I am pleased to announce that the Oracle ACE program has two new MySQL inductees. These people actively contribute to the MySQL community via a varied means in an unbiased and non commercial way.

Giuseppe Maxia (aka DataCharmer) is no stranger to the MySQL community having filled a position with MySQL Inc/Sun Microsystems/Oracle Corporation in the Community team for many years. Giuseppe was an active member in the community before this position, and continues to provide great input with tools such as the MySQL sandbox and many project and code snippets on the MySQL Forge as well as many writings for the Developer zone.

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In the past I’ve used the profiling features (e.g. SHOW PROFILES) in MySQL to help with timing SQL statements, especially those in the < 10 millisecond range.

Out of habit I did use this to time all SQL statements however in MySQL 5.5.8 GA I've found this no longer to be representative.

As you can see, the query takes some 50+ms longer with profiling enabled, not to mention they have broken the Source_file column which I've actually used to troll the source code with.

mysql> set profiling=1;

4 rows in set (1.14 sec)
4 rows in set (1.15 sec)
4 rows in set (1.17 sec)

mysql> set profiling=0;

4 rows in set (0.37 sec)
4 rows in set (0.37 sec)
4 rows in set (0.37 sec)

Investigating further showed the cause. There appears to be some new overhead that causes profiling to log excessive amount of information.

mysql> show profile source for query 35; …

My recent account of The State of MySQL forks seems to have gotten quite a lot of attention. I promised to follow up with a separate piece about Drizzle and also PostgreSQL, as the other major open source database, so I'd better keep that promise now.

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Today I discovered that you are unable to compile the current stable PHP version 5.3.4 with yesterday’s MySQL 5.5.8 GA release. I was able to download the current MySQL 5.1.54 and compile without issue.

You can find all the gory details in Bug #58987 however I was able to edit a number of MySQL include file to get a build. Does this mean it’s a MySQL packaging problem or a PHP problem I don’t know, but I would hope that Oracle in the testing phase of a GA release test this against popular programming languages starting with the LAMP stack to ensure compatibility such as what I uncovered.

I have been looking forward to the general availability (GA) release of MySQL 5.5 since is was publically announced in September that we would see this in 2010. While I already have a production client with 5.5.7rc, the badge of general availability is a great way to promote why environments should consider moving to using MySQL 5.5. Here is my quick short list of why I’d promote moving to MySQL 5.5.

1. Improved integration

The first significant improvement is that InnoDB is now again firmly a default included storage engine. The InnoDB plugin 1.1.x is now the builtin version of the engine, not a plugin version. Also the 1.1.x version has continued improvements over the 1.0.x version available as an included but not enabled plugin in current MySQL 5.1.x versions. Removing the complexity for end users over the choice of InnoDB and the necessary configuration changes is a great simplification. The introduction in the InnoDB plugin …

It is great to draw inspiration from other Open Source communities. Brad Fitzpatrick recently wrote about Android Strict Mode. His twitter tag line for this post was “I see you were doing 120 ms in a 16 ms zone” which is all I needed to hear from somebody who also worries unreasonably about responsiveness (Web site quote).

How would I apply this to a MySQL context? This is what happens in Android. “Strict Mode lets you set a policy on a thread declaring what you’re not allowed to do on that thread, and what the penalty is if you violate the policy. Implementation-wise, this policy is simply a thread-local integer bitmask. By default everything is allowed and it won’t get in your way unless you want it to”

In a MySQL …

The follow-up blog post on moving your MySQL applications to CouchDB has been posted on the CouchOne blog. Part 2 digs into a bit more detail on the specifics of views, and how to perform some of the more common operations used in MySQL, such as paging and aggregation in your CouchDB view. You can read Part 2 here

The follow-up blog post on moving your MySQL applications to CouchDB has been posted on the CouchOne blog. Part 2 digs into a bit more detail on the specifics of views, and how to perform some of the more common operations used in MySQL, such as paging and aggregation in your CouchDB view.

You can read Part 2 here

CRIB is a CentRal Information Base for MySQL, a long time coming project since I worked on it on and off for a few weeks and now I decided it’s time to hand it over to the global MySQL community.

So, what is CRIB?

CRIB is a central database which collects information about all your MySQL instances which you set as clients. It is monitoring in a way, but not the typical number of connections, memory, index usage, table scans, cpu usage and such, but rather consists of a repository where, if you have tens, hundreds or even thousands of clients, you can see where a particular user was created, where a certain database name features or which tables does a database consists of. It also features a script which logs table sizes periodically (customizable) so you can graph disk usage over time and be able to forecast future disk space requirements easily.

Download the latest code with: bzr branch lp:crib

First …

I’ve started a little series on how to migrate your MySQL applications and databases over to CouchDB. Most of the process is about how you think about your data, not about the database itself, the application, or the interface to the database storage. There are some use cases for data storage that lend themselves to the CouchDB document model that provides some advantages over the table-based structure in MySQL. The first part of the series is Moving from MySQL to CouchDB: Part 1.