And again we're on our mission to keep XAMPP up-to-date and put the first beta version of the upcoming XAMPP release in our public beta download area.

New in this beta are: Apache (2.2.8), PHP4 (4.4.8 on Linux and on Windows 4.4.8RC2), Perl (5.10.0), phpMyAdmin (2.11.4), and FileZilla FTP Server (0.9.25) in the Windows version of XAMPP.

XAMPP beta versions are always for testing purposes only. There will be no upgrade packages from and to beta versions. To all testers: Many thanks in advance!!

Get the downloads at XAMPP BETA.

PHP is a nice programming language for web applications with a large number of databases supported.

PDO is one of many database access abstractions trying to unify the way PHP talks to databases. Unlike most of these, PDO is written in C and not in PHP.

Wez Furlong wants to improve PDO "Version 2". In particular he and others want to produce an open spec that can be used by anybody including database vendors to code against, add unit testing for the spec and the drivers that claim to support it and improve metadata handling for PDO.
…

A

I have been using this SQL*Plus command for a while now:

SQL> show spparameter service_names

SID      NAME          TYPE        VALUE
-------- ------------- ----------- ---------
*        service_names string      REDX

And guess what ?

• The right syntax is actually show spparameters (with a “s” at the end of it).
• It’s an 11g New Feature!

It doesn’t work with 10g:

SQL> show spparameters service_names

SP2-0735: unknown SHOW option beginning "spparamete..."
SP2-0735: unknown SHOW option beginning "service_na..."

I thought MySQL was trying to become as big as Oracle but it could be that Oracle is trying to become as cool as MySQL — it has had something like this for a long time! Now Oracle should add SHOW TABLES too.

Anyway, this is really 11g’s most useful feature so far, though. …

Welcome to the 81st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. We begin this issue with some more (and probably not the last) commentary on the acquisition of MySQL AB by Sun. On rand($thoughts);, Savio Rodrigues questions the idea that MySQL are not big enough for some customers: “I’m confused that Sun, [...]

I'll be attending the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo again this year, and I'm looking forward to hearing some great sessions, meeting new and old friends, and giving sessions myself. As a proposal reviewer, I looked at and voted on 250+ proposals for sessions and tutorials for this conference. There are going to be some great sessions and tutorials.

Had a customer issue come through right before I left for the day. Hadn’t seen this happen before and google was not too helpful.

Problem: We had the tmp-dir set as /var/tmp which was on it’s own partition of 5GB. This is a relatively small database of about 15GB. Customer has some replication slaves setup and was running a LOAD DATA INFILE on the master. File was about 12GB, so the slave creates a SQL-DATA-1024-512.data file in the tmp directory to buffer that INFILE command coming from the master. Well, eventually that filled up the /var/tmp partition.

Solution: stop the server, change the tmp-dir=/bigger-partition, move the file to the new tmp location, restart cluster, all good.

Prevention: Make sure your tmp-dir setting is on a large enough partition to hold your temporary files, and make sure if you’re going to load a data file on the master that’s bigger …

Curt Monash has an interesting post. As with everything on the web, I agree and disagree with various bits - which is one of the great things about blogging … but this comment concerns me enough to respond, since it’s not so much an opinion but incorrect technical information…

As for your distinction between too many connections and memory pools ? lack of memory is the reason for limits on connections.

Lack of memory is actually _NOT_ the reason for limits on connections in a well tuned MySQL installation. MySQL is a multi-threaded application and as such in its current implementation allocates a thread to a connection. In the standard web hosting platform, which is Linux, there is a point at which Linux itself can’t actually deal with the threads effectively, thus getting you into an overloaded run queue situation. The answer …

Here are a few upcoming open source conferences worth paying attention to: - SugarCRM Developers Conference, Feb 6-8, San Jose, CA - PHP Quebec, March 12-14, Montreal, Canada - EclipseCon, March 17-20, Santa Clara, CA - OSBC, March 25-26, San Francisco, CA - ApacheCon Europe, April 7-11, Amsterdam, NL - MySQL Conference & Expo, April 14-17, Santa Clara, CA We'll have MySQLers at most if not all of these events. If you're thinking of hitting your boss up for a conference registration and travel, look for the early registration deadlines. You can easily save a few hundred bucks by registering... READ MORE

A number of people have emailed me wondering why I haven't blogged about the Sun/MySQL deal. Well, I'm still working out my thoughts on that, so I'll leave it to another day. Besides, haven't there been enough blog posts about it already?!

As a PHP community member and a person who has been participating on MySQL's behalf in the much-maligned PDOv2 working group, there is a more important and pressing topic of conversation that I'd like to comment on. Namely, the recent events surrounding the publication of the FAQ about PDOv2. There are many different topics being bandied around the PHP community schoolyard — some on-topic, some wildly off-topic and tangential. These are the issues I think represent what the majority of conversations have been about:

• …