MySQL geeks worldwide unite!
 
I am proud to announce that Georg Richter (our Community Engineering Lead) has updated the MySQL Community Development Program.
        http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Community_Contributions   The updated program gives explicit suggestions for items you can work on, if you want to help out yourself and/or MySQL in development.   We have published a list of Development Worklogs (read: design outlines) and Bugs which we are very interested in getting help with. If you let us know your interest in coding one of the items, we can assign a MySQL developer to guide you in your work.    The intent of this assistance is to help you develop good code for MySQL. We hope this makes your end result function well, and makes it possible to merge your code easily with other …

The last day I’m suffering from different thoughts. So I’ve decided to share’em with you.

It is really possible to create the application such as gears, but independent from Google, that will run on most platofrms and browsers. What we need:

• Compile embeded MySQL (very lite edition) for most platforms (Windows, Linux and MacOSX, I believe that would be enough)
• Create Java Applet and JNI-wrapping library to access MySQL
• Create JavaScript library that will access MySQL through the applet

And that’s all. To use it you will need just to include the applet and JS-library into your page, after the first load applet will detect platform and will download embeded MySQL and native libraries.

Today in Kiev, we had a great time with MySQLers in Engineering and Support. And I got competition in the area of photography from Oleksandr “Sanja” Belkin. Other than that, this blog entry is again of the sit-back-and-relax type, not going into lots of MySQL detail. That’s not to say that we wouldn’t have gone into detail, though, although we saw more churches under the leadership of our Kiev team than we had seen in a long time.

This is how much I like my Sigma 8mm lens

We started the day by looking at Sun’s on-boarding procedures for MySQLers in the Ukraine, sipping tea and coffee at the Hotel President. And we went through Sun’s business model, through the importance of retaining the Eventum systems for Support, about how MySQL-time contractors are managed as part of Sun, as well as other topics familiar from other MySQL locations. Our Sun colleagues noted that our values, topics and concerns seem to …

I have just released the first fully durable version of PBXT. Because of the amount of new code I have reverted PBXT to Alpha status. This version, 1.0-alpha, can be downloaded from: http://www.primebase.org/download.

Oh, which reminds me: PBXT now has a new home at http://www.primebase.org, so take a look around! I have actually found a bit of time to write some documentation. Right now the documentation describes building, installation, and the PBXT system parameters. Future additions will include information on performance tuning and a road map for PBXT development.

But there is more to the new home than just a new web-site. The PBXT project is now owned and funded by PrimeBase Technologies, an open source software development …

I think every person responsible for Development or Operations of growing application sooner or later have to decide on couple few questions on how to tackle application performance. These questions are:

• Should we Optimize Application or get more Hardware ?
• Should we do things ourselves or hire an experts to help us ?

The answer on these questions actually depend on a lot of things, some of which we'll try to cover here.

The things which usually define best solution are economics , resources and risks .

First lets talk about optimizing application vs getting better hardware.

With application optimization typically you have rather interesting relationship between "effort" and "result" typical application would have number of low hanging fruits …

Thank you all for taking the time to respond to the little challenge I posted yesterday! I am pleasantly surprised to note that so many people took the time to post a solution. And most people provided the correct answer too: you are all entitled to a well deserved discount to register for the MySQL User's conference!!!

For those of you interested in the solution: there are two different forms of the CASE statement syntax: the so-called simple case and the searched case.

The simple case selects one WHEN...THEN branch by comparing the value of the expression that appears after the CASE …

I’ve been making preparations this week for the panel I’m moderating at this year’s OSBC conference in San Francisco. The title is The State of the Open Source Database Market, and we’re lucky enough to have a great panel, featuring: Andy Astor, CEO, EnterpriseDB; Roger Burkhardt, President & CEO, Ingres; Ken Jacobs, VP Product Strategy, Server Technologies Division, Oracle; and Zack Urlocker, EVP of Products, MySQL.

Everyone’s open to answering whatever questions the audience throws at them (within reason) so with the combined knowledge and expertise on offer it should be an interesting and entertaining session. I’ll try not to get in the way!

I’m also looking forward to putting some names to faces as this will be my first OSBC event. I’m here all …

"So hard hard is that MySQL DBA Certification?" I was asked by two different individuals just a few hours apart. The first was a prospective candidate asking for study guidance. The second was project manager who has the general view that certifications are not worth the paper they are printed on and only represent someones ability to regurgitate answers previously fed to the test taker.

So how tough is the test? Forty percent of those taking the DBA-I fail. DBA-II only fails twenty four percent.

I would hope that simple regurgitation would provide more than a sixty percent pass rate.

The Developer exams have a 72 and 75 percent pass rate. The Associate exam has a 77 percent pass rate and the cluster is just over 80 percent.

The MySQL DBA exams are tough. I had been using MySQL since the days when you downloaded it from tcx.se when I took the exams last year. The study guide and …

Jason Hunter writes in email:

Perl is the duct tape of the internet. Created by Larry Wall in 1987 and made famous with his Programming Perl "camel book" published by O'Reilly, it's the tool sysadmins use to keep things running.

We're proud to announce we've finished loading the Perl.org mailing list history into MarkMail. A total of 530,000 emails across 75 lists. The lists don't go back to 1987 (boy that'd be cool if they did). But that's all right; who really needs tech support against Perl 1.000?

What we have here is traffic starting with the migration to the Perl.org setup in 1999:

Enjoy! And if anyone has earlier archives, let us know.

This is awesome. Markmail also has mailing list …

In MySQL 5.1 Cluster Certification Study Guide at page 151 there’s the following sentence: “InnoDB operates with the REPEATABLE READ isolation level, which still allows phantom reads but suppresses non-repeatable reads”.

The sentence is wrong: the REPEATABLE READ isolation level for InnoDB engine doesn’t allow phantom reads.

In some database systems, REPEATABLE READ isolation level allows phantoms, such that if another transaction inserts new rows in the interval between the SELECT statements, the second SELECT will see them. This is not true for InnoDB; phantoms do not occur for the REPEATABLE READ level. SERIALIZABLE isolation level is similar to REPEATABLE READ with the additional restriction that rows selected by one transaction cannot be changed by another until the first transaction finishes. (as stated by MySQL 5 Certification Guide)

Here is an example to demonstrate such a behaviour.

To …