The purpose of this post isn't by any way to bad mouth MySQL but rather to show the impact of lack of qualified DBAs to those who use MySQL.

I was shocked last year, when a CTO of a large company confided in me and said basically that they are so tired of searching for qualified MySQL DBAs that they may switch to Oracle. At some point, I guess the frustration alone can justify an otherwise unneeded cap-ex of such magnitude.

Today, I hear that ValueCentric, a pharmaceutical technology consulting firm based in New York, has decided to let go of MySQL in their environment and instead switched to Oracle on Oracle Linux.
"as the firm expanded and began taking on bigger clients like AstraZeneca, Roche and P&G Pharmaceuticals, company officials …

The rate of open source M&A continues apace, this time involving two open source software vendors. SpringSource has announced plans to acquire Covalent Technologies for an undisclosed fee. At first glance the deal makes a lot of sense as it marries SpringSource’s Spring Framework-related products and services with the Apache support and services offered by Covalent.

Coincidentally, as news of the deal filtered through to me I happened to be on the phone with …

While helping a user with some questions about the geospatial extensions of MySQL on the #mysql-dev IRC channel on Freenode, I stumbled over this blog: How to use MySQL Spatial Extensions. There currently is just one post, but it was exactly what we were looking for: "Using Circular Area Selection". Nice work! I hope the author will soon provide more examples of how to make use of this functionality.

By the way, there is work in progress to improve the GIS functionality in MySQL - if you are looking for new GIS functions that do not use …

This weekend we're hearing great news from Michael "Monty" Widenius - one of the Fathers of MySQL. Monty finally found a time to create his own blog with very descriptive name Monty Says. At the same time Monty finally announces Maria - the MyISAM successor storage engine he has been working for last few years. You can now get Maria from MySQL BitKeeper Server.

I'm really excited to see Monty speaking publicly again in the free form rather than in form of sanitized interviews and press releases we've seen during recent years.

I'm also excited to see Monty finally releasing his new brainchild and putting his personal commitment behind it: "NOTE: The opinions and promises stated in this FAQ is by the Maria development …

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.