When I first arrived at MySQL more than 4 years ago, we didn't have much in the way of internal Quality Assurance. There were a couple of test suites that had been created and many engineers wrote unit tests. We supported a wide range of platforms, but formal testing was pretty spotty. As bugs were identified and fixed, the test suites were extended to help identify regressions. It was by no means a bullet-proof process; mostly the team depended on external testers to report issues. Sometimes a build would be created that would have some embarassing bug and we'd scramble... READ MORE

Have been thinking about my lack of postings . . . there are two reasons why posting about MySQL (and in general) has become rare in recent months.

First, and primarily, it is because of life changes. Where I used to have a moment here and there to write what was happening or on my mind, I'm barely able to post about anything these days. The whole time and season thing seems to be at play here.

Second, I just don't spend that much time fiddling with MySQL. It used to be that my work brought up lots of interesting things related to the database. I'm still the resident MySQL guy at my current job, but it's rare that something comes up that requires database expertise. And it's not that we're lightweights. We have a very high-volume system with a farm of database servers doing some pretty intense business/enterprise-level querying. We just don't find many issues that require attention down at the database level.

Some folks …

I've been a DBA for SQL Server databases since 2003, but always wanted to learn MySQL.
There is something cool in the fact that it's Open Source. Well, "cool" is actually a nice definition, and also is the all time favorite "warm fuzzy feeling", but if you think about it, it breaks down into the following (at least for me):

From the DBA/Developer perspective:

• You know you have nothing to worry about when you're installing another server.
  
• All the features are available - you don't need to make sure that you have that Visual Studio Ultra-Duper edition with Super-Amazing addon license.
  
• The bug-tracking system is ugly, but it's there out in the open, the way things work is transparent and you really feel that you can contribute to the product (my first critical bug in MySQL!).
• You grow with the …

What do you do when MySQL stopped working? Here are my 2 cents on what you should do.

1. Check if the database is running. Check the MySQL process.
   
   ps -aux | grep mysql
   
   
2. Check the error logs. Where is the location of the error logs again? The default location would be at /usr/local/mysql/data/ and look for a file with .err at the end of it. Sample errors would be:
   
   
   • Database got restarted - check with your sys admin why it restarted.
   • Replication failed - do a show slave status and check the error then restart the replication.
   
   
3. Check the MySQL process list and see if there are any read / write locking happening.
   
   show processlist
   
   
   

Planet MySQL dropped my blog for a while.  It came back, but not fully.  Several blogs are showing just an A as their content on Planet MySQL.  Maybe this will get their attention.

Planet PHP on the other hand has lost me and other completely.  They both happened about the same time.  I thought it was Wordpress.com, but it was not just Wordpress blogs and both the Phorum Planet and Chris Shiflett’s Planet have had no issues.

So, I wonder if the Planet PHP and Planet MySQL sites are running the same code for aggregating and something about is broken with some feed types.  Maybe this will get them looking.  The world is missing my wonderful content …

How do you teach a thinking pattern? In my previous job I worked with a data analyst, who was really good at thinking about how our data correlates among itself. He was good at the data analysis, good at thinking up relationships, and good at coming up with complex comparisons.

However, he wrote some pretty funky SQL. We had him take a course in basics of MySQL, and from time to time I’d take a gander in the slow query logs and pick a few queries and point out the good and bad things. Most of these are optimization tips, such as “Indexes don’t apply to columns when you’re applying a function to that column”.

But it’s hard to try to think outside of your own box, and even running EXPLAIN on every query won’t necessarily tell you how you can fix a query. The problem is that there’s no way to know if you have optimized the query as much as possible. Even experienced DBAs

I was often frustrated when repeating …

I seem to be getting a lot of requests on my webserver of the form: "GET /<directory-path>/pmapper-3.2-beta3/incphp/globals.php?__SESSION[PM_INCPHP]=<some-url>?" where replace the <directory-path> and the <some-url> with a path on your server and some random website respectively. It appears to be a probe to test for some vulnerability but I don't have the full request logged, only the request up

... I didn't get two-way sync done, and I didn't get the Nibble algorithm done. That much I expected. But I also didn't get the current work released tonight because I'm paranoid about breaking things. I'm trying to go through all the tools and write at least a basic test for them to be sure they can do the simplest "unit of work" (such as mk-find running and printing out that it finds the mysql.columns_priv table).

It's good that I'm doing this. I found that mk-heartbeat suddenly doesn't work on my Ubuntu 7.10 laptop. It goes into infinite sleep. Can anyone repro this and/or diagnose? The same code works fine on my Gentoo servers at work.

Hopefully I'll be able to release something very soon. Release early/often is fine, but "knowingly release brokenness" isn't in my code of conduct :)

That is the good news. The bad news is, it is still affected by CVE-2007-5925, which allows remote authenticated users to cause a denial of service (database crash). Jörg Brühe wrote on the packagers mailinglist that is because the sources for 5.0.51 were cloned before the fix got in. I do not know exactly how their release model works, but looks like it needs to be improved, especially because 5.0.52 is not affected.

To make it even worse, bug #32125 which has a patch for the problem, was set to private a few days ago. Because we already have the patch in our MySQL packages since exactly three weeks, it …

I was reminded the other day how SQL Server was annoying in regards to table structure changes. All I wanted to to was copy a table (with structure intact - keys, dependancies) with its data.How hard could that be?MS SQL in ActionFirst, I needed to do a complete DDL on TableOne and replace every instance of the word "TableOne" with "TableTwo". It works, even though it is bulky and takes time,