Some observations from the MySQL developer meeting READ MORE

OK, so on Wednesday morning, in Latvia, Monty came up to me and asked if I could add a feature to the MySQL Forge Worklog system to help his team and others track dependencies between worklog tasks. Internally, our worklog system allows developers to track whether one task is dependent upon the completion of another task. So, I took a couple hours and hacked in this functionality to the public Forge worklog system. If a task has dependent "child" tasks, then a new tab in the worklog display shows those dependent tasks. Shown on the right is the "super-task" for the Maria project, which has a number of direct child tasks (some of which have child tasks themselves). As you can see, the "Dependent Tasks" tab now shows these sub-tasks. Enjoy.

"Das dreieckige Rad hat gegenüber dem viereckigen einen gewaltigen Vorteil: Ein Rumms weniger pro Umdrehung!"

Translation:
"The triangular wheel has one enormous advantage over the quadrangular: One knock less per revolution!"

Maybe not new, but I have not heard it yet and I love it. It was about reinventing functionality in a well known product...

"Das dreieckige Rad hat gegenüber dem viereckigen einen gewaltigen Vorteil: Ein Rumms weniger pro Umdrehung!"

Translation:
"The triangular wheel has one enormous advantage over the quadrangular: One knock less per revolution!"

Maybe not new, but I have not heard it yet and I love it. It was about reinventing functionality in a well known product...

Yet another quiz inspired by Freenode#mysql IRC discussions. If you haven’t been around on the channel lately, you should have a peek. Lots of interesting discussions going on!

mysql> SELECT c1, c2 FROM t WHERE c2 LIKE 'a%';
+------+------+
| c1   | c2   |
+------+------+
| a    | abc  |
+------+------+

Is the following construct for the LIKE clause legal?

SELECT c1, c2 FROM t WHERE c2 LIKE CONCAT('a', '%');

And how about this one?

SELECT c1, c2 FROM t WHERE c2 LIKE CONCAT(c1, '%');

Bonus question: Suppose the table has many rows, several more columns and there’s an index on (c2, c1). Could that index be utilized when running the legal versions of the query — and if so, how?

[hint]Hint: Perhaps some parts of the statement are optimized away before evaluation? [/hint]

[answer]Answer:Both the constructs shown are legal. …

UPDATE at bottom.

I just wanted to extend my congratulations to the team at Greenplum, and our joint customers at Fox Interactive Media - the folks behind MySpace, Photobucket, IGN, FOXSports.com, and a whole series of web properties that together represent one of the single largest audiences on the web.

All three of us announced today that Fox is running a massive production data warehouse built atop Greenplum's data warehousing software on Sun's Solaris/ZFS based OpenStorage platforms (a sea of Thumpers, to be specific). That is to say, open source software is at the core of one of the world's largest - and most affordable - data warehouses.

…

Recently I am been testing few pieces of Storage projects of OpenSolaris with PostgreSQL. One of tests involves using an iSCSI disk  with PostgreSQL.  Unfortunately the storage that's available is  in Colorado  while my PostgreSQL server is  located in Massachusetts. Latency will definitely be one of my top problems since storage  is halfway across the country (in Colorado). Plus the fact that I will be running a database server on my end  doesn't really sound like a good idea. Come to think about it, this could be a more common problem nowadays since Cloud Storage (for example Amazon S3 Webservice ) could be  optimistically  half way across the country and pessimistically be on the other side of the world.

 So what are my options to solve such problems?  …

This bug (http://bugs.mysql.com/19027) was reported by Peter Zaitsev over two years ago... it may not be critical, but it's nasty and surely it can be fixed. This is the problem.

If InnoDB incurs a fatal error during initialisation, for instance changing logfile size, or from a typo in another parameter in the config, mysqld still starts but InnoDB will be disabled. According to Heikki, a storage engine cannot make mysqld not start at that stage, so the only option would be to chuck an assertion - frankly, I'd prefer that over the current misbehaviour!

So you can have a running server that kinda looks ok, but not have access to some or all of your tables.
In a word: ridiculous!

I attended OpenSolaris Storage Summit last weekend.  There are lot of efforts going on to make OpenSolaris into a feature rich storage operating system.  Some of the projects that are relevant to backup are NDMP, Storage de-duplication, Virus scanning, Disk encryption and ZFS hybrid storage pools.

I talked about Amanda network backup and recovery and how well it fits with OpenSolaris and ZFS plans. Amanda can backup ZFS filesystems taking advantage of ZFS snapshots. ZFS snapshots provides the ability to backup open files in Open Solaris. Amanda 2.6.1alpha OpenSolaris packages that are available for download takes advantage of this feature.  Amanda can also take advantage of ZFS send/recv …

After an amazing summer of getting married, graduating college, adopting a new dog, and taking a much needed extended vacation, I’m now back on track with where I left off. I’ve been making good progress on the asynchronous MySQL library I talked about in this post in the form of a new drizzle client library. This library is also compatible with MySQL since they share the same protocol, and if drizzle changes in the future I plan on supporting current and new MySQL protocols as well. All of the connection and I/O overhead is mostly done, and I’m just working through the protocol bits now. I’m hoping to have something ready to show and talk about for the OpenSQL camp.

In other news, I’ve recently started working with the …