Good news fellow DBAs; adding to the already packed list of RSS/Atom aggregation sites out there on the internet, there is a new site catering to DBAs called Relationalnews. Feel free to add your feed(s) for aggregation, because what else do bloggers want but more visibility to search engines, right? This was basically a coding project to get familiar with CodeIgnitor as well as RSS and Atom xml feed processing in PHP. Pretty simple looking back on it, and it was generally a fun project.I’ll probably add more features to the site at a later time, with free time being what it is…So read the news! http://relationalnews.com 

When Brian began the work on refactoring the MySQL 6.0 Server source code into what has now become the Drizzle Project, a number of code pieces were removed, including some major MySQL functionality such as stored procedures, server-side prepared statements, SQL Mode, some legacy code, and a variety of data types. The goal, of course, was to reduce the server code base down to a more streamlined and eventually modular kernel.

Of course, that vision is great, but it's got some side effects! One of those side effects is a dramatic reduction in the number of test cases that pass the test suite in their current form, and an increase in the number of tests that have been disabled. I re-enabled and fixed a few tests yesterday, but as of this writing, there are only 54 of 408 tests currently passing in the test suite.

…

Within minutes after Finland was just about to win 3:2 over Germany in the football world championship qualifications (but it ended 3:3), I got a bit of consolation for myself, my dual-citizenship son cheering for Finland, and my fellow countrymen using MySQL:

We have the next MySQL 5.1 Use Case article live, and it’s about FC Inter Milan. No Finns playing there (but stars such as Ibrahimovic, Materazzi, Luis Figo, and Adriano). And, from a MySQL perspective, the interesting point is that FC Inter Milan is using both MySQL 5.1 Partitioning and the Event Scheduler in an innovative way.

Thanks Corrado Pandiani for the story — let’s hope your good Use Case inspires others! …

Wouldn't it be cool to enhance MySQL creation table syntax to do this?

CREATE TABLE t1 (
  my_date DATE,
  my_month VIRTUAL INT AS (DATE_FORMAT(d,'%Y%m'))
);

And later, when you insert '2008-08-23' in my_date, then automatically my_month will be set to 200808.
Yes, it would be cool, and it has been done. Andrey Zhakov, a so far unknown to me community contributor, has extended the server code to implement virtual columns (WL#411) and functional indexes (WL#1075)
Andrey has published …

MySQL uses locks for concurrency control. Whenever a client/thread acquires a lock, it will have exclusive access to that table or row (depending on the granularity of the lock). Other clients however, will be prevented from writing and possibly reading to/from the locked resource. The two main existing locks are:

READ LOCK – A read lock will allow the other clients to read from the locked resource but not write to it.
WRITE LOCK – a write lock will prevent the other clients from reading or writing to the locked resource.

Also, different storage engines have different lock granularity. For example, MyISAM will lock the whole table while InnoDB will only lock the rows it needs.

Let’s try this out using a MyISAM table. We open two concurrent sessions and in the first lock the City table from the world database (get it …

While playing around with the great MySQL Activity Reporter , I ran into the following error.

[client 192.168.254.72] PHP Fatal error: strftime() [function.strftime]: Timezone database is corrupt - this should *never* happen! in /var/lib/mysqlard/mysqlar.php on line 62

Now the error is clear .. the Timezone database is corrupt and I`m the one to blame for .. this was on a pretty stripped down Centos that lives in UTC. So there wasn't a real Timezone database.

Obviously a quick apt-get install tzdata solved the problem, but once again the lesson is.. don't strip too much .. you'll eventually endup needing those 3 Kb of free space you gained anyhow.

I started to use MySQL 5.1 in a production environment at the beginning of August 2008. My purpose was to log all my web visits (more than 1 million pages per day) and to calculate real-time and on-demand statistics.
New features such as partitioning and event scheduler gave to me the opportunity to solve some problem.

I sent my “use case” to the competition proposed by mysql.com and now there’s an article on the developer section of the site where you can read what I did.
If you like, please read it.

(If you are here following the link on the article on mysql.com … don’t mind … and thanks)

While playing around with the great MySQL Activity Reporter , I ran into the following error.

[client 192.168.254.72] PHP Fatal error: strftime() [function.strftime]: Timezone database is corrupt - this should *never* happen! in /var/lib/mysqlard/mysqlar.php on line 62

Now the error is clear .. the Timezone database is corrupt and I`m the one to blame for .. this was on a pretty stripped down Centos that lives in UTC. So there wasn't a real Timezone database.

Obviously a quick apt-get install tzdata solved the problem, but once again the lesson is.. don't strip too much .. you'll eventually endup needing those 3 Kb of free space you gained anyhow.

Alpha version 5.05 of the BLOB streaming engine for MySQL has been released. You can download the source code from www.blobstreaming.org/download. The documentation has also been updated .
What's new in 5.05:

• A 'C' API has been added for client applications. It provides all the basic functions needed to connect to the BLOB streaming engine and upload and download BLOBs efficiently.
• A test client application has been added to the project to demonstrate the use of the new API.
• Added discover table support for the engine's system tables.
• Simplified the configuration: To configure the engine all you have to do is provide the path to the MySQL source tree (after building MySQL). All build options are taken from the MySQL build.
• And of course …

If you are living in Israel, you have a chance to get more information about GreenSQL. Next Sunday on 14/09/2008 I am giving presentation about GreenSQL on OWASP Israel 2008 Conference.

At this event I am going to talk about MySQL security and how GreenSQL can help you to leverage your protection level. New version GreenSQL SQL firewall will be described.

Update: here you can find the presentation.