On Thursday, July 17 there will be a web based seminar on MySQL Workbench.

Seminar will be in Italian and anyone who is interested is invited to join us. You can find details here.

If you are a database architect and you usually work with data models this tool is going to make your life easier and you will learn some interesting features. In the meantime, to better understand the product, take have a look at http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/, where you can download a copy of the community version, read blogs, contribute, discuss and learn.

Happy data-modeling!

…

Please help save Ivan, son of Andrii Nikitin (MySQL Support Engineer), who needs a bone marrow transplant. Andrii’s message is below:

“My family got bad news - doctors said allogenic bone marrow transplantation is the only chance for my son Ivan.

“8 months of heavy and expensive immune suppression brought some positive results so we hoped that recovering is just question of time.

“Ivan is very brave boy - not every human meets so much suffering during whole life, like Ivan already met in his 2,5 years. But long road is still in front of us to get full recover - we are ready to come it through.

“Ukrainian clinics have no technical possibility to do such complex operation, so we need 150-250K EUR for Israel or European or US clinic. The final decision will be made considering amount we able to find. Perhaps my family is able to get …

SQL proxies have been very much in the news lately, especially for open source databases. MySQL Proxy and PG-Pool are just two examples. Here is another proxy you should look at: Myosotis.

Myosotis is a 'native-client' to JDBC proxy for MySQL and PostgreSQL clients. We originally developed it to allow clients to attach to our Java-based middleware clusters without using a JDBC driver. Myosotis parses the native wire protocol request from the client, issues a corresponding JDBC call, and returns the results back to the client. As you can probably infer, it's written in Java. "Myosotis" incidentally is the scientific name for "Forget-Me-Not," a humble but strikingly beautiful …

Please help save Ivan, son of Andrii Nikitin (MySQL Support Engineer), who needs a bone marrow transplant. Andrii's message is below:

"My family got bad news - doctors said allogenic bone marrow transplantation is the only chance for my son Ivan.

"8 months of heavy and expensive immune suppression brought some positive results so we hoped that recovering is just question of time.

"Ivan is very brave boy - not every human meets so much suffering during whole life, like Ivan already met in his 2,5 years. But long road is still in front of us to get full recover - we are ready to come it through.

"Ukrainian clinics have no technical possibility to do such complex operation, so we need 150-250K EUR for Israel or European or US clinic. The final decision will be made considering amount we able to find. Perhaps my family is …

The two big developments in the SQL world this summer are the pending arrival of the SQL:2008 ANSI standard, and my (Peter Gulutzan’s) attendance on Sun’s behalf at an ANSI meeting. Okay, I concede that the events have unequal importance, but sometimes I slip in a bit about personal involvements.

What’s a standard?

Review: ANSI (which stands for “INCITS Technical Committee H2 on Database”), and its counterparts in many other countries, produce official standards for many things, including SQL. The international co-ordinating body is ISO (International Organization for Standards), so there’s an ANSI standard and an ISO standard, and they’re practically the same. There’s a partially-restricted site containing ISO papers here.

The current edition is ANSI/ISO SQL:2003. But SQL:2008 is only a few days or weeks away. I’m taking a risk here by …

On Thursday, July 17 there will be a web based seminar on MySQL Workbench. 

Seminar will be in Italian and anyone who is interested is invited to join us. You can find details here.

If you are a database architect and you usually work with data models this tool is going to make your life easier and you will learn some interesting features. In the meantime, to better understand the product, take have a look at http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/, where you can download a copy of the community version, read blogs, contribute, discuss and learn.

Happy data-modeling!

On Thursday, July 17 there will be a web based seminar on MySQL Workbench. 

Seminar will be in Italian and anyone who is interested is invited to join us. You can find details here.

If you are a database architect and you usually work with data models this tool is going to make your life easier and you will learn some interesting features. In the meantime, to better understand the product, take have a look at http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/, where you can download a copy of the community version, read blogs, contribute, discuss and learn.

Happy data-modeling!

I actually wrote about this a bit in a comment on Paul's blog, but thought it time to re-hash the issue since it came up again during a friendly discussion at work (PostgreSQL was mentioned :)

Why doesn't MySQL have an custom field types? Or perhaps I should call them complex field types, but either way, why no love for anything but primitive strings and numbers?

Take an IP address, for instance. It is an unsigned 32-bit integer. Yes, we can store it in its raw form and use the INET_NTOA() and INET_ATON() functions. The problem seems to be, however, that many people don't use those functions and opt to use a varchar() instead. Ugly, wasteful, and, in some cases, slow; but simple. The INET_* functions work well, and, while you can mask this behind VIEWs and stored procedures, it seems to make things more complex and …

It turns out that there is a bug that causes replication on a 5.1 slave to fail when reading LOAD DATA statements from a 4.1-or-earlier master.

About a month ago, I set up a data warehouse for an old 4.1.21 system that can't be upgraded. I decided to use the latest 5.1 beta to take advantage of partitioning, but within the first day replication stopped rather suddenly and with a nondescript error:

[ERROR] Error running query, slave SQL thread aborted.
Fix the problem, and restart the slave SQL thread with
"SLAVE START". We stopped at log 'xxx' position xxx

Using mysqlbinlog, I compared the relay log and the masters binary log around that position, and noticed the relay log appeared corrupt! I don't recall the exact steps I took, but I isolated the problem to a LOAD DATA INFILE statement, and filed my first issue with MySQL Enterprise support.

The great folks at MySQL Support had a …

With my continued investigation of evaluating alternative data management with cloud computing options, I’m now evaluating Amazon Simple DB. Still in restricted beta, it helps to have a friend on the inside.

Working through the Getting Started Guide (API Version 2007-11-07) was ok, annoying in parts. Here are some issues I found. I was working with Java as the programming language.

• The Docs enable you to view the language syntax in Java, C#, Perl, PHP, VB.NET, ScratchPad. You can also restrict the view to a specific language. A rather cool feature. One observation is there is no Python, which is rather ironic as my first investigation was …