The MySQL Community Team is about to lose a valuable member. In a few weeks, Jay Pipes, Community Relations Manager for North America, is joining the Drizzle project, under a different organization within Sun, and he won't be much available for MySQL community matters anymore.

On one hand, I am glad for Jay. He has been craving for more technical work, and he happily jumped at the offer from the Drizzle team. On the other hand, I have now the hard task of finding a worthy replacement. It won't be easy. For several years we have taken Jay's presence for granted, and he has done incredibly remarkable things, like creating MySQL Forge (v1 and v2) and organizing two MySQL Users Conferences and two MySQL Camps.

So, here I am, shouting to the world my need for a new manager. What am I looking for? What makes a good Community Relations Manager? …

Hello,

It is pleasure for me to inform that the MySQL User Conference Japan 2008 web site is now open and you can register for sessions!

Registration Site:　http://jp.sun.com/company/events/mysql/
Date: 10/30/2008 – 10/31/2008
Location: Tokyo Station Conference (http://www.tstc.jp/access/index.html)
Fee: Free for those who get registered in advance, 5000 JP Yen for non-registered attendees
Hosted by: Sun Microsystems K.K.

We will have great speakers from Sun Microsystems Inc. such as Kaj Arno (VP Community Relations), Brian Aker (Technology Director) and Jimmy Guerrero (Senior Product Marketing Manager).

Sessions will cover a wide range of topics including Memchached, performance tuning, MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition introduction, Web …

This year's Systems trade fair will take place from October 21st-24th in Munich, Germany. Sun will be present there with a stand in the exhibition area (Hall B2, Stand 329) and we also sponsor a conference themed "Perspective Open Source" that will provide half-day sessions (in German) about opensource-related topics throughout the week.

Some highlights of what we'll present on our stand:

• MySQL
• Sun Fire Servers (with Intel Xeon Processors)
• Open Storage …

This year's Systems trade fair will take place from October 21st-24th in Munich, Germany. Sun will be present there with a stand in the exhibition area (Hall B2, Stand 329) and we also sponsor a conference themed "Perspective Open Source" that will provide half-day sessions (in German) about opensource-related topics throughout the week.

Some highlights of what we'll present on our stand:

• MySQL
• Sun Fire Servers (with Intel Xeon Processors)
• Open Storage …

If you want to get certified for MySQL Cluster then there is only one guide that you need, the MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA Certification Study Guide.

Since the move to Sun, we have changed the method that you can get the title. You can now order a ‘print-on-demand version of the guide directly from Vervante. You can go ahead and order a copy now using this link.

If you think you want the book, or just want a read anyway, but don’t want to commit to buying the full guide, then you can read three of the key chapters in their entirety on docs.sun.com. You can read the chapters online …

A devilish quiz by Scott Noyes has made me thinking about a side effect of partitioning.
The quiz Given a table trickytable with a INT field, explain how these statements and results are possible:

INSERT IGNORE INTO trickyTable (id) VALUES (1);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

SELECT * FROM trickyTable;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

There are no blackhole, federated, triggers, proxy.
I initially tried with the event scheduler, with an event that empties the table every second, but the insert results in 1 row to be inserted, while the quiz asked for 0 rows.

After a few minutes, I got it. The right answer was to use partitioning.

Let me show off a bit. :)
Table trickytable was created with partitions by range or list , with a partition that does not include 1.
…

Tomorrow morning I am presenting a session, Startup Scalability Strategies, at Startonomics, a conference being organized by Dave McClure and Deal Maker Media. The sessions will be streamed live using UStream. Check the Startonomics website at http://startonomics.com for more details.

Also check out my guest blog post titled How Important Is Scalability written for Startonomics blog.

Since the very first time I downloaded the Pentaho suite I’ve been wailing, screaming, shouting, snarking that there absolutely MUST be a way to manage data sources that does not involve XML.

Well… Holy Shit. At just under 3 years it’s here (Pentaho Administration Console from 2.0.M3 build):

This is a most appreciated feature for those getting started with Pentaho! Thank you to the Pentaho Engineers for whipping it up!
PS - It’s not perfect yet, but should be solid by 2.0 GA

The unsung heroes of InnoDB are the logfiles. They are what makes InnoDB automatic crash recovery possible.

Database administrators of other DBMS may be familiar with the concept of a “redo” log. When data is changed, affected data pages are changed in the innodb_buffer_pool. Then, the change is written to the redo log, which in MySQL is the InnoDB logfile (ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1). The pages are marked as “dirty”, and eventually get flushed and written to disk.

If MySQL crashes, there may be data that is changed that has not been written to disk. Those data pages were marked as “dirty” in the innodb_buffer_pool, but after a MySQL crash the innodb_buffer_pool no longer exists. However, they were written to the redo log. On crash recovery, MySQL can read the redo log (InnoDB log files) and apply any changes that were not written to disk.

That is the basic functionality of the InnoDB log files. Given this, …

As I putter around the MySQL INFORMATION_SCHEMA, I am finding lots of undocumented behavior for fields that should be straightforward. For example, the VIEWS table holds information about views, and the VIEW_DEFINITION field contains the view definition, right?

Well, when I was looking at the VIEW_DEFINITION today, I noticed an odd thing. Even though I had permissions to see the view definition (as proven by the SHOW CREATE VIEW command), the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.VIEWS table sometimes came up blank for the VIEW_DEFINITION. I had to figure out why, and now that I know, I’m not sure if it’s a bug or a feature…..can you figure it out?

mysql> USE INFORMATION_SCHEMA;
Database changed
mysql> SELECT TABLE_NAME,VIEW_DEFINITION FROM VIEWS WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA='sakila';

+----------------------------+-----------------+
| TABLE_NAME …