If you went “wtf” at The Drizzle Snowman - WIN! - Jay Pipes on PlanetMySQL suddenly ending at “create table”, you should click through and see the unicode character for a snowman.

In other fun, we’ve also created tables with the name of cloud symbol, umbrella symbol and umbrella with rain drops symbol. All of these seem rather appropriate for Drizzle.

Stewart, Brian and myself are having a little fun this morning. One of the niceties of having real UTF8 support in Drizzle is now we can really fun table names. Behold, the glory of Drizzle:

drizzle>> create table ☃ (a int not null);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

drizzle>> show create table ☃\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: ☃
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `☃` (
  `a` int NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Yep, that's a snowman.

MySQL? Well, not so much:

mysql> select @@character_set_system;
+------------------------+
| @@character_set_system |
+------------------------+
| utf8                   | 
+------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> create table ☃ (a int not null);
ERROR …

OpenSQL Camp 2008 has come and gone, and hooray again for Baron who came up with the idea and made most of it happen (but let’s not forget Sheeri!)  Events such as these are always educational, but the most interesting stuff happens outside of the organised sessions (and this being an un-conf, they weren’t that strictly planned anyway

For me (Arjen) a major chunk of the exercise was acquiring jetlag there and back with no days to spare either side, but I feel it was well worth it. I spent most of the time listening and talking with people rather than coding. It was a great opportunity to catch up with Monty, the Percona crew (Baron, Peter, Vadim, Tom, and more - there’s so many of them now!), Brian, Stewart, Jay, Pat, Eric and other Drizzlers, Sheeri, active OurDelta people like Nick and Rob, ex-Brisbanite Ronald, and of course Jim who …

With the GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 coming up, we have picked the winners in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

To keep you in suspense, let me first announce those on positions 5 to 10:

5. Fourat Zouari (TriTUX.com, Tunis, Tunisia): Using Partitioning for Data Warehousing. See Fourat’s DevZone article, and his blog entry from May 2008.

6. Ryan Thiessen (Big Fish Games, Seattle, …

Dear MySQL fans,

we have done many webinars in these months with good attendance. While thanking everyone for participating, it's my pleasure to announce that now everything has been published and available on demand. You can download a webinar and watch it offline in case you have missed it or you like to view it again. Have a look at http://www-it.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/

See you soon!

…

I have written a new book on SQL DML. This is a total beginner book: how to commit and rollback, how to query, how to add data, etc.

Probably not of interest to most of the people who read this blog but if you know of anyone completely new to SQL, this would make a great Christmas present. Only 14.95. It is completely vendor agnostic, although the examples all use Oracle and MySQL.

You can view the Table Of Contents, Preface and Index here. I plan to release some of the chapters for free on the blog and will make the PDF of the book available at a discount. I have several more books like this (DDL, Intro to Relational Databases and Cloud Computing) under construction. I also plan to do some …

It’s the FRM file format version number.

It’s not the version of the table as one might expect (i.e. after CREATE it’s 1. Then, if you ALTER, it’s 2. Alter again 3 etc).

In Drizzle, we now return 0.

In future, I plan that Drizzle will allow the engine to say what version it is (where 0 is “dunno”).

This’ll be a good step towards being able to cope with multiple versions of a table in use at once (and making sense of this to the user).

So… in removing the FRM file in Drizzle, I found a bit of a nugget on how drop table works (currently in the MySQL server and now “did” in Drizzle).

If you DROP TABLE t1; this is what happens

• open the .frm file
• read first 10bytes (oh, and if you get EIO there, in a SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES you’ll get “Error” instead of “Base Table”)
• if (header[0] != (unsigned char) 254 || header[1] != 1 ||
  (header[2] != FRM_VER && header[2] != FRM_VER+1 &&
  (header[2] < FRM_VER+3 || header[2] > FRM_VER+4)))
  return true;
  Which means that you probably (well, should have) set your enum legacy_db_type to DB_TYPE_UNKNOWN in the caller of bool mysql_frm_type(Session *, char *path, enum legacy_db_type *dbt) otherwise you end up in some form of pain.
• Else, *dbt= (enum legacy_db_type) (uint) *(header + 3);
  return …

This is a quick informal poll. I’d like to know how much network traffic your server receives (not sends), in bytes per second. Give both avg and max if you have them. I’m especially interested in hearing about big, heavily loaded systems. I’ll start things off: just by looking at a couple of customer systems, I see one customer’s server is at 56k and 79k per second. Another slightly larger one is pulling 76k average and 200k max.

Wikimedia's Wikipedia.org is one of the most visited websites approaching 250 million unique visitors per month.  New content is pushed in by the over 100,000 volunteers who edit the articles.  This announcement "Wikimedia Selects Sun Microsystems to Enhance Multimedia Experience..." describes how users can now upload large video files using the servers and open storage environment provided by Sun and other open source organizations.

The solution is built up in an open source paradise:  MySQL, Apache, Sun's Open Storage infrastructure all on Sun's X4500 and X4150 Servers connected to Sun StorageTek arrays.

An article by …