In a despicable business practice, I received a message from a PR Firm representing Ingres. Now, I even wrote about the controversy that seems to have swept the open source community; but even my writings were not completely factually correct — I wrote that even if online backups were closed it was not necessarily the worst thing in the world. The actual parts of the online backup that are not open source and free are compression and encryption — that is all.

So really, we are talking about a very small part of backup. The last I saw most people used their own compressing (ie, | gzip -c) and encryption for backups. And honestly, I would rather use tried and true compression and encryption than something new that MySQL comes up with, so I do not even see most people wanting compression nor encryption.

But that’s besides the point. If Ingres thinks they can win customers over by swooping in when a controversy is happening, …

While at the MySQL Conf, I bought an Apple Time Capsule (1TB). I like it. It does appear that at least an initial time Machine backup eats significant swap space; not RAM as such, I have 4GB in my MacBook and it's not used up at all...

Anyway, OS X cleans up the (encrypted) swap files in /private/var/vm on startup. However, I tend to not reboot my machine a lot, since just closing the lid has a near-100% survival rate (one of the reasons I use a Mac). So now I have these swap files hogging my diskspace. Right now I have 20 of about 1M. Of course, the same directory also holds the 'sleepimage' which with my amount of RAM is over 4GB in itself. Anyway, I'd rather not have OS X eat up 2GB of my disk until I decide to reboot - and I really don't want to reboot!

So, anyone have an idea on how to get rid of old swap files without rebooting? I've found info online about completely disabling swap, but that is (even with 4GB RAM) …

Supplementary Characters
MySQL 6.0 New Features Document#1
2008-04-20

MySQL 6.0.5 is about to appear on the “MySQL 6.0 Downloads” page http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/6.0.html

This is MySQL’s alpha version, not to be confused with MySQL 5.1, which has been ‘release candidate’ for a while. The big 6.0 features are “online backup”, “Falcon”, and “supplementary characters”. This document is about the new supplementary characters feature.

What

Since MySQL 4.1, MySQL has supported two Unicode character sets, ucs2 and utf8. Luckily we don’t have to explain all about “Unicode” because there’s good definition and explanation. So if you need help with Unicode in general, read here:
http://www.unicode.org (Unicode reference)
or here:
…

At the moment, there are two big features in the works in MySQL optimizer - Subquery optimizations and Batched Key Access. While the former is a part of MySQL 6.0, I wrote about it here in my blog, and so forth, the latter was in nearly stealth mode until a couple of weeks ago.

That's no longer the case:

• Batched Key Access source code is now published as mysql-6.0-bka-preview tree.
• Igor Babaev, the author of the feature, gave a talk about Batched Key Access at MySQL User Conference, and the slides are available here.
• There is now …

I do not know if anyone noticed this; but there was an incompatible change from MySQL 5.1.22 to 5.1.23 in mysql_com.h file for NET structure by renaming the members last_errno and last_error to client_last_errno and client_last_error. This is really annoying as it not just breaks the compilation of lot of depending applications; and functionality will be annoy if one uses the wrong client library as there is no protocol version change. The change should have been done in …

For you, Fabrizio. All this talk about MySQL walking a tightrope got me hungry. So, on a pleasant stroll around Brussels I came across this little shop.

Not sure how well he walks the tightrope, but les gaufres...? Magnifiques!

I would be a very fat man if I lived in ...

Since Oracle announced the InnoDB plugin which provides compressed row formats, I thought I'd do this comparison again.

Here are some more data that I've cobbled together.

I've created a 2M row table with a schema that we use for audit data. It has 47 columns and 17 indexes.

I copied the table into new empty tables using INSERT ... SELECT with each of these engines:

• InnoDB row_format=compressed (from the InnoDB plugin)
• InnoDB row_format=Compact
• InnoDB row_format=Redundant
• MyISAM pack_keys=1
  
• MyISAM packed with myisampack (NOTE: these tables are readonly)
• PBXT
• Falcon

Here are …

Thanks to Jay Pipes and the conference team for putting together a great event and especially the top-notch keynotes. I think this is one reason we had such large attendence this year with more than 2,000 attendees. Also thanks to all the bloggers, speakers, session buddies, community members, users, boffers, drinkers, runners, sales people for bringing customers, alliance guys for getting sponsors, to engineering for shipping great products, marketing for promoting the conference, consultants for having great solutions, SEs for keeping us honest, support guys for meeting with customers and more...

There are some great conference photos from Duncan Davidson available on Flickr, including the one above of our community awards.

For a couple of months there have been no updates to our msl patch, however recently I managed some time to change this. The functionality was extended a little bit and what?s even more important the patch is available for all the recent MySQL releases.

To remind anyone who has not yet come across this piece of code. msl (microslow) patch was developed a few years ago to allow more precise logging of query execution times into the slow log. Originally MySQL database offered a second time resolution and also a 2 second minimum for the query to get written, that is when you set long_query_time=1. After applying the patch you could see whether the time was 0.005s or 0.9s, which can make a substantial difference for the database and application performance. Over time msl patch grew with new features to let people learn more details of query execution, normally hidden from everyone's eyes. Currently it?s used by many DBAs and developers to help …

It occurred to me today that open-source infrastructure providers (e.g., commercial providers of open-source operating systems, databases, application servers, etc.) may have much in common with telecommunications infrastructure providers (like cable, wireless, etc. providers).

Everyone uses their stuff, and generally at a rate that doesn't quite match the value of the benefits derived from it.

Early on we pay a premium for broadband Internet or support for still-buggy but cheaper open-source software. Over time it becomes commodified and our willingness to pay decreases.

What's a company to do?

...