I spoke at Montreal on Rails on Tuesday night. I think I had 5 slides, but spoke for about 45 minutes (so there's no point in uploading them). For those that missed it (or couldn't take notes fast enough), here's a transcript of the examples I showed with the world database:

# take a look at this query.  To start with, we have no indexes used:
EXPLAIN SELECT Name FROM Country WHERE Continent = 'Asia' AND population > 5000000 ORDER BY Name;

# First let's look at an index on population
ALTER TABLE Country ADD INDEX p (Population);

# is that index effective?
EXPLAIN SELECT Name FROM Country WHERE Continent = 'Asia' AND population > 5000000 ORDER BY Name;

# no it wasn't.  what happens if we modify the query just slightly:
EXPLAIN SELECT Name FROM Country WHERE Continent = 'Asia' AND population > 50000000 ORDER BY Name;

# time for the next index:
ALTER TABLE Country ADD INDEX c …

Get it while it’s hot! The Fall 2008 issue of the MySQL Magazine is now available at http://www.mysqlzine.net. Issue 6 is chock full of 16 pages good stuff, including:

• “Decision Table”-Driven Development by Jonathan Levin
• Part I of a series on Transaction Time Validity in MySQL by Peter Brawley
• An Overview of Zmanda Recovery Manager by Pythian’s own Gerry Narvaja
• Keith Murphy, editor has a note about Drizzle.

Download the PDF directly or go to the MySQL Magazine page to download any and all of the 6 issues.

“Reminders work. At least on me.” I confessed in my previous CfP posting.

Well, guess what also works on me? Deadline extensions! I aim at making most (ehh, all) deadlines, but at times, I fail. And I have observed similar behaviour in others.

And therefore we have extended our CfP to 5 November 2008 (all fellow Europeans out there: “midnight 11/05/2008 PST” looks like mid May, but isn’t).

Some key points:

1. We’re looking at high quality presentations
2. We’re looking at innovation, i.e. *new* things
3. We’re looking at covering main areas of MySQL …

I’d say I normally don’t respond to idiots… but I think we all know that’s a lie. Our fine friends at Slashdot pointed out an “interesting” article which opines that the downturning Economy to Give Open-Source a Good Thumping. There’s a bit in the middle that points out that people still don’t get it.

The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

The disconnect seems to continue to be an idea that we’re doing the Free Software in hopes that it might turn a profit one day. The people who share this disconnect seem to think Free Software is a “gimmick” of some sort.

I have uploaded prebuilt binaries of Q4M for MySQL 5.1.28-rc to http://q4m.31tools.com/dist/. For installation instructions, please refer to http://q4m.31tools.com/install.php.

Gads, someone else asking for E/R diagram support. We have 36 votes for this in Issuezilla. What is it with you guys?

First of all, MySQL Workbench really owns this space. Yes, I know, right now it only runs on Windows, but the next release will fix that. And, yes, I know it only works for MySQL, but the promise is that they will fix that too, albeit not right away. 

Secondly, NetBeans DB tooling has a huge opportunity because we're part of the IDE.  An E/R diagram tool doesn't really leverage that advantage.  There are things we can do that will make your day-to-day experience of slogging code for database applications really nice.  But we can't be doing that if we're spending all our time writing an E/R tool.

That said, we're looking very …

[Part I, Part II]

Perturbations in the Field

In the weeks leading up to the Dev meeting in Riga, the Falcon team dumped a record number of changes into the codebase, including a page cache optimization that contained a severe but undetectable bug.

The usual indicators offered no sign of trouble: the Pushbuild matrix was green, the Falcon regression tests passed, System QA reported nothing unusual. It wasn't until Philip modified the System QA stress tests that a problem emerged.

The modification was simple: kill mysqld at the end of the test, then restart the …

Come get it while it’s hot. The brand new issue six of the magazine is available for free download from http://www.mysqlzine.net.

Rudimentary analysis of Sun's SEC filings suggests that MySQL is not to blame, but investors won't know for sure unless Sun provides more information READ MORE