySQL by default is vary lax with data validation. Silent conversions is a concept that is not a common practice in other databases. In MySQL, instead of throwing an error, a warning was thrown and many applications simply did not handle warnings. With the introduction of sql_mode=STRICT_ALL_TABLES (or TRADITIONAL), in MySQL 5, a better level of validation now exists.

My understanding was that Warnings are now thrown as Errors, therefore eliminating the need to do a SHOW WARNINGS to confirm any problems after every query (this is a performance overhead on a high volume system due to the round trip latency).

However I found an instance where MySQL in STRICT Mode still throws warnings, leading to the question, are there any other areas, and does the earlier statement “Warnings are now thrown as Errors” hold true.

Here is my seeding process to showing the problem.

mysql> create table i(i tinyint, unique key( …

I've been working as a Ruby on Rails developer the last couple of months. It's interesting to see how my impression of MySQL changes when I'm on the other side - and using a development environment I am less familiar with. Here are a two things I wished I could have been able to do:

• When --log-warnings=2 is enabled, log all statements the server receives that cause warnings or syntax errors.
• When --log-warnings=2 is enabled and --some-other-setting, log all statements which return empty results.

Not that it caused me too much pain - but I think I could have benefited. I think I've read something about both of these before too... anyone know if it was in the Drizzle or Google patches?

I've been working as a Ruby on Rails developer the last couple of months. It's interesting to see how my impression of MySQL changes when I'm on the other side - and using a development environment I am less familiar with. Here are a two things I wished I could have been able to do:

• When --log-warnings=2 is enabled, log all statements the server receives that cause warnings or syntax errors.
• When --log-warnings=2 is enabled and --some-other-setting, log all statements which return empty results.

Not that it caused me too much pain - but I think I could have benefited. I think I've read something about both of these before too... anyone know if it was in the Drizzle or Google patches?

I just finished updating my website with new information about a training class I will be teaching in the Metro Atlanta area next month.  This five-day class will begin on March the 30th and will cover everything that a beginner to intermediate-level database administrator needs to know to work effectively with MySQL Server.

Every student will receive a free laptop for use during the class. When the class is done, the student gets to take the laptop home!

The curriculum is available at http://www.paragon-cs.com/training

I limit the class size to twelve students in order to provide individual attention to each student so spacing is definitely limited.  In addition, if you sign up before the end of day on March the 2nd there is a $200 discount.

This is #5 in a series of blog postings about MySQL Performance Schema.

I mentioned the PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA.SETUP_INSTRUMENTS table in an earlier post. Recently I saw a bug report where I could actually use it in a meaningful way. So today I can talk about SETUP_INSTRUMENTS and with a “realistic” example.

The table has three columns: NAME, ENABLED, TIMED.
mysql> SELECT column_name,column_type FROM information_schema.columns WHERE table_name=’setup_instruments’;

+-------------+------------------+
| column_name | column_type      |
+-------------+------------------+
| NAME        | varchar(128)     |
| ENABLED     | enum('YES','NO') |
| TIMED       | enum('YES','NO') |
+-------------+------------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

The NAME column corresponds to the NAME column in EVENTS_WAITS_CURRENT.
The ENABLED column is ‘YES’ to enable instrumenting, ‘NO’ to disable.
The TIMED column …

Sun has launched the Glassfish Portfolio,  the best web application platform on the planet.

To learn more, you can also go to "the Aquarium" and "Miles to go...."

Last week I had the chance to visit the MySQL Meetup in Boston at the invitation of prominent MySQL community persona Sheeri (who is organizing this year's MySQL Camp at the MySQL Users Conference) and give a small talk on the Event Scheduler feature of MySQL 5.1. The Meetup had about 15 people, which for a different night at a different venue was a great number in my mind.

I presented on the Event Scheduler which while a small subject is still a nice feature of MySQL 5.1. The presentation can be downloaded from my personal dups.ca site. Sadly I was suffering from a really bad cold/flu/whatever and was happily heavily dosed on flu pills. I only later discovered that these pills had caffeine in them and was the reason I hadn't been …

Unless you are doing it wrong.

And sadly I`m seeing more and more people doing it wrong.
To a lot of people Open Source means that they have a piece of software that does almost what they want and which they can modify to their best wishes and use internally.

So they fork locally,, they don't redistribute their code , but they aren't contributing their changes back upstream, chances are these changes wouldn't be accepted upstream anyhow as they are really customizing the code for their specific cases. At first sight this doesn't look so bad , at second sight ..

When weeks or months later the upstream project releases an urgent security fix, the local fork has deviated soo much that it can't upgrade anymore and stays with an insecure version.
Often it's worse.. a feature that could have been accepted upstream has been implemented slightly different in the local fork, the result being that newer features depending …

The current size of a MySQL 5.1.30 installation is around 420M.

$ du -sh .
426M    .

A further breakdown.

$ du -sh *
213M    bin
20K     COPYING
9.8M    docs
8.0K    EXCEPTIONS-CLIENT
436K    include
12K     INSTALL-BINARY
121M    lib
504K    man
4.0K    my.cnf
77M     mysql-test
4.0K    README
20K     scripts
2.3M    share
2.9M    sql-bench
100K    support-files

A means to reduce the footprint by 25% is to delete some unused stuff.

$ rm -rf docs/ mysql-test/ sql-bench/
$ du -sh .
337M    .

It’s no big deal, however it certainly does cut down on verbose output in the backup logs removing the mysql-test directory and files.

On February the 18th I have the privilege of participating in a seminar that Sun is putting on about one of the MySQL 5.1 case study finalist. I will kick things off covering the new features of 5.1.  Chris Lavigne, from Breadboard BI,   will be discussing how his company put together a business intelligence solution for the Boats.com and YachtWorld.com web properties. The project was developed using a 100% open source stack that leveraged Linux, Pentaho and MySQL, specifically using 5.1’s new table partitioning feature. Hear Chris explain how he helped his client unlock valuable information from their large and disparate data sources so that far more informed sales, production and marketing decisions could be made.

Join us! Registration is available here.