Last month I went to the Sun Microsystems / MySQL Developer Conference in Riga Latvia. Along with about 250 other people. The majority were MySQL developers, but as usual we had several attendees from MySQL support and administration, and a few non-MySQL people came to talk about Google, Drizzle, and PBXT. This was one of our annual “internal” conferences, so lots of stuff that we talked about in Riga will only be publicly announced around, say, the time of the next MySQL User Conference . I’ll just talk about the stuff that’s already leaked, and about my own involvements.

First let me give my impression of ‘morale’. It’s up, way up, since two years ago. I attribute this to two causes: removal of a problem, and a better team.

Huh? Haven’t I read non-MySQLers’ blogs about people leaving the team? …

The two big developments in the SQL world this summer are the pending arrival of the SQL:2008 ANSI standard, and my (Peter Gulutzan’s) attendance on Sun’s behalf at an ANSI meeting. Okay, I concede that the events have unequal importance, but sometimes I slip in a bit about personal involvements.

What’s a standard?

Review: ANSI (which stands for “INCITS Technical Committee H2 on Database”), and its counterparts in many other countries, produce official standards for many things, including SQL. The international co-ordinating body is ISO (International Organization for Standards), so there’s an ANSI standard and an ISO standard, and they’re practically the same. There’s a partially-restricted site containing ISO papers here.

The current edition is ANSI/ISO SQL:2003. But SQL:2008 is only a few days or weeks away. I’m taking a risk here by …

Did you know that many parts of the MySQL web sites provide news and updates via RSS Feeds? Markus Popp from our web team did a great job on making some of these more visible by adding RSS icons to the respective pages. If you want to keep up with what's happing at MySQL, consider adding the following feeds to your feed reader:

• New downloads on dev.mysql.com
  
• New DevZone articles
• PlanetMySQL (You probably knew that one already)
• MySQL Forge - All New Items
• …

It has been quite some time since the last 0.0.3 release, and now QOT 0.0.4 is finally available.

Here’s the ChangeLog of the new release:

- added ORDER BY analysis for index generation
- added an ORDER BY-specific rewrite (const-field removal)
- added ORDER BY-specific static checks (unoptimizable ORDER BY cases)
- added table and field alias support
- improved error reporting
- fixed: bug 0000002: Segfault if query-file doesn’t start with create database and use commands general
- fixed: bug 0000003: Segfault for queries that use table alias
- fixed: bug 0000005: Various segfaults
- fixed: bug 0000006: crash with bigint, datetime, enum field types
- minor output formatting improvements
- improved covering indexes gneeration algorithm

Instructions for adding a new Unicode collation

By Alexander Barkov and Peter Gulutzan
Copyright (c) 2007 by MySQL AB
All rights reserved

[ Previously published as a note on a bug report.]

MySQL offers 42 built-in collations (sets of rules
for comparison and sorting) for the Unicode character
sets utf8 and ucs2. But you can add your own.

We will describe here how to add Vietnamese Unicode
collations. This is intended as an example, so
that you can try out all the steps and then modify
based on your own rules for some other language.
We chose Vietnamse because many people asked for it
via our "Feature Request" option in bugs.mysql.com,
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=4745.

There are two ways to add a new collation:
* Change the source code. This is the trickier way,
but it's the only way for pre-August-2007 versions.
* Change the LDML "markup" file. This hasn't been
tested much, but it's simpler, it requires no
recompilation. (LDML stands for …

In the earlier article about upcoming features, “Roadmap”, there was no mention of materialized views. The explanation is simple: they’re not on the roadmap. Yet.

However, this is one of the things that might change. There is a strong desire for materialized views, and one of MySQL’s architects has a strong interest (he wrote his PhD thesis on the topic). So if their absence from the “Roadmap” article troubled you, despair not. Keep watching this space and maybe there will be further news someday.

At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Werner Vogels of Amazon.com delivered a keynote called "A Head in the Cloud -- The Power of Infrastructure as a Service". See all the blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008TuesdayNotes#A_Head_in_the_Cloud_-_The_Power_of_Infrastructure_as_a_Service.

At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Mårten Mickos handed out the 2008 awards for Application, Partner and Community Members of the year See all the blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008TuesdayNotes#State_of_MySQL.

MySQL Version 6.x is alpha. This blog is about its new features.

Expect a new article every week or two.

The first article,
MySQL 6.0 Feature #1: Supplementary Characters
is out now.
http://blogs.mysql.com/peterg/2008/04/

The new version is avaialble for download.

In this release:

- added: windows port
- added: multitable select star warning
- added: multicolumn IN clause warning
- added: numeration for output messages

- fixed: bug 0000001: Compilation fails
(a compilation problem on 3.x g++ compilers)