By Tim O'Reilly

There's a scorching article on Forbes about the Sun acquisition of MySQL, entitled Cash Me Out: The End of Open Source as Counter-Culture:

These deals have nothing to do with peace, love and software, and everything to do with money. The open source guys realize they can't build a decent business unless they hook up with the old closed source guys.

Meanwhile, the old guard have figured out that open source code can be a wonderful way to inflict pain. IBM pumps money into Linux and other open source programs because those programs undermine Microsoft. Microsoft has pumped money into Novell, the number two Linux player, to undermine Red Hat (nasdaq: RHT - news - people ), the number one Linux player. Oracle offers to support customers of Red Hat Linux because it hurts both Red Hat and Microsoft.

While there's …

As a follow up to the series of posts I've been making, I wanted to post what I ended up with.  Thanks to everyone who posted comments, your help was extremely useful. To recap, I have a working pair of events to add and remove partitions to this table:

create table log (
    logged datetime not null,
    id int not null auto_increment,
    text varchar(256),
    PRIMARY KEY ( logged, id )
)
PARTITION BY RANGE( TO_DAYS( logged ) ) (
    PARTITION p20080206 VALUES LESS THAN (733444),
    PARTITION p20080207 VALUES LESS THAN (733445),
    PARTITION p20080208 VALUES LESS THAN (733446)

read more

Judging by the test scores, the INFORMATION_SCHEMA is unfamiliar territory to many of you. Many other vendors besides MySQL support this standard and it allows you access to data that is unavailable or hard to find otherwise.

Back when I first downloaded the MySQL tarball from tcx.se, I did not know much about DBMS software and just needed a running database. Over the years I upgraded that software and did not dig deeper into the software because I did not need to. I was too busy with other job related duties to worry about my always smooth operating MySQL instances.

But one day the database seemed slow and the regular show commands were not giving me the answers I needed. So how do you dig further? Yup, the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.

The INFORMATION_SCHEMA is the meta-data about your tables. What storage engine, column names, collation, and stored procedures are out there lurking in your database. This is the …

Ok, at least they tried. But it seems SAP has for now put their attempts to rest to smoose up a bit closer to OSS. I guess Oracle-InnoDB deal send enough shockwaves around the SAP HQ to kill of any of the little wishpers that had made the surprising MySQL-SAP deal happen in the first time. Now things have come full circle again, MaxDB development is not only back at SAP as I have noted before, its also back to closed source development. At the same time most big European OSS companies seem to end up in the hands of US based companies.

A while ago Novel scooped up SUSE. Recently MySQL AB was bought up by Sun. The biggest European software maker …

As a follow up to the series of posts I've been making, I wanted to post what I ended up with.  Thanks to everyone who posted comments, your help was extremely useful. To recap, I have a working pair of events to add and remove partitions to this table:

create table log (
    logged datetime not null,
    id int not null auto_increment,
    text varchar(256),
    PRIMARY KEY ( logged, id )
)
PARTITION BY RANGE( TO_DAYS( logged ) ) (
    PARTITION p20080206 VALUES LESS THAN (733444),
    PARTITION p20080207 VALUES LESS THAN (733445),
    PARTITION p20080208 VALUES LESS THAN (733446)

read more

Overview
While everyone tries to improve speed and performance in MySQL, other databases have realized that adding features that cut down on development time and improving time-to-market is what some people are looking for. MySQL is well known for great performance and it might be time to discover other parts of it that will speed up your over-all development process.

This article tries to explain how you can save time and effort on the development process by moving some of that development to the database. It does this by recommending you apply business rules to the database.

Additional Notes:

This example was taken from an actual database. Some of the table designs from that database were not ideally optimized and normalized. Please refer to the theory of the example and not the exact technical detail.

What is a Business Rule?

"Business rules represent …

Since almost a year now, we host a weekly training session for our engineers on Thursday (14:00 UTC winter time), coined the "MySQL University". While it's primary purpose is to share and distribute knowledge about a wide variety of topics relevant to our own developers, many of the sessions are of general interest for developers on other projects as well.

Therefore we hold this sessions in the public and everybody is welcome to attend! You can listen to the presentation via an OGG Audio stream, questions can be posted via IRC on the #mysql-university channel on freenode.net. The audio file and IRC log will be saved, so you can also listen to past university sessions at a later point in time again.

=================================== ERROR ====================================
File holyfoot/hf@mysql.com/deer.(none)|mysql-test/r/bdb_notembedded.result|20061113160642|60022|276fa5181da9a588
is marked as gone in this repository and therefor cannot accept updates.
The fact that you are getting updates indicates that the file is not gone
in the other repository and could be restored in this repository.
if you want to "un-gone" the file(s) using the s.file from a remote
repository, try "bk repair ”
takepatch: other patches left in PENDING
==============================================================================
2.85M uncompressed to 16.4M, 5.77X expansion
Pull failed: takepatch exited 1.

stewart@willster:~/MySQL/5.1/ndb$ cp ../../5.0/ndb/mysql-test/r/SCCS/s.bdb_notembedded.result mysql-test/r/SCCS/

A world of fail. Of course, the “bk repair” suggested does not fix the problem. This kind of problem should just not be possible. grr…

Hi,

I don't get out here too often. If you have a question, or comment, please feel free to post it here, but also send it directly to me @ jmiller@mysql.com. You will get a faster response.

Best wishes,
/Jeb

Recently I helped someone who accidentally ran ALTER TABLE my_table AUTO_INCREMENT=1234; on an InnoDB table, not realizing that this causes the *entire* table to be rebuilt[1]!

They were concerned that if they killed the ALTER process, InnoDB might have to ROLLBACK internally.. and it's possible that a ROLLBACK in InnoDB take up to about 30 times longer than applying the statement took.

So what's the answer? Killing SELECT and ALTER TABLE commands seem to be free of cost. Killing UPDATE, INSERT and DELETE statements is about as much fun as being stabbed in the eye:

mysql> show processlist;
+----+------+-----------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------------------------------------+
| Id | User | Host      | db   | Command | Time | State | Info                                      | …