Keith Murphy and Mark Schoonover have put together an excellent survey which is already doing good (seeing the numbers they have been clocking). Survey results will be out in the summer issue of MySQL magazine. I feel this is a "must take" survey for everyone in the MySQL community. And do not forget to mention my blog in the "top 5 favorite MySQL blogs" ;-). Just kidding!

Overall, this is the best survey regarding MySQL that I have ever taken, don't miss it. It will hardly take 10 minutes of your busy schedule. A busy man has the time do anything, right?

Quick Links:

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In the next proxy release we introduce plugins, we talked about it already in http://jan.kneschke.de/projects/mysql/mysql-proxy-a-chassis-and-a-mysql-server. Take a look at http://svn.mysql.com/svnpublic/mysql-proxy/trunk/plugins/ and check out:

• proxy
• admin
• debug

each of them sharing the common code that is provided by the chassis.

The debug plugin is a lua shell with a mysql-protocol ... well, just read on ;)

The purpose of the plugin is to be able to introspect the proxy at runtime. If it is loaded you can connect to port 4043 and execute lua code inside the proxy core:

$ mysql --user=root --password=secret --port=4043 --host=192.168.2.113 …

There are now two ways how to do this:

1. Using "set debug=d,flag" and adding some DBUG_EXECUTE_IF("flag", abort()) we can trigger the server to crash at a specific place in the code. There is an example of this in crash_commit_before.test
This requires a debug compiled server so you need to add a "source include/have_debug.inc" at the beginning of the test.

2. There is also a new way to do it without using DBUG_. By using the new command in mysqltest called "shutdown_server"[1], we will tell the server to stop, wait a while(60 seconds) and finally kill it off. This way we get a reliable shutdown. The first testcase that uses this is events_restart.test

In both of these methods, the testcase has to write a small file before the "crash/shutdown", that file tells mysql-test-run.pl that it was an expected crash/shutdown. The server will be started up again with the same settings as before …

I’m very pleased to say that I’ve been invited to join CIO.com’s first Executives Online discussion panel, Open Source in the Enterprise, this week. As the starter post explains, the event is a virtual round table discussion bringing together a number of open source executives, and me, to discuss the enterprise adoption of open source software between today and Friday June 6.

It promises to be an interesting discussion, and CIO.com has been good enough to give us some starting discussions points with its survey of attitudes towards open source in the CIO community. I’ll be …

This column obfuscation scheme is designed so that information can be gathered about the query and underlying schema, by just looking at the query. You will be able to tell if it is using keys correctly just by looking at the column names in the query.

Column Name Obfuscation 

1. Table Prefix Columns of a table will be prefixed with a abbreviation or (from a list of random names that can be selected from a list following a theme or something) of the Obfuscated table name (when I tackle joins this will resolve and conflict in names that are going to occur)
   
2. Column Type, undecided on whether or not to just go with simplified names like (str|int|float|bin) or go with the full data type (i.e BININT,BLOB,DECIMAL,VARCHAR,TEXT…).
   

3. Keys, P[0-9] numbers are only for multi value PRIMARY KEYS.

   …

This is going to be an unusual blog post, because I will continuously update it with features that MySQL still has on top of PostgreSQL, which is generally considered to be more feature rich. Some of these missing features can however hurt a lot. I am including MySQL 5.1 in here, since eventhough its not yet released as GA, more and more people have started to use it in production. At the same time I am also including 8.4. So in a way I am talking about what MySQL has on top of PostgreSQL by the end of the year. I am not going to include stuff like auto increment if there is something that is more or less equivalent with SERIAL. I am also not including features I consider unwise (like REPLACE). Finally I am skipping XML support, because I know both are working on improving the support, but I have not yet looked at it so closely. So here it goes:

• Multiple charsets/collations in the same DB (all the way down to the column level)
…

It was a beautiful day to start with, but rain and thunderstorms did mess with the barbeque planning Germans are famous for. So, lots of people attended Web Montag yesterday!

Darren Cooper opened Web Montag this time. He repeated a few times "1st of September", which is the next meeting in Frankfurt. For next events he really want to see more non-technical presentations. I think that's indeed a good thing. Darren also got some good jokes, seriously!

Andreas Demmer was first speaker, talking about Presentation Zen. It made us, the other speakers look bad afterwards.. just kidding! I knew bits and pieces about this approach for doing presentations, but it's what it is: an approach, not a …

Over the years, the database world has been buzzing with the strategic threat posed to the established players by upstart open-source database systems. Oracle and IBM would no longer be able to gouge defenseless small and medium-sized businesses of non-trivial portions of their IT budgets for a mere database licence. Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, for their part, have tried their best to respond to this threat, but it is clear that they cannot simply squash open-source products, but rather evolve with the changing landscape.

the countered threat from Oracle

Oracle made some strategic purchases in the past few years to establish a foothold in the embedded and front-end database market by acquiring Sleepycat (maintainers of BerkeleyDB) and InnoBase (makers of InnoDB storage engine for MySQL). These two also happened to provide the only two transactional backends for MySQL, whlie InnoDB is the only one to be used widely in practice. …

I'll be using this blog to keep the community and anyone interested in updates on my Google Summer of Code Project.The initial ideas for the project are available here MySQL Obfuscator. 
I'll developing it for PHP >= 5.1. The simplified working of it will be that it takes query's and a DB connection, gathers information about schema and rewrites the query and DDL for related tables.

I've got some ideas about the Schema renaming scheme that i will post here in the next day or two, I would like to get some feed back on the scheme, so feel free to poke holes in my ideas early. I would also like to hear any other input.

Greeting from India!
India Shock Tour which started on May 27 has been successfully ended. The MySQL team of David Axmark, Brian Aker, Iko Rein, and myself visited Pune, Hyderabad, and Chennai along with Manish Malhotra and Naveen Asrani from Sun Microsystems India. The tour attracted 750 MySQL developers in total.

In the week of Feb 18, just before MySQL was merged with Sun, we were in India holding India Road Show stopping 4 cities. This time, more than double number of people joined and I found MySQL was definitely getting more attention and popularity in India. There was a hailstorm of questions during MySQL performance turning session which was one of the topics added by the requests from many attendees of the Feb tour.

One of the …