About one month ago we posted a call for interns to work with us on various MySQL Performance related things.

We got good number of replies and a lot of people wondered what tasks exactly we could offer as surely this sort of involvement should be fun and should teach you something.

Really we did not have a list - Cool opportunities and
ideas constantly pop up plus we expect you to bring your ideas on what
you would be interested to work on and we will see if there is an
interest for us to mentor and sponsor your work.

Generally the tasks we see Interns working on are either Open Source
projects or research which would be published so besides minor
financial compensation there is publicity and education components.

Here are few things we have in mind:

Work continues apace on High Performance MySQL, Second Edition (the link leads to the chapter outline). I'm working now on Chapter 6, Advanced SQL Functionality, and thought I'd solicit input on it. Are there things you'd like to see us cover? Do you have any favorite techniques you'd like to see us include? Feel free to leave feedback in the comments. The chapter is already significantly done, with 26 pages written, but the ink's not on paper yet, so there's still time to correct omissions!

I'm on the select board of elite people who were duped into reviewing proposals for the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo 2008, and I'm here to tell you how to get your proposal accepted. Aside from bribing me with chocolate, that is.

MySQL Toolkit version numbers are based on Subversion revision number. This release is the first past the 1,000-commit milestone. It also marks several days of being in Sourceforge's top 100 most active projects. It has been in the top 300 for a couple of months, and the top 1000 for, um, a long time. While I would hasten to say I'm not a popularity-contest-focused person, it's rewarding to see that people think this project is important and useful.

This release of MySQL Toolkit updates MySQL Parallel Dump. I had been using it on a relatively small server; yesterday I took a deep breath and started using it to generate backups from a large server with lots of data and lots of queries. Of course I found a couple bugs and decided I needed more functionality and error handling. The major new functionality is for efficiency; it defers locking as late as possible and releases locks as soon as possible, and with the --setperdb option …

This is still a bug, a very serious obvious bug which break simple UPDATES.

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=30485

This is yet another data corruption bug

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=31104


Xaprb has given a great write up on what should be done. It's brain dead simple to do and would ensure that mysql does not produce obvious critical bugs-which tarnishes the reputation of this great database platform.

On a side note: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/upgrading-from-4-1.html
Making incompatible changes between versions so late in the game is very confusing.
5.0.12 a change was made to JOIN that breaks upgrading from 4.1.

If a change is going to be made at a parser level to ensure some sort of standard. IMHO it should …

I am curious about character sets and collations, especially how they are used in databases. I got some time to play with them recently. I did some testing today on MySQL. I will do the same test on Sql Server, Oracle, and PostgreSql, time permitting. I am only dealing with simplified Chinese at this point. I may take up traditional Chinese too.

Here is my setup:

1. I created a table that stores simplified Chinese characters in different character set, along with collation used, pinyin, number of strokes, and tone value. There are 126 collations in MySQL, only 10 of which are suited for simplified Chinese.

2. I used the Chinese version of the golden rule,

Christopher Cordray, a ScienceLogic founder and the principal software architect behind the EM7 appliances, has more than fifteen years experience with networking, management systems and technology-related operations. Passionate about improving IT operations and application efficiency, Cordray has architected and developed various commercial and custom solutions for companies including Verizon Global Networks, Interliant, Inc and Edison International.

Fotolog is the world's largest photo blogging social network, boasting more than 700,000 new photos per day and more than 3 billion page views a month. More than 11 million fotologgers communicate and connect through their photos on Fotolog. With the help of Solaris 10 and MySQL Enterprise, Fotolog has scaled to become a top 20 destination on the Internet according to Alexa.

Infobright announced today that Xerox has selected Infobright to provide an Analytic Data Warehousing solution for improved customer insight.

BrightHouse is an analytic data warehouse that takes advantage of the MySQL database server's pluggable storage engine architecture . Using BrightHouse, Xerox will have a solution that allows business intelligence analysts to quickly and easily analyze customer data to more rapidly react to changes in the market. BrightHouse has very low administrative and maintenance requirements, resulting in a very low IT overhead for the solution.

Fotolog is the world's largest photo blogging social network, boasting more than 700,000 new photos per day and more than 3 billion page views a month. More than 11 million fotologgers communicate and connect through their photos on Fotolog. With the help of Solaris 10 and MySQL Enterprise, Fotolog has scaled to become a top 20 destination on the Internet according to Alexa.