For some reason the MySQL examinations have escaped the notice of the test bank world. I will admit to being a little disappointed when I was studying for my CMDBA exams (before I was a MySQL employee) to find no additional study materials other than the MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide. The study guide is great but grad school taught me their is no preperation better than overkill. Today I was forwarded the question that titles this entry and I replied that the test bank companies offer no sample exams.

There are some example questions that I modeled closely to the questions you will see on the six MySQL exams. Previously there had been some questions from the 4.x exams that did not reflect the current material.

Test banks are not a panacea. Some are a pan of #$%@!!! I spent twenty bucks on one when studying for the Linux …

As you might know even if you're only using Innodb tables your replication is not completely crash safe - if Slave MySQL Server crashes/power goes down it is likely for relay logs to run out of sync (they are not synced to the disk) plus position on the master which slave remembers becomes stale.

During MySQL 4.0 and 4.1 series there was a great workaround if you're using only Innodb tables - Innodb when Innodb does crash recovery it would print position in master log files up to which replication was done:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. InnoDB: IN a MySQL replication slave the last master binlog file
2. InnoDB: position 0 115, file name portland-bin.001717

All you needed to do is to use --skip-slave-start on the slave server and have a little script which will do CHANGE MASTER TO to specified location to restore replication in case of crash (assuming …

A

Over the weekend, MySQL made available a new storage engine, codenamed Maria.
It is an improvement of MyISAM, the flagship engine, adding crash recovery to the already appreciated features of MyISAM. This release is a preview, based on MySQL 5.1 code base. The actual final implementation has not been announced yet, although it is safe to assume that it will happen in the 6.x series.
The source code is available as a bitkeeper tree.
There is some documentation, and more will follow.
What can we do with the new engine? The immediate answer is "use it as we use MyISAM, with crash recovery features".

Let's show an example, using MyISAM: (this demonstration was given live at the Linux Conference Australia …

I’ve been very excited seeing that we announced the Maria Engine Preview. Giuseppe and I were trying to setup a demo, for Maria, at the lightning talks happening later today, towards the end of the MySQL MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2008. It involved MySQL with Maria, and an Asus Eee PC. For the demo, we wanted to show pulling the plug, which can be done either via a kill -9 `pgrep mysqld` or pulling out the battery of the Eee.

However, we failed to get MyISAM to reliably crash! Yes, imagine that, we actually want it to crash - pity that it might have only happened about 1/3rd of the time we tested it. The magic we were looking for:

check table t1;
+---------+-------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------+
| Table   | Op    | …

The MySQL Proxy presentation at Linux Conf Australia 2008 was done just before lunch.
As announced, here are the presentation slides
The penguin on the above image is actually painted on my room's window glass.

Today Nokia announced their intention to acquire an open source tools manufacturer, Trolltech.

Trolltech is an open source company by virtue of their dual-licensing of the QT tool kit that is used by a number of products but probably most notably the KDE desktop. Though they do dual license and sell commercial proprietary products as well.

The Nokia deal was reported in kroners …

Nokia acquires Trolltech. Black Duck announces Code Center. LoopFuse launches update. (and more)

Nokia to acquire Trolltech to accelerate software strategy, Nokia / Trolltech (Press Release)

Black Duck Code Center Accelerates Component-Based Software Development in the Era of Open Source Software, Black Duck Software (Press Release)

Former JBoss Executives Launch New Version of LoopFuse OneView, Changing the Face of Online Marketing, LoopFuse (Press Release)

New Open Source WSO2 Mashup Server Combines Best of Web 2.0 and SOA to Enable the Social Enterprise, …

While I ducked out of Giuseppe’s miniconf talk, on MySQL Proxy (a great session, might I add - it takes up 2 slots right up until lunch), I went over to the LinuxChix miniconf, to attend a talk about memcache, by Brenda Wallace. Brenda, works at Catalyst IT, in New Zealand - they use a lot of memcache, in the telco business.

Memcache: volatile cache for keeping data in. Its a daemon. The code, can connect to memcache, put values in, read values, delete values. An example of how to use memcache, is given in PHP5.

A killer feature, is the setting of expiry. You can tell it to cache for 30 seconds, and then forget about it, no worries there.

What do you store? Database, generated content (front page of a website, just like a blog even), web service lookups (useful in telco, or …

Upcoming MySQL Features - Stewart Smith

Stewart’s talk on Upcoming MySQL Features was sort of a roadmap of what one might expect to see in MySQL 5.1 and above - he touched on Falcon, online backup, batched key access, Maria, Proxy, Workbench, and some cluster changes. When he shares his slides, it might be great to link to Worklog items, and Forge pages about these new features and previews (because, believe me, the stuff thats coming in future, is clearly very exciting).

MySQL Indexing Methods - Jonathon Coombes

Sitting in Jonathon Coombes session on MySQL Indexing Methods now - he’s going through covering indexes, the B+-tree index, hash index, full text indexing.

Some select points, that aren’t in the slides (otherwise, the slides themselves are very verbose, and when they make it online, it will provide some great reading material):

• InnoDB uses a B+-tree, and a secondary …