What MySQL honestly was never good at is giving good helpful error messages. Start with basics for example - The error message in case of syntax error gives you information about tokens near by but little details:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> SELECT * FROM  user oder BY pwd;
2. ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error IN your SQL syntax; CHECK the manual that corresponds TO your MySQL server version FOR the RIGHT syntax TO USE near 'by pwd' at line 1

It would be much better if MySQL would give error give exact position of error (with complex auto generated queries line number is often not good enough) as well as give some better explanation on what is wrong.

The new parser for MySQL was spoke since 5.0 times but it never took off and I'm not seeing it on public road map either.

Though this is just tip of the iceberg of not so helpful or misleading error messages. …

Download Maatkit

Maatkit contains essential command-line utilities for MySQL, such as a table checksum tool and query profiler. It provides missing features such as checking slaves for data consistency, with emphasis on quality and scriptability.

This release contains major bug fixes and new features. Some of the changes are not backwards-compatible. It also contains new tools to help you discover replication slaves and move them around the replication hierarchy.

Changelog for mk-archiver:

2008-03-16: version 1.0.8

   * Added --setvars option (bug #1904689, bug #1911371).
   * Added --charset option (bug #1877548).
   * Changed short form of --analyze to -Z to avoid conflict with --charset.

Changelog for mk-deadlock-logger:

2008-03-16: version 1.0.9

   * Added --setvars option (bug #1904689, bug #1911371).
   * Added 'A' part to DSNs (bug #1877548).

Changelog for …

I found this interesting article that talks about things to look for in a programmer which I think is also suitable for a DBA.

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=319

Found this today: Windows Core Networking : WSAPoll, A new Winsock API to simplify porting poll() applications to Winsock.

Which means we should be able to squeeze some peformance out of Vista. Although, since poll() we’ve gone and moved on to much better things in the free world.

As part of porting MySQL Cluster to Microsoft Windows platforms, I’m going and redoing a lot of the portable sockets code in MySQL. My goal is to have enforcing of proper use of the portable functions be done by the compiler instead of the programmer - leading to less portability bugs.

Let’s face it: friends don’t let friends have to run Windows to not break the Windows port.

Good news is that so far I’ve found several bugs that could have presented them in real nasty ways at run time but have instead showed up as build errors - …

... or how to safely run data manipulation statements in your database.Reading posts on Devshed's forums I sometime notice people doing maintenance work on their data without any safety net apart from occasional ages old backups ;-).Anyway I think there's no need for a restore if you just issued the wrong update query, I mean, transactions are here for this, it's just a matter of educating people

Maatkit contains essential command-line utilities for MySQL, such as a table checksum tool and query profiler. It provides missing features such as checking replicas for data consistency, with emphasis on quality and scriptability. This release contains major bug fixes and new features. Some of the changes are not backwards-compatible. It also contains new tools to help you discover replication replicas and move them around the replication hierarchy. Changelog for mk-archiver: 2008-03-16: version 1.

MySQL 5.1 introduces the plugin interface, a series of API that allow the load and unload of server components at runtime.
The idea behind this architecture is to make MySQL server really expandable.
Surprisingly, the latest engines being developed in house (Falcon and Maria) are not implemented using the plugin technology. The best example of how to take advantage of this interface comes from the outside. Paul McCullagh's PBXT is a transactional engine that can be loaded at run time.
To use it, you can either download the pre-compiled plugin library, and load it into your server, or get the source code and build the whole server from scratch.
Of course, the most interesting option is the pre-compiled binary. I downloaded the latest …

If you have a 12-server MySQL Cluster with: 1 Management Node 3 SQL Nodes 2 Data Node Groups, 4 Data Nodes per group And each machine is configured to allocate 1G of memory for its function, how much data (data + indexes) can you store in total in your cluster? You can guess, but you get bonus points if you [...]

I was wrong in my last post, it seems that all Sun database developers are now part of the same organisation, including PostgreSQL's Josh Berkus.

MySQL has the pluggable storage engine architecture, which is unique in the industry. The idea is you pick from among a suite of storage engines the most suitable one. PostgreSQL on the other hand has a plugin architecture for programming languages you can then use for stored procedures. And the cool thing about Open Source...

Someone went as far as to implement a PostgreSQL plugin of LOLCODE, a funny programming language I didn't know about until recently. So now you could do this with PostgreSQL:

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