The end of May - such a lovely time of the year and a bit of a hell for each and every student. But this year it is completely different for me in the way I was selected for GSoC (omg still cannot believe I was). Anyway it is exactly one week left before the coding for GSoC 2008 starts. The right time to analyze what has been done so far and what should be done during the summer.
The first step that I took the day I was selected I started reading the MySQL documentation. No way! I let myself to relax and enjoy the life for a few days. And after that the work on the project started. And there are few things that i just have to point out. The most important one is when you start hacking into something large and new for you is a proper documentation. From this point of view MySQL documentation is just a perfect example of how things should be done. You can find almost everything related to MySQL server under …

This problem is "documented" in two bugs:
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=36073
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=20001

Why in the world is this just a "documentation fix"? There have been a number of occasions when I've tried to write generic stored procedures that might want to analyze information about temporary tables. For instance, given a SELECT statement, I want to determine what datatypes each select clause produces. A fairly straightforward way to do this might be to run a "create temporary table xyz as (SELECT ... LIMIT 0), to produce an empty temporary table to analyze. This doesn't work however, because there isn't any information on xyz in the information schema! Worse, SHOW statements don't work as a PREPARED STATEMENT so there isn't any way to determine this information in …

I know many of you may be wondering why Cool Stack 1.3 isn't out yet, so I thought I'd post an update on where we are with the release. When I first started talking about this, I was hoping to get the release out in early May. But several things have colluded to cause a delay.

1. We took on a lot for this release. Although just looking at the proposal, it may seem like a simple matter to just update the versions of the various components, underneath the hood, we decided to do a lot more streamlining of the build and packaging process.  Since so many version updates were involved, that also meant more legal approvals.
2. We have a more formal QA process for this release (and for future releases). The good news is that this means we will have a more quality release, but the bad news is that it now takes more time as we have to …

There are a few podcasts I tend to listen to as I have time. Since I work with a wide range of technologies, I've tried to group them together into a semblance of order. There are a few others I am evaluating, but since I haven't listened to a large enough body of work, I'll refrain from listing them at this time. If there's one you think is particularly valuable or interesting that I don't have listed, please leave it in the comments.

.NET

.NET Rocks - http://www.dotnetrocks.com/

This is one of the best done podcasts out there and they cover anything and everything related to Microsoft .NET. That's a broad brush of most anything that interacts with Microsoft technologies. This one runs twice a week and is about an hour each podcast, but if you can spare the time, it's worth the listen.

Plumbers @ Work - …

Properties:

Description:

This variable changes the way InnoDB open files and flush data to disk and is should be considered as very important for InnoDB performance. By default, InnoDB uses …

There was some interesting discussion following my post last week asking whether there is a growing rift between commercial open source software vendors and some aspects of the open source user community.

Amongst the comments, Chris Marino of SnapLogic suggested that some of the tension might be eased by open source software vendors being more upfront about their intentions via the publication of social contracts. Examples include the Debian Social Contract and also Funambol’s Open Source Project Social Contract.

I know many of you may be wondering why Cool Stack 1.3 isn't out yet, so I thought I'd post an update on where we are with the release. When I first started talking about this, I was hoping to get the release out in early May. But several things have colluded to cause a delay.

1. We took on a lot for this release. Although just looking at the proposal, it may seem like a simple matter to just update the versions of the various components, underneath the hood, we decided to do a lot more streamlining of the build and packaging process.  Since so many version updates were involved, that also meant more legal approvals.
2. We have a more formal QA process for this release (and for future releases). The good news is that this means we will have a more quality release, but the bad news is that it now takes more time as we have to …

I know many of you may be wondering why Cool Stack 1.3 isn't out yet, so I thought I'd post an update on where we are with the release. When I first started talking about this, I was hoping to get the release out in early May. But several things have colluded to cause a delay.

1. We took on a lot for this release. Although just looking at the proposal, it may seem like a simple matter to just update the versions of the various components, underneath the hood, we decided to do a lot more streamlining of the build and packaging process.  Since so many version updates were involved, that also meant more legal approvals.
2. We have a more formal QA process for this release (and for future releases). The good news is that this means we will have a more quality release, but the bad news is that it now takes more time as we have to …

We (in the Telecom team at MySQL) have been debating whether we should call this blog 'MySQL in Telco' or 'MySQL in Communications'. Naming discussions tend to take long time, and this one was no exception.

From a US perspective, it appears that Telecom is an outdated term. Wireless carriers and cable television companies do not consider themselves as Telecom companies. Maybe for this reason, large US-headquartered vendors including Sun, HP, IBM and Oracle all have a 'Communications & Media' practice.

From a European perspective, Telecom is used for equipment vendors and service providers. Companies like Logica, Cap Gemini, Atos Origin and TietoEnator refer to the vertical as 'Telecom & Media'.

Of the global SI's in India, Wipro and TCS refer to Telecom while Infosys talk about Communications.

As a working title we at one time used 'MySQL blablabla' blog, and funnily enough, there was a compromise suggestion to …

Quite frequently I would log in to customers system and find MySQL using too much memory. I would look at memory consumed by Innodb (it is often higher than innodb_buffer_pool_size) substract memory used by other global buffers such as query_cache_size and key_buffer and will in many cases see some mysterous memory which I can't really explain. It can be several Gigabytes accounting for over 50% of memory usage of MySQL in some cases, though typically it is much smaller fraction.

Now. There are a lot of guesses I can make. Could it be memory allocated for per connection buffers which was not really freed to operation system ? Could it be some buffers associated with opened tables, prepared statements etc ? Could it be some of the queries currently running is using some of the buffers temporary based on per connection settings ? It also could be memory leak in MySQL or runaway stored …