The best storage engine for MySQL is by far InnoDB (and yes some applications can live with MyISAM only, but that's not the point). InnoDB (now part of Oracle) is also dual-licensed and has had an agreement with MySQL for several years now.

On the surface everything is looking  smooth:

• MySQL distributes proprietary MySQL+InnoDB to those who wants to embed them in their proprietary applications
• The open source community can work with  GPL MySQL and GPL InnoDB.

In practice it doesn't work quite that way:

Firstly because InnoDB hot-backup feature for instance has never been open source released. So contrary to the …

So, I mentioned before that I found out about index_merge at the MySQL Conference. I was wondering why I had not heard more about it since it came out in 5.0.3. When talking with some MySQL people about it, I received mixed results. So, I decided to kind of run my own tests on some data and see what I could figure out.

I apologize for WordPress’ bad output. =(

The Data

I created a table with 5 million rows. Early tests with MySQL’s Harrison Fisk (HarrisonF) over my shoulder with small data sets showed MySQL would optimize out the indexes in favor of table scans. I wanted to avoid that. This is my table schema:


CREATE TABLE `test2` (
`id1` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default ‘0′,
`id2` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default ‘0′,
`id3` int(10) …

All of my sites run a piece of software called Everything. Mine is a fork from the original Everydevel Corp's release. It shares some common traits with Slash but it has a more rapid development cycle that I like.

One of the things it shares with Slash, is that the "site" is the database. AKA everything that makes a site, a site, is the database. This means that a backup of the site can be tossed into an everything container and be up and running in seconds (I use this with virtual machines so that I can move stuff around on a whim).

I hate backups. I don't want to take snapshots with LVM, since I know I just need the content, and typically with dumps I end up with a huge set of these files just sitting around.

I cannot search them. …

Last week saw MySQL User Conference 2008 in Santa Clara, but I was not able to make time for it this year either. However, in the wake of Sun's acquisition of MySQL, it was very interesting to follow what was going on. A few things that caught my attention:

MySQL 5.1 is nearing General Availability and an interesting storage engine plugin ecosystem starts to emerge. It's this latter, but related event that I see as the first real sign of validation for MySQL's long-ago chosen path of pluggable storage systems instead of focused effort on making one good general-use engine.

Oracle/Innobase announced InnoDB Plugin for MySQL 5.1, which much-awaited features which promise a great deal of help for daily management headaches. More than that, InnoDB Plugin's release under …

Apache has a neat module called mod_dbd that allows your Apache modules to connect to a database. mod_dbd interfaces with apr_dbd, an Apache Portable Runtime (APR) abstraction layer around database specific drivers.

Back when Ubuntu 7.04 (fiesty) was released, a MySQL driver was not bundled with Apache for licensing concerns. So, in order to use mod_dbd to connect to a MySQL database, you need to get the MySQL driver source code from WebThing (apr_dbd_mysql.c) and manually re-compile apr-utils.

You also need the source code for Apache 2.2.3 (which includes apr-utils 1.2.7) from the Ubuntu 7.04 repositories, then copy the apr_dbd_mysql.c file into the Apache source …

Marten Mickos was profiled in this past weekend's San Jose Mercury News, the prominent Silicon Valley newspaper.  (In fact, they have the domain name www.SiliconValley.com among others.)

Integrating with Sun's products is an attractive thing, but it's not the main idea. The main idea of the acquisition and of our business generally is to be the platform for the Web economy. Now, with the help of Sun, we will be able to accelerate this.

We had in our field organization 200 people; Sun has 17,000. We have a lot of usage in the big corporations, but we haven't been able to sell to them and become key vendors for them yet. With Sun, we get instant access to the big Fortune 500 and Fortune 2000 customers.

And to those who do want more than the …

At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, The Pythian Group gave away EXPLAIN cheatsheets. They were very nice, printed in full color and laminated to ensure you can spill your coffee* on it and it will survive.

For those not at the conference, or those that want to make more, the file is downloadable as a 136Kb PDF at explain-diagram.pdf

* or tea, for those of us in the civilized world.

During the conf, Keith Murphy spent long late-night hours getting issue 4 of MySQL Magazine ready.
Horay to Keith for starting (and continuing) that initiative!



(I snapped this pic of Keith + Monty at the MySQL Community dinner)

Read this doc on Scribd: Record every Referral for Flickr Realtime

Looks like the InnoDB plugin is completely broken with MySQL-5.1.24; at least there is no luck for me so far to set it up right. First, the Makefile is broken. Second, I tried to do a static build of InnoDB plugin with MySQL server (–enable-innodb and –with-plugin-innobase) resulted in partial InnoDB plugins (Information schema) missing the main one as shown below:

   1:  mysql> show plugins;

2:  +---------------------+--------+--------------------+---------+---------+

3:  | Name                | Status | Type               | Library | License |

4:  +---------------------+--------+--------------------+---------+---------+

5:  | …