KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• Finished the integration of new data collection features in Skoll. The Skoll Client can now collect runtime information about MySQL while running the MySQL tests.
• Collected runtime information for MySQL compiled with different configuration flags and began analyzing the collected runtime data.

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• Had connection problems with BitKeeper (MySQL's source control) servers while testing the new Skoll Client.
• Skoll currently gets MySQL source code from BitKeeper, however, not every revision in the BitKeeper can compile/run perfectly. Right now I have to find a "good" revision and manually request it with the Skoll Client. I need to get access to MySQL push-build tar balls to solve this bad revision problem.

KEY CONCERNS

• More than ever, the future progress of the project depends on having …

If there is one thing that a DBA or data warehouse architect can count on, it is that data volumes will increase while budgets will decrease.

This is why MySQL 5.1 and its partitioning capabilities are so interesting. I’m going to demonstrate how you can build a small/medium-sized data warehouse or data mart (1-10 TB range) on a shoe-string budget.

the mission

I decided to convert a relatively large statistics table (750m rows, 140GB in size in about 10 partitions) on a test machine from MyISAM to the Archive storage engine. After a long conversion process, my data, on disk, ended up being about 21GB, for an impressive compression ratio of 6.7:1.

Prior to MySQL 5.1, one of the drawbacks to the archive storage engine was that you could not index it; however, with partition pruning, you can get yourself a “free” index on a large archive table by splitting it into date-based chunks, whether by …

I am giving a talk titled "An Introduction to MySQL" here in Birmingham, AL on June 21, 2008 at 3PM.

I love living in Alabama.  I was born and raised in Huntsville.  However, Birmingham has always seemed a bit behind in technology compared to what I do for a living.  There is good reason.  The industry here is medical, banking, industrial and utilities.  I don't really want my doctors keeping my medical records in an alpha release of anything.  Same goes for my banking and utilities.  But, as this page shows, the companies here are catching up.  So, I am happy to present MySQL to as many people as I can in this town.  Hopefully I will help some folks that have not been exposed to MySQL or any open source for that matter.
…

And again we're on our mission to keep XAMPP up-to-date and just released the first betas of the upcoming XAMPP version.

In this beta we updated: Apache (2.2.9), MySQL (5.0.51b), PHP (5.2.6), phpMyAdmin (2.11.6), mod_perl (2.0.4), OpenSSL (0.9.8h), and eAccelerator (0.9.5.3).

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!!

Get the downloads at XAMPP BETA.

I encountered this weird SQL error / anomaly.

I have 5 replication slaves with one master. On the master, an insert statement was issued and it was replicated to all of the slaves except to one which I will call weird_slave. The weird_slave (MyISAM) complained that there was some SQL syntax error. I checked the insert statement and it looks pretty simple.

Also, the weird_slave has already been running for more than a couple of months now and it has received some variation of the insert statement.

I was thinking that the table could be corrupt and issued a check table and everything returned okay.

So, the question is why would the weird_slave complain about an SQL syntax error while the other slaves were okay with it. Sadly, I could not reproduce the error again. Also, I've tried to re-insert the same SQL statement on the weird_slave again and again and it was accepting it without …

If you are new to MySQL and would like to get an overview about some best practices for securing a MySQL server and some commonly used backup techniques, consider attending this webinar (in german), held by yours truly. It will take place this Tuesday (2008-06-17) at 15:00 CEST - participation is free of charge! This is my first attempt to perform a webinar, I usually give talks in front of a live audience... Let's see how it goes.

Dave reports that IDC's latest report "Worldwide Standalone Open Source Software 2008?2012 Forecast: A Preliminary View" estimates that the stand-alone OSS market will grow from $1.73B in 2007 to $4.83B in 2012. That's a 23 percent annual growth rate to 2012 vs. 7.7 percent annual growth for the overall software market. Interesting to note that $4.8B represents 1.3 percent of the overall software market. The previous version of the IDC data suggested that stand-alone OSS spending would come in at 1.8 percent of the total 2011 market spending. (Don't try to reconcile the two figures, as forecasting is difficult and... READ MORE

It has been quite some time since the last 0.0.3 release, and now QOT 0.0.4 is finally available.

Here’s the ChangeLog of the new release:

- added ORDER BY analysis for index generation
- added an ORDER BY-specific rewrite (const-field removal)
- added ORDER BY-specific static checks (unoptimizable ORDER BY cases)
- added table and field alias support
- improved error reporting
- fixed: bug 0000002: Segfault if query-file doesn’t start with create database and use commands general
- fixed: bug 0000003: Segfault for queries that use table alias
- fixed: bug 0000005: Various segfaults
- fixed: bug 0000006: crash with bigint, datetime, enum field types
- minor output formatting improvements
- improved covering indexes gneeration algorithm

I was pretty excited when OpenLogic announced the Open Source Census. A key feature of the census was a tool that scanned respondents' servers to determine which open source products/packages were actually being used. Anonymous data from these individual scans was going to be shared with the public in order to revolutionize our understanding of OSS usage. This data-sharing would be very important for companies whose IT leaders don't know that they are using OSS. However, to date, only ~= about 1300 machines have been scanned. News from InfoWorld today that Microsoft has also sponsored the Open Source Census is... READ MORE

It’s been a while since the MySQL Management Plug-in 0.42 was released. Since then, I quietly updated it to version 1.0. The changes were very few; the biggest news was that the plug-in was certified by Oracle and added to OTN Oracle 10g Grid Control Extensions Exchange (see at the bottom).

I think the next version is due, as a few people have come back to me with some issues. The biggest was compatibility with Windows. Since I used the command line MySQL client, *nix and Windows shell incompatibilities were a major headache to solve, and I still couldn’t make it work reliably. I wanted to use DBI and DBD:MySQL, but it required installing and compiling Perl packages, which makes the deployment process very …