I’ve written in the past about how enterprise management vendors can act as “Gatekeepers of the Datacenter” by virtue of what technologies they do or don’t support as part of their management solutions. This rather lame dynamic is a big part of the reason why a lot of otherwise great technologies dont make it all the way into the traditional enterprise.

The problem gets further compounded when one of these “Gatekeepers” is also a platform or stack vendor. See, it’s hard to resist the temptation of delivering the absolute best management for IBM products from a Tivoli solution while shortchanging non-IBM ones. Or, to lay this on one of the aspiring members of the big 4… how about getting support for SQL Server on Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. Hmmm… I’m gonna guess it sucks because Oracle wants you using their database. Besides, who uses OEM that isnt already an Oracle db customer?

Lucky for us, Hyperic has always …

Today I answered to a problem regarding fulltext indexes on an italian newsgroup. The guy was in trouble in building a multicolumn fulltext index. MySQL always said that a column cannot be part of the index. Why?

Remember that all the columns in a fulltext index must have the same charset and the same collation.
Let’s try if it is true!

Create a sample news table and try to build the fulltext index on (news_title, news_text):

mysql> CREATE TABLE news(
        -> id INT auto_increment,
        -> news_title VARCHAR(100),
        -> news_text TEXT,
        -> PRIMARY KEY(id))
        -> CHARSET latin1 COLLATE latin1_general_ci;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX ft_idx ON news(news_title,news_text);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.05 sec)
Records: 0  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

Great, it works!

And now, change the charset of one of the field and try …

After successfully passing the MySQL 5.0 Developer exams earlier this year the next step was preparing for the Zend Certified Engineer.

For preparation I first took php|architect's Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide from the bookshelf and started reading. The book gives a good overview of the topics covered in the exam and I even learned a few things while reading that I did not knew of before. Unfortunately it contains too many errors and mistakes in the printed examples and there is no errata on the internet.

After reading through the book I first did not really knew how to proceed in preparing for the exam. I did not have the feeling of being prepared to pass an exam, although I would think myself of a quite good and experienced PHP programmer. A really good thing is that everyone at Mayflower has the possibility to take some text exams at …

Given the very low number of issues reported to us, we can assume that the core features of mysqlnd have matured. Therefore, we spend some time discussing parallel, background and asynchronous fetch ideas for mysqlnd. All have been on our brainstorming list from the beginning but it was just too early to even discuss them before these days. None of the ideas is new in any way as a recent discussion on the PHP Internals list on parallel database queries has shown. However, people seem to expect different things from it and are not sure how to implement it. We trapped into this ourself when Andrey wrote a background fetch proof-of-concept patch recently. Back one step: what is this about, what do you want, please comment!

(...)
Read the rest of …

Given the very low number of issues reported to us, we can assume that the core features of mysqlnd have matured. Therefore, we spend some time discussing parallel, background and asynchronous fetch ideas for mysqlnd. All have been on our brainstorming list from the beginning but it was just too early to even discuss them before these days. None of the ideas is new in any way as a recent discussion on the PHP Internals list on parallel database queries has shown. However, people seem to expect different things from it and are not sure how to implement it. We trapped into this ourself when Andrey wrote a background fetch proof-of-concept patch recently. Back one step: what is this about, what do you want, please comment!

(...)
Read the rest of …

MySQL Proxy is being beefed up, to make it ready for prime time. New features are being added, and old ones are improved and tested.
Testing the Proxy is an adventure in its own right. It's a tool that was designed to get in the middle of the scene and change things. Testing its features is more challenging than testing a straightforward application, even more complex like a database server. So the test suite for MySQL Proxy is much more complex and feature rich than the corresponding suite for the database server.
While researching to create the next edition of the test suite, able to cope with more features and corresponding testing requests, I developed a Lua script that enhances the current Proxy features and allows you to load several scripts, and use them all at once.
The script (load-multi.lua) is available in the latest …

Given the very low number of issues reported to us, we can assume that the core features of mysqlnd have matured. Therefore, we spend some time discussing parallel, background and asynchronous fetch ideas for mysqlnd. All have been on our brainstorming list from the beginning but it was just too early to even discuss them before these days. None of the ideas is new in any way as a recent discussion on the PHP Internals list on parallel database queries has shown. However, people seem to expect different things from it and are not sure how to implement it. We trapped into this ourself when Andrey wrote a background fetch proof-of-concept patch recently. Back one step: what is this about, what do you want, please comment!

The status quo

PHP scripts are not threaded. A PHP scripts cannot follow …

Imagine having a database with 100 tables and you want to allow a user to read from all of it, except one.
But of the table of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not select of it
That's an old problem, with an ugly solution. You must either move the forbidden table to another database or to explicitly authorize the user to read each one of the other 99 tables.

A friend of mine had a similar problem. She has a huge database with thousand of tables, and she wants to prevent the users from issuing a "SHOW TABLES" command. Why? Because, with thousands of tables, the response time of MySQL can easily become very slow. It is a design problem, not easily solvable, and the best course of action here is to deny access to this command.

The bad news is that MySQL has no provision for this kind of restrictions.
The good news is that you can solve this problem with an easy MySQL Proxy script.
…

Maatkit (formerly MySQL Toolkit) version 1297 contains a significant update to MySQL Table Checksum (which will be renamed soon to avoid trademark violations). The changelog follows. What you don't see in the changelog is the unit test suite! I got a lot more of the code into modules that are tested and re-usable.

2007-11-18: version 1.1.19 

* Check for needed privileges on --replicate table before beginning. 
* Made some error messages more informative. 
* Fixed child process exit status with 8-bit right-shift. 
* Improved checksumming code auto-detects best algorithm and function. 
* Added --ignoreengine option; ignores federated and merge by default. 
* Added --columns and --checksum options. 
* Removed --chunkcol, --chunksize-exact, --index options. 
* --chunksize can be specified as a data size now. 
* Improved chunking algorithm handles more cases and uses fewer chunks. 
* Do not print --replcheck results for servers that are not …

Download Maatkit

Maatkit (formerly MySQL Toolkit) has for some time been released both as a bundle, and as individual tools. It's too much work to maintain the individual packages, and I don't think it really benefits anyone much, if at all. While the tools will still be versioned separately, I'm going to discontinue releases of the individual packages, and just release the one uber-package from now on.

This will also make it easier for me to manage the name change, but that's just an extra incentive; I've been considering this for a while.

By the way, Sourceforge indicated it would take up to a couple of days to finish the project's rename, but it took only a few minutes. Lots of broken links; I've asked for a permanent redirect from the old URLs to the new.