So I guess the argument that Monty is putting forth is that MySQL's future depends on some company exploiting their ownership of the MySQL copyright. As in, he feels that MySQL future will fall apart if there isn't a company that makes its money by dual licensing MySQL under some proprietary license. Amazingly enough Stallman, chief hater of all things proprietary, agrees. Hell seems to have frozen over. I however humbly disagree. The MySQL community has already left the dual licensing model behind. Sun has never shipped the "best" MySQL version, the community has!

Obviously since many of the patches that make the community versions better have not been licensed to Sun, they can't of course apply these patches to their distro without leaving their proprietary customers …

Here’s a quick flowchart for the different ways that Kontrollbase gathers and processes data.

We have lots of things on the go right now (over and above the normal process of keeping things up to date), and one of the main projects for me is to do a complete rebuild of the installation chapter (Installing and Upgrading MySQL). I’ll be starting with the 5.1 manual, then the 5.4 manual. Any future manuals should be based on these so we should be up to date for future generations. What I’m doing:

• Re-structuring the chapter to make it easier to follow on a platform basis. The old structure mixed content for different binary and source types, and different platforms, across a number of sections, making it very difficult to follow the instructions for your chosen platform.
• Make some things generic. There are sections which are generic and apply to all (or at least many) different installation types.
• Make some things …

We have lots of things on the go right now (over and above the normal process of keeping things up to date), and one of the main projects for me is to do a complete rebuild of the installation chapter (Installing and Upgrading MySQL). I’ll be starting with the 5.1 manual, then the 5.4 manual. Any future manuals should be based on these so we should be up to date for future generations.

What I’m doing:

• Re-structuring the chapter to make it easier to follow on a platform basis. The old structure mixed content for different binary and source types, and different platforms, across a number of sections, making it very difficult to follow the instructions for your chosen platform.
• Make some things generic. There are sections which are generic and apply to all (or at least many) different installation types.
• Make …

Feels like a long time ago, but my talk at the MySQL User’s Conference back in April 09 on running MySQL Multiple Times to get better performance is now available online at YouTube. The original PDF of the presentation is available here.View it here: YouTube – Improving Performance by Running MySQL Multiple Times

This entry is a follow up to TOTD #95 and shows how to use the recent integrations of JSR 299 in GlassFish v3 to convert a JSF managed bean to a JSR 299 bean (aka Web Beans). The TOTD #95 describes a simple Java EE 6 web application that uses Java Server Faces 2.0 components for displaying the results of a database query conducted by EJB 3.1 and JPA 2.0 classes.

The EJB class, which …

This entry is a follow up to TOTD #95 and shows how to use the recent integrations of JSR 299 in GlassFish v3 to convert a JSF managed bean to a JSR 299 bean (aka Web Beans). The TOTD #95 describes a simple Java EE 6 web application that uses Java Server Faces 2.0 components for displaying the results of a database query conducted by EJB 3.1 and JPA 2.0 classes.

The EJB class, which …

This entry is a follow up to TOTD #95 and shows how to use the recent integrations of JSR 299 in GlassFish v3 to convert a JSF managed bean to a JSR 299 bean (aka Web Beans). The TOTD #95 describes a simple Java EE 6 web application that uses Java Server Faces 2.0 components for displaying the results of a database query conducted by EJB 3.1 and JPA 2.0 classes.

The EJB class, which …

Some of you may have run the mysql-test-run tool which is the MySQL test suite. But did you know there are actually multiple suites? If you just run the tool, you don’t get everything!

Check out the mysql-test/suites subdirectory. That’s all the stuff you don’t get when just running the tool normally. If you take a peek at the Makefiles, you will find a target test-bt (build team) which shows the extra calls and parameters for the additional suites.

OurDelta has had some interesting cases where a build that’s otherwise ok would fail when users tried the test suite on their installation. We reckon such a test should definitely pass, and thus we had some more homework to do. So now OurDelta builds with as many tests as exist enabled, on all platforms and architectures. Slow yes, but that’s not an argument to not test something, right? Failing tests are often indicative of other issues, so at the very least …

It may seem hard to believe, but I have seen DECIMAL(31,0) in action on a production server. Not just in one column, but in 15 columns just in the largest 4 tables of one schema. The column was being used to represent a integer primary or foreign key column.

In a representative production instance (one of a dozen plus distributed production database servers) the overall database footprint was decreased from ~10 GB to ~2 GB, a 78% saving. In total, 15 columns across just 4 tables were changed from DECIMAL(31,0) to INT UNSIGNED.

One single table > 5GB was reduced to under 1GB (a 81% saving). This being my record for any GB+ tables in my time working with the MySQL database.

Had this server for example had 4GB of RAM, and say 2.5GB allocated to the innodb_buffer_pool_size, this one change moved the system from requiring more consistent disk access (4x data to memory) to being able to store all data in memory. Tests showed …