The latest from the MySQL community

(Jumbo) Maple Cream Pie

(Credit: Matt Asay)

In thinking a bit more about my post on MySQL's Workbench product, it's starting to sound to me like a matter of pie. Let me explain.

MySQL isn't really holding back any functionality with Workbench. Not the essential functionality that its users need. It's just holding back some time-saving features from a tool that is otherwise fully functional and enables the same output that its open-source version enables. You pay to get to the end result faster, but you can get the same end result with the open-source version.

MySQL writes:

Everything that is possible in the Standard Edition (commercial version) can also be done with the OSS Edition. You only trade saving time and ease of use for money.... …

(Credit: MySQL)

MySQL, one of the world's most successful open-source companies, has released the Standard Edition of its new MySQL Workbench product under a proprietary license. The company gives several reasons for doing so, but I suspect the core reason is that MySQL is experimenting with ways to ensure more of its production customers pay it for the value they derive from its products.

Is this the future of open source? To get ubiquity through open source and then cash through proprietary source?

I emailed Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, about the change and he stressed what MySQL's FAQ already notes: This is not crippleware:

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The 72nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, making its second appearance on Sheeri Kritzer Cabral’s blog, The MySQL She-BA. Eddie Awad is on-deck for LB#73. After him, there’s lots of room, so please send an email to the Log Buffer coordinator (me) if you’d like to edit and publish an [...]

Welcome to the 72nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) is over, and Lucas Jellema of the AMIS Technology blog notes the OOW Content Catalog has been updated with most of the presentations available for download.

On his way home from OOW, Chris Muir of the appropriately titled One Size Doesn’t Fit All blog notes how OOW and the Australian Oracle User Group Conference and OOW compare with regards to 99% fewer attendees in AUSOUG Perth conference - from 45k down to 350.

Mark …

Welcome to the 72nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) is over, and Lucas Jellema of the AMIS Technology blog notes the OOW Content Catalog has been updated with most of the presentations available for download.
On his way home from OOW, Chris Muir of the appropriately titled One Size Doesn’t Fit All blog notes how OOW and the Australian Oracle User Group Conference and OOW compare with regards to 99% fewer attendees in AUSOUG Perth conference - from 45k down to 350. …

Cesar Cerrudo of Argeniss Information Security has put out a new whitepaper (.pdf format), Data0: Next generation malware for stealing databases, describing how malware could be crafted to steal information out of databases. For the most part, it stays at a high-level, however, Cesar does give a few example queries (for SQL Server), the appropriate API calls to perform certain operations, etc., which delve a bit more into the technical side, but even these are fairly straight-forward. To demonstrate what he talks about in the whitepaper, he built a simple proof of concept (PoC), but based on what's in the whitepaper (and what is generally accepted as what's possible), nothing seemed outlandish or hard-to-do. Just for those worried about that PoC being …

Marten Mickos once (mildly) complained about the Open Source Business Conference, suggesting that it was good for vendors but needed more customers. I heard the same thing from Red Hat and other would-be sponsors. Back then, of course, the market wasn't buying as much open source as it was selling.

My what a difference three years makes. Last year we had attendees from MIT, Christian Science Monitor, AllianceBernstein, E*Trade, H&R Block, Sony, Boise Cascade, and many others. This year that IT contingent keeps swelling.

I'm starting to get really excited about the upcoming OSBC. The website doesn't yet show it, but we're quickly pulling together the best assemblage of open-source firepower on the planet. It turns out that there are a lot of people qualified to speak on the topic of "Putting Open Source to Work," OSBC 2008's theme.

Here are a few of the …

Recently I had a case with a web server farm where a random node went down every few minutes. I don't mean any of them rebooted except once or twice, but rather they were slowing down so much that practically stopped serving any requests and were being pulled out from the LVS cluster. The traffic was not any different than usual, all other elements of the system worked perfectly fine (e.g. databases, storage), no one started any backup in the middle of the day as it happens sometimes... so what was happening?

First I am going to describe the setup a little bit. As I already mentioned it was about web servers. Each of them was running Lighttpd that handled the requests coming from the internet. It was configured however only to serve static content, such as images. The requests asking for PHP files were passed down with proxy module to Apache listening on another TCP port.

And so I started investigating the problem. As it turned out …

Just a short blog entry about a funny error message I’ve got while trying to activate a physical standby database: SQL> alter database recover managed standby database finish skip standby logfile; alter database recover managed standby database finish skip standby logfile * ERROR at line 1: ORA-00283: recovery session canceled due to errors ORA-01110: data file 1: '/oradata/stage/datafile/system_01.dbf' ORA-01122: database file 1 [...]

Again I have a well neglected and documented feature of MySQL. As we all often need and use locks in MySQL, we tend to forget (or not bother about) MySQL internals and how they cause trouble. For example, try something like LOCK TABLE ... WRITE on an InnoDB table in a transaction and see the same transaction getting timed out while waiting for a lock on one of the rows, Ref: [Bug 5998]. All these problems occur when we have difference in semantics of statement at MySQL and Engine levels. But recently, we figured out this good technique of keeping the logic with ourselves and not relying on MySQL too much. Though even this technique is not fool proof in all the cases.

The secret is: use GET_LOCK function of MySQL. GET_LOCK(str, timeout) function tries to get an exclusive lock with a name (str) using timeout seconds. The return values are tri-state, …