Xaprb April 15, 2008A Different Angle on the MySQL Conference (http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/04/15/a-different-angle-on-the-mysql-conference)

It is finally exam time at the Users Conference. The Magnolia Room where the exams will be given is just past the escalators in the lobby area. Over 20,000 pieces of paper have go into the exams and two staplers were sacrificed in preparation for the six exam sessions. As you can see from the photo, we have plenty of seating just ready for you.

Actually I have been giving exams since Sunday to MySQL Employees who are going to be busy working during the normal exam time.

If you are at the UC, please be sure to stop by to say hello to Christi, Ricky, and me. And thank you for your support of MySql.

MySQL MagazineApril 15, 2008Introducing Kickfire (http://www.paragon-cs.com/mag/issue4.pdf)

eWeek April 15, 2008SQL Chip Gives MySQL Data Warehouse Boost (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Database/SQL-Chip-Gives-MySQL-Data-Warehouse-Boost/)

The irony of it all doesn’t escape me at all. I remember sitting in a small meeting room with my former BioWare colleague Jeff Marvin a couple of years or more ago and we were having a heated debate. The BioWare web site framework was something that we had primarily written in house (many years before) and I was vehemently opposed to moving to an off-the-shelf web framework.

Jeff was arguing quite rightly about some of the many good points about Web Frameworks. I was arguing, quite rightly, some of the many bad points of Frameworks. And so, we came to a stalemate, mostly, and that was that.

Fast forward several years and now working at MySQL (now part of Sun Microsystems) I came into a team that had inherited a home-grown …

Percona, the company maintaining MySQL Performance Blog has a good presence on the conference this year. We have me (Peter), Vadim, Aurimas, Baron and Andrew attending the show. Alexey had to stay because he could not get Visa in time and Maciek is staying to be able to reliably service emergencies arising with our customers.

Everyone but Aurimas is …

I’ve been using MySQL 5.1 a lot more of late. Also, as of about a month ago, I’m now a Mac OS X user, so tend to use MySQL on OS X Leopard 10.5 a lot more for testing. I’ve found a rather annoying bug (in 5.1.23-rc) that is fixed in the current source tree, and will be in 5.1.24-rc…

What’s annoying me? The fact that Control+R (which allows one to save typing, because you can go through the search history of ~/.mysql_history) segfaults the MySQL client. At first I thought something was wrong with my install when I saw the infamous “Segmentation fault” error. Turns out, its just mysql#33288.

I always hit ctrl+r without even thinking… Its just a shortcut ingrained in my fingers, because I predominantly use a shell. So, Mac OS X users can rejoice soon, as 5.1.24-rc is surely around the corner. In fact, there are numerous improvements, just read the …

I’m still looking for new entries. I get quite a few suggestions, but not all of them make it into quiz questions. Do send in your suggestions!

Here’s something I came across several months back. Watch in wonder as we create a PRIMARY KEY which is already there, then drop it again, only and to see that it’s still present in the table…:

mysql> DESC t1;
+-------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field | Type    | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| i     | int(11) | NO   | PRI |         |       |
+-------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> ALTER TABLE t1 DROP PRIMARY KEY;
ERROR 1091 (42000): Can't DROP 'PRIMARY'; check that column/key exists
mysql> ALTER TABLE t1 ADD PRIMARY KEY(i);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Records: 0  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql> DESC t1;
+-------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| …

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Venture capitalist Brad Feld just put up an intriguing post comparing Google App Engine to Amazon EC2. The meat of the entry is from an analysis by Brad's friend Scott Moody. Here are the juiciest bits, pro and con:

With EC2, you still have to set-up load balancers, configure multiple replicated database servers, implement scalability hacks if things grow too fast (such as distributed caching of data via memcached), keep distros and apps up-to-date, etc. Bottom Line: EC2-based companies still require sys admins, AppEngine companies don't. That will certainly change as more companies begin offering EC2 server management services.

Google provides a non-relational datastore and that's the only datastore available (no traditional file system, no relational databases). With EC2, people generally use MySQL or Postgresql. Amazon offers a …