The 98th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published on Jeff’s SQL Server Blog.

Log Buffer is a shared project of the DBA blogging community, so you’re welcome to edit and publish an edition yourself. LB’s 100th anniversary edition is still up-for-grabs (and there’s plenty of room besides that), so read the Log Buffer homepage and the guidelines, and then email me.

Here’s Jeff Smith’s …

To some, Google has long been a champion of open source, hiring top open-source developers and contributing to a range of open-source projects, in addition to its Summer of Code. To others, Google has been the worst enemy of open source, bumping AGPL-based code of its Code.Google.com and only selectively contributing back to the projects like Linux and MySQL from which it derives benefit.

I've been in both camps. One thing is increasingly clear to me, however: Google is opening up to open source.

Earlier this week, I noted its …

A few years ago a backdoor was found in Firebird, the open source fork of Interbase, that already existed in the original Interbase product and was still in the version of Interbase that was sold at the time. Nowadays this is fixed, but it was kind of scary that a company would add a backdoor and then totally forget about it, why else would they not have removed it before open sourcing (after all a backdoor only works through obscurity)? Anyways the other day another security issue (this sort of thing happens to the best of them) in Interbase that was fixed in January in Firebird already.

The security issue has been long disclosed. Now why on earth would the Interbase …

Performance improvement:

* Earlier MONyog was semaphore intensive. That could result in reaching the ‘limit of semaphores that can be created by the kernel’ in some systems. MONyog 2.04 will use less semaphores. Another symptom was that a large number of small and zero-size files could be left behind (in system TEMP folder on Windows and in MONyog/bin folder on Linux). This is also solved with this.

Downloads: http://webyog.com/en/downloads.php
Purchase: http://webyog.com/en/buy.php

Bug fixes:

* Structure Sync could miss the concluding quote around column comments. This bug was introduced in 6.5.
* Migration from SQL Server could fail with empty tables.
* Migration (UPDATE and DELETE) triggers could fail with specific schemas on source (afffected were small tables with short column types only - like integers and very short string types). This bug was introduced early in 6.x with the full Unicode support added here.
* Migration could generate non-matching columns-count with specific schemas. This was also introduced early in 6.x
* Message about ?Successful rows? could display twice in Migration (sja.log). Note: This was a cosmetical issue with the message only. Rows were only migrated once!

Downloads: http://webyog.com/en/downloads.php
Purchase: …

I now enabled SQL-interface to table-reorg.

The syntax (which is the same for other partition mgm) is
ALTER ONLINE TABLE T ADD PARTITION PARTITIONS N;

Also switched so that hashmap partitioning is used for all tables created using SQL.
And mysql-test-run works (including a new ndb_add_partition-test)
(except for some range/list partition testcases)

it's still kind of fragile. Error handling is sparse...

there are 3 known things which are easy to fix
- ndbapi transaction hinting/pruning does not work after/during a reorg
- unique indexes will not work after/during a reorg
- only 1 reorg per table is possible (SUMA caches distribution information incorrectly)

and one quite hard
- cluster crash *during* table-reorg

current plan is
1) fix 3 easy known problems
2) fix error handling
3) write …

I guess I am bit late with these news... but.. IT IS GREAT NEWS!

Short summary (read more on Ramon's blog)

• Cluster was pulled out of 5.1.24
  
• Don't use 5.0 any longer
  
• MySQL Cluster 6.2 is what everyone should use (unless CGE 6.3 features are needed). It is a great piece of software, thoroughly tested by telcos and put in production around the world!
  

Why pull Cluster out of 5.1.24? As everyone knows 5.1.24 is delayed and at the same time CGE 6.2 has lived its own life and matured in production and in test labs.

Although the mysql server parts are based on 5.1.23 the …

During 2008 we are planning to run a series of interviews with interesting persons somehow related to the telecom field. In this first installment, we will have a chat with Juha Heinänen from Finland.

MySQL: Juha, you are a former professor of Computer Science and Communication technology, CTO (or similar positions) in at least Sonera, Telia and Song, former ATM specialist, responsible for bringing Internet to Finland and registering the .fi top-level domain, a consultant for many early network equipment startups some of which succeeded to be still with us today, and author of several RFC's. Nowadays you are a core contributor to the OpenSER SIP proxy, and you sell a VoIP platform called OpenSIPg based on that to Nordic operators. In addition you seem to live a life that would likely be a dream of many hackers, spending time in different parts of the world hacking on your favorite Open Source project. Even to this date, I …

What a long name eh... the link is http://au.sun.com/sunnews/events/2008/horizons/

Jonathon and I will be there, and I am speaking in the business track on Tuesday. It won't be about training or the other stuff that Open Query is doing, but instead provide a high-level (business) overview of MySQL's unique architecture. As we know, MySQL is particularly capable at doing a lot of things, but for optimal results the underlying architecture needs to be right, too.

Of course it is an excellent opportunity for us to meet some more potential customers too, as we now have a lot more training modules for developers, DBAs and High Availability. Our public course schedule for the coming months covers Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide and Auckland, and meanwhile …

Bruce Momjian says

…the volume of patches [to PostgreSQL] has risen dramatically during the past few years.

This is total hearsay — I don’t have hard numbers, haven’t verified it myself, etc etc. But consider the source!

What can be responsible for this increase in patches to PostgreSQL?

Bruce Momjian, Open Source development, patches, PostgreSQL