The latest from the MySQL community

Marktplaats.nl, the largest E-commerce platform in The Netherlands, and part of eBay since 2004, is growing its business on Sun Microsystems' MySQL Enterprise™ Unlimited database subscription offering. To enable their fast growth, protect site uptime, and contain IT expenses, the company is using a flexible and scalable infrastructure based on open source technology such as MySQL™ -– backed by Sun's 24x7 global database support team.

Apparently High Performance MySQL, 2nd Edition is selling quite well — I’m not sure exactly how well — because we’re preparing for a second printing. This makes me very happy. I don’t think they anticipated going back to the press for quite some time.

The book fluctuates between sales rank 1000 and 2000 on Amazon during the day, and has reached as high as 600 or so. This is just phenomenal. The O’Reilly team was psyched when it broke 5000, and so was I — but now we’ve stayed under 2000 for a long time (except when Amazon sold out of it). Frankly I’d have thought that for a niche-market book like this, we’d have been in the 10,000 range or something like that.

Clearly we (the authors, editors, publisher, etc) have done something right! This is a great feeling.

Thanks for sending errata, by the way. I have just completed proofreading the whole …

Make sure you set sp_max_recursion_depth - see the instructions file.

changes:
functions/procedures now take parameters in DB,TABLE order.
demo database removed from sourceforge and added into SVN/release tarball.
GRANT USAGE on *.* to flexviews; is now the default permission level of the flexviews user
I removed the mview_ prefix from filenames.
flexviews.add_table() now checks for the existence of the table and the table's mvlog

get it at http://flexviews.sourceforge.net

Project: MySQL Forge RSS/Atom feeds

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

* Merging feeds with the BZR branch.
* Writing first PHPUnit tests.
* Extending existing PHPUnit testsuite to make it more suitable for use in the BZR branch.
* Reading the SeleniumRC documentation

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

* Installing SeleniumRC and exercise with its functionality.

KEY CONCERNS

* None

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

* Installing SeleniumRC
* Write new PHPUnit tests
* Final merge for RSS/Atom feeds in BZR trunk

The Sphinx project just released version 0.9.8, with many enhancements since the previous release. There’s never been a better time to try it out. It’s really cool technology.

What is Sphinx? Glad you asked. It’s fast, efficient, scalable, relevant full-text searching and a heck of a lot more. In fact, Sphinx complements MySQL for a lot of non-search queries that MySQL frankly isn’t very good at, including WHERE clauses on low-selectivity columns, ORDER BY with a LIMIT and OFFSET, and GROUP BY. A lot of you are probably running fairly simple queries with these constructs and getting really bad performance in MySQL. I see it a lot when I’m working with clients, and there’s often not much room for optimization. Sphinx can execute a subset of such queries very efficiently, due to its smart I/O algorithms and the way it uses memory. By “subset” I mean you don’t get the …

Had an interesting thought today, I wonder how much faster ( if at all ) updating via insert on duplicate key in bulk was compared to individual update statements.  The client  app I was looking at receives updates to a counter from various severs around the world and they are updating a row that contains time metrics.  For instance update traffic set visistcount = visistcount + 1000 where customer = 123 and hour = ‘12′ and date=’7/15/2008′.  These statements are driven by feeds from the various servers, so it lends itself to bulk operations very easily.   It seemed like batching these up will minimally save the parse and network travel time.

Basically instead of :

update bulk_update set val=10+val where val1 = 20;
update bulk_update set val=10+val where val1 = 21;
update bulk_update set val=10+val where val1 = 22;
update bulk_update set val=10+val where val1 = 23;

use …

Open source Marketcetera Trading Platform allows hedge funds and trading institutions to maximize control and minimize cost READ MORE

After a very long time distracted with other projects, I finally added the third component of the MyCAT project: binlog_mon, a binary log manager for MySQL.

The main feature of this tool is that it has two disk usage thresholds which determine when it purges your binary logs:

• a lower, "nominal", threshold above which binary logs will be purged if-and-only-if none of the replication slaves are still reading it,
• and a higher, "critical", threshold at which the behavior is configurable.
  

It can simply send you an alert if disk usage is above critical and the oldest file is still needed - or it can purge 1 file, all files until usage below critical, or all files until usage below nominal levels. (Other options could be added fairly easily.) The "critical" option is so configurable because purging any binary …

Looks like there's been a slew of new applications enabled by Apple's new iPhone, SDK and app store. While a lot of the emphasis is on communications and games, there's a surprising number of good business applications. First to market among open source business applications for the iPhone are Pentaho with their open source Business Intelligence extension for dashboards, reports and drilldowns, Funambol with open source contact sync program, Zimbra with an open source email client, Zmanda with an iPhone client for their Enterprise backup tool, and SugarCRM with their offline client edition. I have no doubt that many more... READ MORE