I'm off to do some MySQL training in Asia for the rest of the month. One week in Singapore, one week (and the weekend) in Bangalore.

Correction, Asia and the Emerging Markets. Apparently thanks to phenomenal growth, China and India have left Asia in the last few years (in our corporate parlance).

Always good to check flight status before you head to the airport, even (especially?) at 7am when you just checked 6 hours before. I now have 5 extra hours in beautiful John F Kennedy Airport, terminal 7. I haven't seen the new JetBlue terminal, but this one almost makes JFK feel like a major international airport.

Cathay Pacific seems a fine airline, though perhaps …

I'm pleased to announce the release of DBD::mysql 4.008!

This release contains several fixes, particularly the issue where TAKE_IMP_DATA_VERSION being defined allowed code features to be compiled in that caused potential grief for anyone running DBI < 1.60x (segfault). I've disabled this for the time being until I find a better solution.

I've also decided from now on, as soon as I get a patch, or if I fix something, even if it is a minute change, I'm rolling out a release. Release early and often, right!?

The changes in this release are:

* Multi statement patch (fixes multi statement issues), thanks to Chris Heath!
* Disabled TAKE_IMP_DATA_VERSION because segfault with DBI < 1.607
* #29528: bind_param(..., SQL_FLOAT) ignores exponents - fixed, Thanks to
Tokuhiro Matsuno!
* Cleanups to make mysqlEmb work under Cygwin - Thanks to Chris Rodgers
…

Agenda:

* CAOS Report 8 - Community Linux
* Linuxworld review
* A look at SourceForge
* Microsoft’s new database push

iTunes or direct download (26:48, 6.1MB)

I have been asked twice this week what version of MySQL I would choose for a new project.
As with most questions in life the answer is: It Depends?

In general I would now recommend for a new project to select 5.1, and he is why.

1. If it’s a new project and your not managing existing applications with older versions then 5.1 is slated for General Availability (GA) at some imminent time. Having been at Release Candidate (RC) for quite some time (almost 1 year), many people, both internally and in the community are just waiting for Sun/MySQL to get this version out.
2. MySQL 5.0 is in maintenance mode, it’s now 3 years old. MySQL is placing (I’m assuming) resourcing energies to current and future releases.
3. If your looking at releasing a product in the next 3 months for example, you do not want to consider the testing and deployment of a new version (e.g. 5.1) in the next 6-9 months.
…

Welcome to the 110th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

From the MySQL side, Jeremy Zawodny gets things going this week. He writes about his doubts over the long-term performance of InnoDB, specifically the cost of multiversion concurrency control, particularly in a master-slave arrangment or a DW. Jeremy comments, “[The] disk bloat, fragmentation, and ongoing degradation in performance may be an argument for having some slaves that keep the same data in MyISAM tables.” His readers, however, point out some diagnostics and tools to remedy this concern.

Not that MyISAM is without foibles. Case in point, on the …

If a MySQL DBA from Pythian goes to Oracle Open World, it would be a shame not to send an Oracle bloke, so there I am — presenting a 90-minute session on the first day of the OOW 08 entitled Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware.

I gave it during RAC Attack in Chicago and I’m pretty satisfied with how it went, so there should be no significant changes to the presentation. The session is in “User Group Forum,” thanks to RAC SIG and Dan Norris.

When the session was first …

I've stumbled around for awhile searching for a way to observe IO at the table or file level on a MyISAM engine. Since I'm running on Solaris 10 I decided to explore dtrace and in my travels I found some handy scripts that made it easier.

I used iosnoop which can be found here : http://brendangregg.com/dtrace.html#DTraceToolkit

iosnoop can be pointed at a specific pid, in my case the pid of the mysqld process:

iosnoop -v -p123456

Since the probe fires when IO happens, this will send out quite a bit of output to STDOUT. So I wrote a perl script to call iosnoop and summarize Read and write IO Counts and Bytes by the minute. I still have more testing and refinements but it seems to work correctly. I have probably over-scaled the bytes by converting to Mbytes.

Here is a sample output:
…

I've stumbled around for awhile searching for a way to observe IO at the table or file level on a MyISAM engine. Since I'm running on Solaris 10 I decided to explore dtrace and in my travels I found some handy scripts that made it easier.

I used iosnoop which can be found here : http://brendangregg.com/dtrace.html#DTraceToolkit

iosnoop can be pointed at a specific pid, in my case the pid of the mysqld process:

iosnoop -v -p123456

Since the probe fires when IO happens, this will send out quite a bit of output to STDOUT. So I wrote a perl script to call iosnoop and summarize Read and write IO Counts and Bytes by the minute. I still have more testing and refinements but it seems to work correctly. I have probably over-scaled the bytes by converting to Mbytes.

Here is a sample output:
…

I previously reported about my joy with MySQL-Proxy and a simple SQL-Injection detection based on a simple heuristic.

Today I present the more interesting approach that I promised to publish after my webinar yesterday. This approach is based on the idea that SQL queries issued by an application always have a certain structure. This structure can be learned and remembered by MySQL-Proxy. Any SQL query that has a different structure can then be considered an attack.

Training Mode

The first Lua script learn_sql_queries.lua uses MySQL-Proxy’s read_query hook to catch COM_INIT_DB and COM_QUERY packets. COM_INIT_DB packets are issued when the database is …

I was surprised to read today that Sun just released SocialSite, an open-source social network server similar to Ringside Networks. Per Patrick Chanezon's blog: "Socialsite is an open source (CDDL/GPL) social network server based on Apache Shindig (Java) that implements the database and User Interface for a full ...