Great conference yesterday at “La Sapienza” University in Rome with Marten Mickos and the Italian Team of Sun | MySQL.

I’ve just returned in Triest, my hometown, after 8 hours :( train ride.

Slides should be available the next week, here.

Marten, thank you for coming, I hope to see you in Italy once again!

Why? In brief, it is said that mysql is not as stable as postgresql. Postgresql or pgsql focuses on a single database engine as compared to mysql which has a pluggable engine architecture and has multiple engines. Also postgresql is well designed as compared to mysql. psql console is much better than mysql console (you will realize it when you use it). It is supposed to be much more scalable and

Many vendors are going to performance based testing, also known as hands on exams. Most of the criticisms I receive on a regular basis that that all Certification Exams are PICKY or rely too much on the memorization of trivia. 'Besides, a real {DBA|Developer} never uses most of those commands in Real LifeTM!'

Well, your next MySQL Exam just may eschew most of those complaints. Developers could be asked to normalize tables, DBAs could be asked to set up replication, and Cluster DBAs could be asked to set up a full cluster. There are many details to be worked out.

One of these details are tools that do not come with your MySQL Server. I find the MySQL Administrator a very valuable tool for quick, day-to-day DBA tasks. I am probably not alone in using it. But would it be fair to allow it on a hands on exam? How about other tools?

So, if YOU have an opinion, please let me know and help guide the …

In preparation for the book’s launch next month, I’ve created a website for it: High Performance MySQL. You may notice that the URL isn’t the same as the site for the first edition. It proved to be difficult to transfer that domain. If we accomplish it later on, I’ll set up a redirect.

Why an official site? To give you free stuff, of course. Final drafts of the front matter (TOC, preface, foreword), a sample chapter, and the index are there already. When the final quality control is done, I’ll update these. Right now they don’t have professionally drawn figures. That will change soon.

Also, you’ll eventually various things such as errata* and book-related info that I feel belongs there instead of here. You can subscribe to the site’s RSS feed to find out when these planned additions become reality.

* Surely there will be no errata, right? Right? …

I've opened a 'feature request' bug on this at http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=37107

Many third party tools designed for MySQL are designed such that referential integrity constraints may only be defined on InnoDB tables. Up until recently, this was fine as a hard coded limitation because only InnoDB supported referential integrity. Unfortunately, the reality now is that many storage engines, especially pluggable ones have many varied capabilities. There is no SQL accessible method for determining exactly what specialized capabilities any given engine has. The INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ENGINES metadata table includes XA, TRANSACTIONS, and SAVEPOINTS columns, but these don't go nearly far enough.

We need a table that lets engines expose exactly what capabilities they feature.

TABLE ENGINE_CAPABILITIES
ENGINE VARCHAR(64)
…

Welcome the the 99th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Since PGCon recently happened right here in Ottawa, let’s start with some posts about it, and about PostgreSQL. Josh Berkus came to the conference with his Database Soup. It sounds like he enjoyed himself: “So, that’s pgCon. It was exciting and fun. All of you PG geeks who missed it should be kicking yourselves about now, and putting in budget requests for next year.” He has day one highlights; day two highlights, and also …

I just saw that Atlassian, the provider of the essential community tools like Confluence wiki and JIRA ticket system, updated their wiki on the importance of monitoring the “lifeblood of your organization”.

They even outline the important monitoring tasks you need, and stress that it will help when dealing with their own world class support.

Monitoring involves a number of essential tasks, including those listed below:

• Monitoring log files.
• Checking for HTTP-availability and performance (e.g. by getting the same page every five minutes and displaying the time on a graph).
• Looking at many different parameters such as load, connections, IO, database-trends, and so …

I'm pleased to announce the release of Memcached UDFs for MySQL. This release contains the ability to now pass expiration values. For instance, you can:

select memc_set('keyabc', 'somevalue')

or

select memc_set('keyabc', 'I die in 10 seconds', 10);

The functions that now have this ability are:

memc_set()
memc_set_by_key()
memc_append()
memc_append_by_key()
memc_prepend()
memc_prepend_by_key()
memc_add()
memc_add_by_key()
memc_replace()
memc_replace_by_key()

You can download the latest archive from http://patg.net/downloads/memcached_functions_mysql-0.5.tar.gz

Also, mercurial repository at …

On the way to

http://jan.kneschke.de/2008/5/18/mysql-proxy-replicating-into-memcache

I have another small side project:

• translating Row based log-records into Statement ones.

Our support team was asking for it since a while and it was a nice PoC that I can decode RBR events nicely.

Running MySQL 5.1 (with binlog_format = ROW) I issued:

mysql> INSERT INTO cols_pk VALUES \
     ( 3, "varchar", "char" ), ( 4, NULL, NULL );

... and have let mysql-binlog-dump decode the row-based log-events into SQL statements:

$ ./mysql-binlog-dump \
  --binlog-file=/home/jan/datadir/mysql-bin.000010

-- mysql-binlog-dump.c:256: db = test
BEGIN

-- mysql-binlog-dump.c:220:
CREATE TABLE test.cols_pk (
  field_0 INT NOT NULL,
  field_1 VARCHAR(64) DEFAULT NULL,
  field_2 …

Properties:

Description:

If you have slow query logs enabled (with --log-slow-queries), this variable will help interpret all those queries that are not using indexes as slow queries.

Usage:

While …