If you are a programmer, you, by definition, belong to the elite [awesome] human breed called geeks. If you know how to code in Python or Ruby, you might even think you’re pretty hot shit. But none of that compares in hotshitness to what you are about to learn.

Allow me to introduce LOLCODE – perhaps the most serious and, for some, cryptic, programming language. It is Turing-complete and uses an advanced compiler called Brainfuck (I’m still totally serious, and by the way if you’ve never heard of LOLCATS, then you’re not spending nearly enough time on the Internets. See the funny button that looks like a cross at the …

The Sun Fishworks guys were nice enough to invite me for a demo of their new 7000 series storage device.

We bang the heck out of our IO systems here at Spinn3r so having more options is always welcome.

Bryan Cantrill, one of the original DTrace developers, worked on this bad boy so there’s obviously going to be an emphasis on performance analysis.

This is one of the main competitive advantages of the 7000 series.

Out of the box you have a full admin console for performance tuning. It doesn’t stop at just raw IOs because they’ve instrumented it with a bunch of dtrace scripts.

You can view IOPS per file, CPU, make runtime tuning and configuration changes. Basically, the entire …

The one thing that has consumed my days (and nights) recently, has been the organising of the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 (hereinafter, referred to as the CE2009).

For starters, we’ve had 356 proposals. That basically provides a 1:3 acceptance:rejection ratio. So the voting committee had a really, really hard task to look at talks. Some even cross-referenced submissions with other submissions. Some even made suggestions of combining talks (successful, even). So my great thanks to the voting committee for the CE2009 - you guys all rock.

Then, once the voting committee has done the hard work, you’ve got to sanely schedule the talks. This is really, not an easy task. Very quickly, you realise that you want to be in all track, and you’ve got to split yourselves. This, being impossible, however, leaves room for the community (and in the past, …

How much space would empty MyISAM table take ? Probably 8K for .frm file, 1KB for .MYI file and 0 for MYD file. .MYI file can be larger if you have many indexes.

How much space will Innodb take:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> CREATE TABLE test_innodb(a int, b int) engine=innodb;
2. Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.30 sec)

Check out files (using Innodb File Per Table)

-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 8578 Dec 16 20:33 test_innodb.frm
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 98304 Dec 16 20:33 test_innodb.ibd

So we get about 100K and so about 10 times more for MyISAM. This is ignored space which needs to be allocated in main tablespace for Innodb data dictionary. But that one is pretty small.

This is the good reason to avoid having very small Innodb tables - they will …

Today we officially announce our new storage engine, "Percona XtraDB", which is based on the InnoDB storage engine. It's 100% backwards-compatible with standard InnoDB, so you can use it as a drop-in replacement in your current environment. It is designed to scale better on modern hardware, and includes a variety of other features useful in high performance environments.

Percona XtraDB includes all of InnoDB's ACID-compliant design and advanced MVCC architecture, and adds features, more tunability, more metrics, more scalability on many cores, and better memory usage. We choose features and fixes based on customer requests and on our best judgment of real-world needs. We have not included all the InnoDB patches available. For example Google's well-known InnoDB patch set is omitted (at least for now).

The first version of our new storage engine is 1.0.2-1, which is forked from InnoDB-plugin-1.0.2. …

Apart from lots of interactivity, I tend to use anecdotes and humour when teaching a MySQL training course, as it really helps people to remember.

Sometimes I call something "evil" (no I'm not religious), and attach a little story to it. One example the NATURAL join. It's not a join type (like inner, left outer, right outer), it's a modifier keyword that can be used with any join type, and it directs the way the join is resolved.

Instead of specifying a join condition through ON, USING or a WHERE clause, the NATURAL keyword tells the server to match up any column names between the two tables, and automatically use those columns to resolve the join. For example, if two tables that you're doing a natural join on have a column foo_id, the server would automatically use that column. But of course a …

Don't try this at home :)



create table ☃ (☢ int, ☣ int, key ☢ (☢), key ☣ (☢,☣)) ENGINE=MYISAM;
insert into ☃ (☢) values (1);
insert into ☃ (☢) values (2);
explain select ☢ from ☃ where ☢=1;
drop table ☃;


And no... this is not for live code, it is in a test case I am working on for Drizzle.

Oh how I love register_shutdown_function of PHP. This bad baby will execute at the end of the scripts in call order. So, how is this useful?

Say you want to log some action, but that logging DB is on another server. Additionally you do not want to take into account that writing to the other server may break your transaction because of timeouts if logged in the middle of a transaction. Another use case: you do not want to change a bunch of code in different places to batch all logging routines up.

public function __construct($platform){
        parent::__construct($platform);
        register_shutdown_function(array($this, 'afterProcess'));
}


public function afterProcess(){

    foreach($this->getDataThatChange() as $key => $values){
             $insert_data[] = $values;
    }
    
 …

Stewart Smith, a former member of the MySQL Cluster team recently decided to move on and work as a programmer on the Drizzle project. We wanted to catch with Stewart on both MySQL Cluster on Windows and what's he up to now.

Masood Mortazavi is an Engineering Manager at the Sun Database Group. After the acquisition of MySQL, and along with the rest of Sun's original database technology group, he joined the MySQL organization to form the larger Sun Database Group. In this interview, Masood talks with Lenz about the flexibility and diversity of Sun as a workplace, his life prior to joining Sun and his current assignment to improve the MySQL code contribution process.