The latest from the MySQL community

I am happy to announce that a new version (0.9) of mylvmbackup has been released. This is the first release since the source code has been moved from Subversion to Bazaar and is now hosted on Launchpad.net. I would like to thank Robin H. Johnson and Patrick Hahn for providing the patches that contributed to this new release!

mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of MySQL server's data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, makes an LVM snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup proceeds.

From the …

That’s right. MySQL now has a user group in Paradise.

I am always looking into connecting with other MySQL professionals, to share the laughs and tears, and to enjoy what we love working with every day, MySQL. I have always wanted to bring us all together, and I thought that this would have a good chance of doing so. Since I live in Malta, this made for the perfect location for it. If you live in Malta, or perhaps in Sicily or Tunisia, and want to take a trip, please do join us at our first meeting.

We will be having our first meeting in Mellieha, and please RSVP to me personally via email, westerlund (at) pythian.com if you want to attend. The date is set for Thursday, …

Ok, I'm quite Sphyched.

I built the Sphinx Storage Engine, and it appears it'll solve a lot of pain I've had with FT, and gives me integration without having to write a bunch of perl glop to glue results of index searches into subsequent queries.

mysql> SELECT url, content,items_text.title FROM feeds join items using (feed_id) join items_text using (item_id)join items_sph_idx using (item_id) WHERE query='Kowalchik'\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
url: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=Mike+Kowalchik&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss
content: [This is a comment on Blogs I'm enjoying of late from Mike Kowalchik.] Hi Jack, couple of quick things. We have lots of autodiscovery features in our code …

I will be demonstrating the features of Flexviews as well as talking about how you can improve performance by:

• 
  
• pre-aggregating important tables for improved query performance
  
• pre-calculating joins on InnoDB using materialized views
  
• nesting incrementally refreshed materialized views to further improve performance
  

http://mysql.meetup.com/101/

By “Good SQL Querying”, I am not referring to “how to make your queries more perfomant.” I am about to go on a mini-rant about how to make readable and self-documenting SQL queries.

One practice that will get me instantly going on a rant is using a comma join. There is NO reason to do the following:

-- uses the sakila sample database
SELECT first_name, last_name, address
FROM customer,address;

What kind of join did the original author intend? A CROSS JOIN? Or did they really want an INNER JOIN and forget the WHERE clause?

The answer: you do not know for sure; you can only guess. Had the query been

SELECT first_name,last_name,address
FROM customer INNER JOIN address;

you would know that the author intended an INNER JOIN; had the query been

SELECT first_name,last_name,address
FROM customer CROSS JOIN address;

you would know that the author intended a CROSS JOIN. I …

Most days Matt Asay's blind love for OSS makes me laugh. Today is no different. In giving advice to Ballmer, Matt has the following particularly hilarious quotes: "Ballmer lacks the imagination to conceive of a world where Microsoft could open source code and still make a lot of money (He's apparently not heard of "Google"):" Umm, just so we're clear, we're taking about the same Google that makes billions on its proprietary search & AdSense algorithms encoded in proprietary software? Just because Google decides to open source some ancillary pieces of their infrastructure and supports OSS projects that they consume... READ MORE

Week 6 (30th June – 7th July 2008 )

Key Accomplishments Last Week

1. Implemented a feature to rearranger.c to allow it to accept multiple input files (as requested by Brian). There are a few problems with this feature, however, and I plan on rectifying them soon.

2. Learnt some basics of Lua.

3. Learnt a bit about the ddd.

4. Started learning about the internals of mysql and bought a book, “Expert MySQL” by Charles A. Bell. I already have a fair idea about the working of mysqlslap. Once I get a good grasp of the ddd debugger I should be able to understand mysqlslap more thoroughly.

Key Tasks that stalled last Week

None

Key Concerns

The upcoming midterm evaluation gives me a sense of urgency in my work. On looking back, I feel I have given my best but it could definitely have been better. Hope …

Week 6 (30th June – 7th July 2008 )

Key Accomplishments Last Week

1. Implemented a feature to rearranger.c to allow it to accept multiple input files (as requested by Brian). There are a few problems with this feature, however, and I plan on rectifying them soon.

2. Learnt some basics of Lua.

3. Learnt a bit about the ddd.

4. Started learning about the internals of mysql and bought a book, “Expert MySQL” by Charles A. Bell. I already have a fair idea about the working of mysqlslap. Once I get a good grasp of the ddd debugger I should be able to understand mysqlslap more thoroughly.

Key Tasks that stalled last Week

None

Key Concerns

The upcoming midterm evaluation gives me a sense of urgency in my work. On looking back, I feel I have given my best but it could definitely have been better. Hope …

In our latest database journal piece, we cover some useful Oracle-supplied pl/sql stored procedures to help you instrument and debug your code, dump metadata descriptions of your database objects (a la MySQL dump –no-rows) and much more.

Take a look at  DBA Insider - Useful PL/SQL Packages.

?WL4271 Encrypted Online Backup: Preview 3? branch in Launchpad

Now with Windows support. Many thanks to Chuck Bell for helping get the code going on Windows.

We can however, all sit around dumbfounded as to how Windows has so little of a POSIX like layer and yet doesn’t define ENOTSUP.

As a refresher, this tree implements:

• Encryption for MySQL Online backup
• Algorithms and keysizes supported:
  • 3DES
  • AES (128, 192 and 256bit)
• World peace

(world peace not included)

UPDATE: If you’re wondering why the branch isn’t there, it’s still pushing to launchpad. Yes, that’s over 7 hours to push a branch. ick. Can’t be too …