The Certified MySQL Associate exam is the entry level exam for those new to MySQL and it covers a lot of the basics. Sometimes the basics are so basic that they are not obvious.

Suppose you have a table with dozens of columns that has been in production for a period of time and you issue the statement 'SELECT * FROM long_used_table;'. What order will the records be returned from the server?

Well, it depends. And a second try with the same statement may give you different results. The rule is that there is not a guaranteed order. If you want the data in a specific order you need to add ORDER BY, i.e. 'SELECT * FROM long_used_table ORDER BY special_index;'.

Now, on the CMA exam you are ask about this guaranteed order (or lack there of) in a very explicit fashion. In the other exams, it is not as straight forward and you have better have that internalized when reading the question. And in 'real life', this …

Benjamin and Pieter just launched Kill Software Patents

A

The sixth annual MySQL Conference & Expo, co-presented by MySQL AB and O'Reilly Media, is expected to bring together 2,000 open source and database users from some of the most exciting and fastest-growing companies in the world, as well as from the large and active MySQL community. The conference will take place April 14-17, 2008, in Santa Clara, California.

MySQL AB CEO Marten Mickos and Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO of Sun Microsystems, will kick off the conference with keynotes highlighting the strategic, technical and community synergies between the two companies and their pending merger. Tuesday's other keynote will be Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, who will speak about distributed computing in the modern Internet era.

To register and learn about early registration discounts, please visit www.mysqlconf.com.

I'm working on an update to my myq_gadgets package for 5.1, particularly the innodb stats tracker.  I'm liking the additional stats that are in SHOW STATUS now for Innodb, particularly because I don't need to parse SHOW INNODB STATUS anymore.  I'm in love with being able to compare logical to physical I/Os for the buffer pool.  

I'm a bit confused, however, as some of my numbers don't quite line up.  Here's what I've got so far:

| Innodb Engine       Buffer Pool                        Data                     Log       Lock
Time         read  ins  upd  del  new read %phy wrte %phy %dirt wait read      wrte      fsyc wrte fsyc wait time
02/22-10:06  3.8k    0    0    0    0 9.8k  259 15.0  0.1   0.0    0  351 6.6M  0.9 2.6K  0.9  0.7  0.8    0    0
02/22-10:07  5.6k    0    0    0    0  14k  344 21.8  0.1   0.0    0  461 8.7M  1.3 3.9K  1.3  1.0  1.1    0    0

…

You have only a few more days to sign up for the MySQL Conference and Expo before the early-bird discount goes away. Check out the schedule of speakers and tutorials, and sign up soon! And just in case you didn't get one from any of the other people blogging about it, you can email me for a code that's good for a 20% discount.

I'm presenting two sessions: one on the query cache, and one on EXPLAIN. Both are manageable for an hour-or-so talk. I'm not trying to boil the ocean, but rather to help you understand these important topics in ways you'll remember after leaving the conference.

I was also on the voting committee for the proposals, so I've read them all. I really believe this event is worth every penny. (Of course, as a speaker, it doesn't cost me... but I digress).

While …

I'm working on an update to my myq_gadgets package for 5.1, particularly the innodb stats tracker.  I'm liking the additional stats that are in SHOW STATUS now for Innodb, particularly because I don't need to parse SHOW INNODB STATUS anymore.  I'm in love with being able to compare logical to physical I/Os for the buffer pool.  

I'm a bit confused, however, as some of my numbers don't quite line up.  Here's what I've got so far:

| Innodb Engine       Buffer Pool                        Data                     Log       Lock
Time         read  ins  upd  del  new read %phy wrte %phy %dirt wait read      wrte      fsyc wrte fsyc wait time
02/22-10:06  3.8k    0    0    0    0 9.8k  259 15.0  0.1   0.0    0  351 6.6M  0.9 2.6K  0.9  0.7  0.8    0    0
02/22-10:07  5.6k    0    0    0    0  14k  344 21.8  0.1   0.0    0  461 8.7M  1.3 3.9K  1.3  1.0  1.1    0    0

…

Welcome the the 85th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Here we go! Oracle We start with the obscure. Eddie Awad has started the Obfuscated SQL Code Contest on his Oracle Community site, thanks to an idea by Chen Shapira. If you’re familiar with this contest’s antecedents, like the [...]

Computer Weekly looks at MySQL as a hot skill to have. The full article is at:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/03/22/229539/hot-skills-mysql.htm

We at MySQL hear a constant plea from customers and partners looking for qualified MySQL developers and DBAs. The MySQL exams are the best way to prove your qualifications.

Not certified? Please try the test questions at: http://www.mysql.com/certification/selftest/core/index.php

We are about to release the next Beta version of MySQL Workbench. There are no new additions like in the last release. This will strictly be a bug-fix build. Apart from several smaller fixes this build will see an improved software rendering performance. Alfredo has blogged about the changes in his last post. And the changes are really paying off. Tax tested it on several machines and found the speed to be acceptable even on older machines.

The slow and flickering software rendering has been one of the major points of complain (except from the yet missing Linux and OS X versions that will be released later this year). Now that this is out of the way we are marching towards the RC level, fast.

If there are no new obstacles the release build will happen later today. Markus from the web team will get online on Saturday or early Sunday to update the download pages. Then we will send out the announce emails asap.