The latest from the MySQL community

It may be tested again! Reason for the new version are two new releases of the main components of XAMPP: PHP and MySQL.

New in both XAMPP versions: MySQL (5.0.67), PHP (4.4.9), and phpMyAdmin (2.11.8.1). .

Go to XAMPP BETA download area

XAMPP BETA versions are always for testing purposes only. There will be no upgrade packages from and to beta versions. To all testers: Many thanks in advance!!

We are hiring!  dealnews is looking for a full time systems administrator.  The developers have been sharing the sys admin load for over 10 years now.  But, we really need a dedicated person now.  If you are interested, see our jobs page.

Today I achieved something which is a first in the MySQL
server as far as I'm aware of. I managed to run a query
with multiple threads. The query was:
ALTER TABLE t1 ADD COLUMN b int;
and the table had 4 partitions in it. So it used 4 threads
that each thread handled the copying of data from old
table to new table of one partition.

Currently it's designed for use by partitioned tables but
it should be very straightforward to do minor parallelisation
also of non-partitioned tables by e.g. breaking up in a scan
thread and a write thread.

It's nice to get started on this track and see how one can
make use of modern computers with a great deal of CPU power
if one can parallelise the applications. As an example a
dual socket box T5220 (2 Niagara II CPU's) can handle 128
threads in parallel.

So running mysql-5.1.24rc with INNODB-Plugin-1a I ran into "Can't initialize function 'INNODB'; Plugin initialization function failed", and noticed a more serious issue with the whole plugin architecture.


Before without plugin if the engine died so did mysqld. Now, mysqld can stay up and accept connections. But what if you have 1000 mysql instances, and all of your Nagios checks where to test if mysqld was up and accepting connections? This entire test is now invalid. I now need a Nagios check to test if the plugin-engine is up, by doing a write to the engine.

Now to the cause of the issue:

Here is my condition. 5.1.24rc with INNODB-Plugin was killed by OOM killer (mysqld memory leak?). When it came back, my expectation was for innodb to go through a recovery process, it didn't. Strange. Then I got this message from replication.

Slave: Unknown table engine 'InnoDB' Error_code: …

well.. in my head anyway.

mysql 6.0.6 alpha was recently released, and with it a whole slew of patches (as one would expect).

So I got to thinking.. the problem with forking a large existing project is that you lose the testing that millions of people banging away at your product gives you.

going through the release notes I thought I saw 1 or 2 things that might be relevant to drizzle.

for example.. sorting.

  Incompatible Change: Certain characters were sorted

  incorrectly for the following collations: TILDE and GRAVE ACCENT

  in big5_chinese_ci; LATIN SMALL LETTER J in cp866_general_ci;

  TILDE in gb2312_chinese_ci; and TILDE in gbk_chinese_ci… Bug 25420

I am no way an expert in the mysql/drizzle internals but …

Is this a step towards companies opening up their source code in return for higher quality software? READ MORE

Stefan over at Suspekt brought up some interesting security vulnerabilities based on MySQL's column truncation tendencies (when not in strict mode), so I thought I'd add my own to the pile, this one right in the grant tables.MySQL's user table restricts user names to 16 characters (and hosts to 60). Any attempt to create a user with a longer login results in an error. However, unlike Stefan's example where a field is compared, then truncated and then inserted, MySQL actually truncates a login attempt before processing it. ...

Talend announced an open source data quality offering this week at the TDWI conference in San Diego. The company is rapidly to filling out the basic components needed in a complete data integration suite. In June they delivered added changed data capture (CDC) features to Open Studio, their ETL tool. They also added Talend Open Profiler for data profiling. While Talend doesn’t offer a complete suite yet, these new offerings are a big expansion of functionality in short time. The ETL and data profiling tools are available today, but Data Quality won’t be ready for download until September.

Talend …

Open Query has partnered with The Pythian Group, founded in Canada by Paul Vallee and active around the world providing fractional database infrastructure teams on a linear cost-to-effort basis.

Open Query focuses on MySQL and related training and consulting work, whereas The Pythian Group has its remote DBA offering with around the clock (and around the globe) coverage. A perfect match!

I'm very pleased with this partnership, so a grand thanks to Paul and Alex, but also Sheeri, Niklas, Gerry, Augusto, Keith, Julien, Singer, Danil, Santinesh, Paul, and everybody else (they're everywhere!) I've met some of you already, and hope to meet …