I have seen a few people now ask about using MySQL's FULLTEXT indexing with asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean (herein referred to as CJK.), however, there doesn't seem to be a good centralised article that covers it.

The information is out there, I just don't think it has been well presented yet.

As I have recently done a bunch of research on this topic for a customer, I figured it might be a good opportunity to make my debut in the MySQL blogosphere.

So here we go...

I'll open by saying that attempting to use FULLTEXT with CJK text in MySQL 5.0 will be unsuccessful.

From the CJK FAQ in the MySQL manual:

"For FULLTEXT searches, we need to know where words begin and end. With Western languages, this is rarely a problem because most (if not all) of these use an easy-to-identify word boundary — the space character. However, this is not …

Since I got fed up with Solaris the other day, the T1000 is running Debian. This means that “I’ll care about Drizzle on Linux Sparc”.

OMG were things broken in the most “trivial” ways.

A good quick intro to the issues is Memory alignment on SPARC, or a 300x speedup!

It all comes down to memory alignment.

So I pulled the MySQL 6.0 bzr tree onto the box to try it too… I haven’t seen so many compiler warnings in ages (okay… since I last built MySQL.. drizzle is warning-clean and it makes it hard to remember a time before that). I think it works purely by …

I’ve started an investigation of MySQL Backups using LVM. I’m working with Lenz’s mylvmbackup but I found it both used Perl and needed a number of dependencies installed.

Installing dependencies failed on my test system, yet I found it actually worked when I went back to my dev system (but it is not configured with LVM for full testing).

$ sudo cpan Config::IniFiles Sys::Syslog Date::Format Getopt::Long  DBI

Details of error:

....
 CPAN.pm: Going to build S/SA/SAPER/Sys-Syslog-0.27.tar.gz

WARNING: LICENSE is not a known parameter.
Checking if your kit is complete...
Looks good
'LICENSE' is not a known MakeMaker parameter name.
Writing Makefile for Sys::Syslog
cp Syslog.pm blib/lib/Sys/Syslog.pm
/usr/bin/perl /usr/share/perl/5.8/ExtUtils/xsubpp -noprototypes …

I was working on a client’s server today to troubleshoot some variances between the result timing of some queries. Guess what I came across - the profiler is not available in certain enterprise releases but it is available on community versions of the same release number.

I can understand if that feature was something that wasn’t fully tested in the enterprise code base and thus was only released in the community version - but if that’s the case then I don’t understand why the same version releases of Community and Enterprise can have different feature sets. That goes against the whole idea of versioning. Someone correct me if I’m wrong here but that is very frustrating.

What does a MySQL Support Engineer do during his first hours of vacation? Yes, napping. After that, he goes on the web and tries out something new. Today: SugarCRM .. and struggeling a little with the installation.

The problem? The installation (on MacOS 10.5) was successful, no errors, but:
Sugar CRM 5.1.0c Files May Only Be Used With A Sugar CRM 5.1.0 Database

Logging didn't reveal anything, but the general query log did! All DML statements were send to MySQL, but apparently not .. committed? After looking in the code I noticed a lack of commit statements.. Putting an explicit commit it worked, for the `config` table.

What was the real problem?

[mysqld]
init_connect='SET AUTOCOMMIT=0'

Don't ask me why that was there, sometimes I do crazy stuff testing things, but this setup should …

Here is my advice to MySQL. Take it or leave it. Time will tell whether I'm full of shit.

MySQL 5.1 is out the door. Awesome. Great job to all the folks who fixed the thousands of bugs over the last 3 years. MySQL 5.1 should be faster and more stable than 5.0 because of those bug fixes, and features like partitioning are welcome additions to the small percentage of MySQL users who need that functionality. And, even if there are some bugs in partitioning (what feature doesn't have any bugs?), the partitioning feature is as good or better than other competing products. Good job.

However, going forward, here is my advice to MySQL engineering: stop all work on new 6.0 features entirely. Don't scrap the features, just stop development on them now.

Take one month to figure out how to restructure MySQL engineering and priorities with the following steps:

Suggested Steps

Drop …

I've been involved with the Drizzle project since very soon after it began, working on it on nights and weekends.

That has just changed. As of today, I'm no longer a MySQL Professional Services consultant, instead I'm part of a new division of Sun

Much of my time is to be spent working on Drizzle, with a focus on plugin interfaces and making it work well in Extremely Large distributed environments.

I will be blogging heavily about what I am doing. How I sort that blogging out between my personal LiveJournal, my (mostly unused) Sun employee blog, and maybe some other blog system, remains TBD.

This is going to be fun.

Last week I had to confront one of those situations where you can’t really tell what is going on with a piece of software, and the final conclusion would sound completely crazy if postulated as the initial hypothesis. The regular MySQL commands and utilities fall short in these cases, so I had to resort to the three tools reviewed in this article.

The problem we were diagnosing was this: at some point in time, a number of queries that use to take less than one minute to execute, started to take between five to 15 minutes. We needed to get an insight into what was going on inside the MySQL server.

MySQL Tuner

At some point in a long diagnosis process, MySQL’s SHOW [GLOBAL] VARIABLES and SHOW [GLOBAL] STATUS are nothing more than a long list of numbers. Going through a team mate’s notes on another issue, I came across MySQL Tuner. This is an …

This Thursday (December 18th), Martin "MC" Brown will talk about using DTrace with MySQL. MC is the Solaris (and, naturally, DTrace and ZFS) expert on the Sun Database Group documentation team. He's helped the openSolaris team port MySQL to openSolaris.

Note that we'll be using a new session address / Dimdim URL:

http://webmeeting.dimdim.com/portal/JoinForm.action?confKey=mysqluniversity

You can bookmark this address, since it will remain valid for all future MySQL University sessions. Remember, though, that the meeting room will open only 15 minutes before the session starts.

Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL …

Back in October last year a corporate accountability group called As You Sow attempted to persuade Oracle to detail its commitment to open source by publishing an Open Source Social Responsibility Report.

Oracle resisted the proposal but did promise to share more details on its use of open source in the next version of its Oracle’s Commitment social responsibility report. I just noticed that the renamed Oracle Corporate Citizenship Report (Pdf) was recently published (in late November as far as I can make out) and does indeed include a section on Oracle’s commitment to open source.

In the section “Open Source and Accessibility” Oracle notes that …