Last Tuesday when I was walking the show floor at the MySQL conference, I ran into a familiar name,  Jennifer Venable.  I had never met Jennifer before but we had traded mails and had spoken on the phone.  This was about 18 months ago when we were negotiating the renewal of Sun's contract as an Authorized Distributor of Red Hat.  At that time, Jennifer was the Red Hat lawyer working on the contract.

Well since that time Jennifer has escaped from the Red Hat legal ranks and has joined the business side where, as of a couple of months ago, she took over as head of the Red Hat Exchange. 

Take a listen.

My interview with Jennifer (12:25)  Listen ( …

MySQL 5.1.24 was released last week. I am nearly done with preparing and testing the updated package for Debian, and will upload it to experimental within the next few days. MySQL AB decided to disable Cluster support from their official binaries with 5.1.24, but unfortunately they forgot to add a note to the release notes. It was only mentioned in a bugreport where someone asked why mysqld does no longer understand the --ndbcluster option in 5.1.24:It was decided that we do not support NDB Cluster in the 5.1 release but do a general release of the Carrier Grade Edition 6.2 branch (which is based on MySQL 5.1) instead as it has received substantial improvements on the cluster side that can not …

MySQL 5.1.24 was released last week. I am nearly done with preparing and testing the updated package for Debian, and will upload it to experimental within the next few days. MySQL AB decided to disable Cluster support from their official binaries with 5.1.24, but unfortunately they forgot to add a note to the release notes. It was only mentioned in a bugreport where someone asked why mysqld does no longer understand the --ndbcluster option in 5.1.24:It was decided that we do not support NDB Cluster in the 5.1 release but do a general release of the Carrier Grade Edition 6.2 branch (which is based on MySQL 5.1) instead as it has received substantial improvements on the cluster side that can not be backported to 5.1 for now.

So while the 5.1.24 source still includes the cluster …

This past week was the annual MySQL Users’ Conference. It was my fourth time attending the conference, my second as a MySQL-er, and my first as a Sun employee.

The conference was very well attended with many more people than last year. Overall, I’d say it was a great success.

I work on the Backup project for MySQL and I must say it was a very strange experience being in the spotlight of so much controversy concerning the announcement made about making some backup features enterprise only releases.

While there was a lot of blogging expressing the general distaste for the suggestion of making some features of backup enterprise only (as opposed to free), most of these comments seemed to come from a relatively small number of people.

I presented the Backup session and led the Birds of a Feather session on Backup. I must say that the sentiments of the bloggers was not represented in the audience of these sessions. I …

If you use a transactional storage engine in MySQL like InnoDB some of your transaction may be terminated by the storage engine because of deadlocks. Sadly it is a bit tricky to see what has led to the deadlock. SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS gives only a very minimal look into the state when it happened.

With the proxy and a little script we can track what happened in all open transactions before the deadlock happened. A classic example is the cross-over deadlock:

[36] received a ERR(1213, Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction), dumping all active transactions
  [35].1: select * from commit where id = 1 for update
  [35].2: select * from commit where id = 2 for update
  [36].1: select * from commit where id = 2 for update
  [36].2: select * from commit where id = 1 for update

35 and 36 are the two transactions we have open, the last statement in 36 triggered the deadlock.

In the …

New features of InnoDB - compression format and fast index creation sound so promising so I spent some time to research time and sizes on data we have on our production. The schema of one of shards is

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. CREATE TABLE `article87` (
2.   `id` bigint(20) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
3.   `ext_key` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
4.   `site_id` int(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
5.   `forum_id` int(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
6.   `thread_id` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET latin1 NOT NULL,
7.   `published` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
8.   `crawled` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
9.   `subject` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
10.   `title` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
11.   `url` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
12.   `num_links` smallint(6) NOT NULL,
…

This is an idea I came across at the MySQL UC last week: How many applications handle failing COMMITs correctly ? And how can we test it ?

COMMITs can fail. The most simple case are deadlocks. The sad side of deadlocks is that they only happen under real load when you application creates concurrency against the same rows. That's usually hard to create in test-setups.

With MySQL Proxy you can create deadlocks easily. Well, more or less.

You can at least fake them nicely and let the application and server think that we have a deadlock. The trick is:

To make it a bit more interesting you don't have to let all the COMMITs fail. Just let 50% of them fail.

--[[

Let a random number of transaction rollback

As part of the QA we have to verify that applications handle
rollbacks nicely. To simulate a deadlock we turn client-side COMMITs
into server-side ROLLBACKs and return a ERROR packet to the client
telling it …

In a unique display of mass hysteria, one blogger after the other and even slashdot (no, I’m not going to link) managed to take the completely innocent message that certain new enterprise features might get released as closed source only and turn it into an ongoing bad press onslaught about “MySQL closing down source code”.

Why don’t you all give MySQL a break here please?  The rule is always the same for everybody: the one that writes the code gets to pick the license.  Listen, I 100% believe in open source and I consider myself to be a big advocate, but commercial open source companies like MySQL (and Pentaho) are commercial entities.  At lease try to put yourself in their position for a second.  For example, if a customer asks you to NOT to release a piece of software they paid for, you don’t release it, it’s that simple.

In the end, what MySQL is doing is simple: they are experimenting with a …

TOTD #30 explained how to create CRUD application using Grails and hosted using in-built Jetty servlet engine and in-memory HSQLDB database. Jetty and HSQLDB are built into Grails and allows to start easily. You can also use GlassFish and MySQL for deploying your applications in production environment.

This blog entry walks you through the steps of deploying a Grails application on GlassFish and MySQL.

1. If MySQL is already installed, then download …

This past week was the annual MySQL Users’ Conference. It was my fourth time attending the conference, my second as a MySQL-er, and my first as a Sun employee.

The conference was very well attended with many more people than last year. Overall, I’d say it was a great success.

I work on the Backup project for MySQL and I must say it was a very strange experience being in the spotlight of so much controversy concerning the announcement made about making some backup features enterprise only releases.

While there was a lot of blogging expressing the general distaste for the suggestion of making some features of backup enterprise only (as opposed to free), most of these comments seemed to come from a relatively small number of people.

I presented the Backup session and led the Birds of a Feather session on Backup. I must say that the sentiments of the bloggers was not represented in the audience of these sessions. I …