The latest from the MySQL community

As of July 1 all Canadian MySQLers are employees of Sun Microsystems. I was expecting that we would be the rear guard, I was going to greet the great day singing “a broken man on an Edmonton pier / the last of Monty’s engineers” (with thanks to the writer of “Barrett’s privateers”), or perhaps “And I, the last, go forth companionless … Among new men, strange faces, other minds.” (with thanks to Mr Tennyson). But as things turned out, the Ukrainians and the French were delayed. So Trudy Pelzer and I were the last Canadian engineers to come on board, but not quite last of all.

And it’s been wonderful. A free lunch, a tour of Sun’s Edmonton office, a SafeWord security doohickey, a carrying case, and an alternative address = peter.gulutzan@sun.com. More seriously, I’ve …

I didn't have a chance yet to write about this due to some recent travel, but better late than never. About 10 days ago, Nokia acquired the remaining 52% of Symbian that they didn't already own for a cool $410 million. Nokia also announced that they would open source all of the Symbian code. This follows on Nokia's earlier acquisition this year of Trolltech, the open source GUI toolkit developer, for $153 million. For those not familiar with it, Symbian is a platform created jointly between Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and Psion ten years ago. (Symbian evolved from the EPOC platform... READ MORE

I've made a few fixes to the SVN version of Flexviews:
flexviews.enable() would return an error when trying to create an incremental refresh materialized view without an AVG() aggregate expression in the select clause.

Performance of DML is now improved substantially. Flexviews is designed to work in an environment with serialized DML (such as a MySQL slave). I removed extra serialization enforcement overhead. Previously two tables were involved in coordinating the 'uow_id' generation to ensure serialization in the logs. Now only one table is utilized. I need to add a procedure to auto-cleanup this new table.


There and there are a lot more to make. On my list of things to do:
1) code cleanup
flexviews went through several iterations and there are still 'mview' references all over the
place

some of the code is encased in comments because it was extracted by …

Project: MySQL Forge RSS/Atom feeds

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

* Updated local branch to the new code setup of the Forge
* Installed PHPUnit
* Read documentation from PHPUnit
* Read some documentation from SeleniumRC

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

* None

KEY CONCERNS

* None

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING 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.
* Installing SeleniumRC and exercise with its functionality.

The Daily WTF: Hastening an Inevitable

Keeping hundreds of millions of sheets of paper on file isn't easy, so the IRS had an application built to computerize their records. It'd scan paper tax returns into a WORM (Write Once, Read Many) drive system and record lookup data in a database. That way they could filter by any fields they recorded in the database and access a scanned image of the tax return for any further information using a simple app, which sure beat the old method of data retrieval - digging through boxes, incurring huge wait times.

The nice thing about the old method, though, was that it generally worked. The new system was full of bugs, in addition to several other irritating issues. On Bobby's first day he was put in front of the application, and right off the bat it looked amateurish. Form elements …

Baron recently wrote about very helpful but often forgotten about “Pager” feature of command line client. There is another one which falls into the same list - the –tee option.

Specifying –tee=/path/to/file.log you can get all session content (everything typed in and printed out) stored in the log file. Quite handy for example to keep track of changes done on production.

Moreover you can put tee=/logs/mysql.log in “mysql” section in my.cnf to have logging enabled automatically when you start the client.

If you’re looking to log session beyond MySQL command line client you can check out “script” tool.

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I’ve now published slides from my talk at Velocity conference on Percona web site. Enjoy.

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Via Luis Vila's blog: Stormy Peters has taken a new role at the GNOME foundation. With Stormy gone, who will convince Rod & SpringSource to join the newly announced OpenLogic's Partner Program? ;-) Best wishes to Stormy in her new role. PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don?t necessarily represent IBM?s positions, strategies or opinions."... READ MORE

Few days back, Baron re-introduced MySQL's command line pager command and described some cool tricks with maatkit's mk-visual-explain (one of my favorite tools). Soon after reading it, I wished if it was possible to describe regex based (on query) paging.

I have written a small hack, christened mysmartpager, that can actually do regex based paging for you.

The idea is simple, write a relay that will redirect the output based on to the desired pager. The problem was complex, there was no direct way of getting to know the original query. There are a couple of indirect ways of doing so, but of course with hurdles:

• Run mysql client with --xml option: This will print the output of each command in xml and the command itself is included in the xml. The downside was not many pagers (including …

OpenLogic announced an evolution to their "aggregated open source support" model today. According to the press release: "OpenLogic provides front line enterprise-grade support across the 400 open source packages in its certified library. In 2006, OpenLogic created its Expert Community to provide additional backstop support ? paying lead open source developers for support. Now, with this new partnership program, commercial partners will provide backstop support for their projects and OpenLogic will resell its partners? enterprise support offerings." OpenLogic's CEO Steve Grandchamp is quoted: "This is the next phase of our open source aggregation model where we partner with leading open... READ MORE