Here’s a rundown of Thursday (day 3) of the MySQL Conference and Expo. This day’s sessions were much more interesting to me than Wednesday’s, and in fact I wanted to go to several of them in a single time slot a couple of times. Inside the PBXT Storage Engine This session was, as it sounds, a look at the internals of PBXT, a transactional storage engine for MySQL that has some interesting design techniques.

Keith Murphy and his hard-working crew have released the spring 2008 issue of MySQL Magazine. Go take a look – it includes quite a few articles on various topics, even a mention of our upcoming book (High Performance MySQL, Second Edition).

MySQL has a lot of string data types - CHAR, VARCHAR, BLOB, TEXT, ENUM and bunch of variants such as VARBINARY but I think it is not enough

I would also like to see type HEXCHAR which would be able to store hex strings, such as those returned as MD5() and SHA1() efficiently. With little modification it could work for UUID() as well (it adds some dashes). Currently it is quite inconvenient to deal with strings like that in MySQL. Either you store them as strings and waste space or you spend them as binary and deal with inconvenience of having not readable strings in the table OR adding UNHEX() everywhere - which also adds overhead.

Another one I would like to see is zBLOB or zTEXT (or call them BLOB COMPRESSED/ …

I’ve hacked around a bit to get PBXT to compile in tree, and pulled in the Maria engine. Both are latest source.

So, want to try out Maria?

Want to try out PBXT?

Just want to do ./configure and go with it, just like building a normal MySQL Server?

Grab the -stew tree. Source tarball here:

mysql-5.1.24-stew1.tar.gz

(it’s based on something close to 5.1.24… and I’m going to switch some of my systems over to it rather soon… already done some good benchmarks on one of my apps).

feedback much appreciated.

UPDATE: Got x86-64 Linux. Try my binary tarball (built from above src tarball). Built on Ubuntu Gutsy (my laptop). So it may (or may not) work. …

Is proprietary software really that bad? Or is it a fair contract between consulting corporations? The answer is "It depends" and "Not really." Both depend on the strictures a vendor puts in place to inhibit its ability to lock a customer into its software. In MySQL's case, MySQL has no intention to lock customers in, as far as I can tell. It just wants to convince customers to pay so that it can prove its worth.

MySQL is contemplating introducing extensions to its core database that are only available to paid subscribers, for compelling reasons. This is not, as has been suggested, in and of itself proprietary. Red Hat does the same by providing an initial gate to its RHEL code which only a paid subscriber can access unless they get it from an existing customer of Red …

Just as a note the Ebay memory engine has been released:
http://code.google.com/p/mysql-heap-dynamic-rows/

This is awesome to see open sourced. It is an extension to the current Memory engine that has the engine using less memory (aka it really implements variable size character types).

A number of people have asked me about the Slashdot article Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL.

The software that was proposed to be closed source are portions of the online backup drivers. Each such driver has to be written in close cooperation with the developers of each storage engine. Well...

InnoDB already has an online backup tool, and even if/when they revise their tool to use this new API, it's still going to be theirs, open or closed, not the property of the MySQL Group.

Online backup of the engines for Archive, CSV, Blackhole, and Memcached doesn't even make sense, and even if it did, BrianA will flat out refuse to write crippleware into his own software.

Similarly, while online backup makes sense for Maria, I don't see MontyW writing crippleware into his work.

How about …

Ok. We may all (maybe not really "all") agree that XML in a relational DB is a cool thing. But which kind of approach should we use to store non tabular data in a typical tabular infrastructure?

Personally I don't like hybrids. The core of a RDBMS is designed to be efficient and with a relatively small footprint. Inflating the core with some features that would probably be helpful to not more than the 30% of the projects (to be optimistic, but this percentage is a good reason to think about XML in a DB), does not justify the extra overhead.
Unfortunately, an XML storage engine. On the contrary, it would make things worse, because we would translate queries twice - Xquery to SQL then to XQuery again (the big fans of MySQL internals will forgive me for this simplification).

My interest for a XOR (XML Over Relational) approach goes back to several years ago, mainly because in my past life I have designed a couple of …

I spent part of yesterday attending the Open Source Summit at Portland’s Innotech Business and Technology Conference, and moderating a panel on ‘IT Giants and Open Source.’ We had a great discussion about the reasons, roles, responsibilities and rewards for big vendors to be acutely and adequately participating in open source software development and commercialization. Our fabulous panelists were Danese Cooper, open source diva, knitting machine and present to give perspective from Intel, Stuart Cohen of OSDL fame and current leader of startup CSI and …