Wouldn't it be fun to be able to embed web-service routines into MySQL as if they are stored procedures?

CREATE FUNCTION xml_current_time() RETURNS DATETIME NO SQL
        LANGUAGE XMLRPC
        EXTERNAL NAME "xmlrpc://time.userland.com/RPC2;currentTime.getCurrentTime";

Perhaps not a completely useful example... but an interesting goal to achieve. I have written up some code and pushed it to the experimental repository. I haven't tested it yet but I may do later today if I don't get too preoccupied catching up watching NBC's "Heroes". Snapshots created automagically at midnight, Pacific time.

Brian mentioned Gemini on his blog... As many people remember, there was a stunned silence for a while when Oracle purchased InnoBase OY only 2 years ago... Very similar to the stunned silence about 6 years ago when the suits at NuSphere tried to do a SCO. Back on to the topic at hand... Gemini. About two years ago, Brian fed me a copy of the Gemini engine saying that "Hey, you remember Gemini? Here's the code. Get it working. Don't talk about it and call it 'Amira'.". Perhaps not exactly his words but close enough.

So the Amira project had a shaky beginning... I ported the code to work on MySQL 5.0 and started examining it, removing platform-specific code, and improving the performance of it. From the first working run to the last, I think performance improved by about a factor of 10 but I don't remember specifics. The Amira project was cancelled 2Q2006. I suppose …

Yay! It's the weekend!

Why does the weekend make me cheerful? I get time to spend on personal projects, although my sweet wife does complain that my 'personal projects' don't look much different than my day job.

This project, I have been doodling with for quite a while. It spawned from a little project that Eric Herman and myself started to look at 2 years ago with what we called "MySQL UDF v2". At the time, it included a whole plug-in and unit testing framework. Since we have to work with what is in the server, we dropped our plug-in and unit test framework after the current MySQL 5.1 plug-in system suddenly appeared: Somehow, I ended up maintaining it but that's another story.

A more modern and sane system for user-defined functions is still our goal. One part of our concept is to minimize the amount of 'heavy lifting' that needs to be …

Wow, it actually worked with only minor changes to the code. Check this out:

mysql> create function xml_get_state(id int) returns text
    -> no sql language xmlrpc external name
    -> 'xmlrpc://betty.userland.com/RPC2;examples.getStateName';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select xml_get_state(40);
+-------------------+
| xml_get_state(40) |
+-------------------+
| South Carolina    |
+-------------------+
1 row in set (0.42 sec)

Now I just need to check that it works for more complex resultsets... Trawl the web for open-access trivial XML-RPC services or build a test XML-RPC server?

Ok, this is a late late blog post because the code was done and pushed into the work tree not last weekend, but the weekend before. I think it is a pretty significant feature to blog about but for some strange reason, it completely slipped my mind.

Check this out:mysql> call test2('select count(*) from mysql.user; select count(*) from mysql.proc'); +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 3

It's not exactly serious work but I found this post on Slashdot hilarious.
Definitely mod as funny.

Very fast, as it turns out. Click through to the full article for details.

On Wednesday, October 24, at 2 PM EST I will be presenting an Information Week webinar about scaling MySQL on Solaris 10. The webinar is free to attend and sponsored by Sun. The webinar will be followed by a Live QA session.
Register for the webinar
DESCRIPTION
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In this TechWebcast, Sun Microsystem's partner Fotolog shows creative ways used to scale their Web 2.0 architecture and MySQL Enterprise with Solaris 10 …

For those of you who want to use MySQL 5.1 on etch, I prepared a backport from the experimental package of MySQL 5.1.22-rc. It's available for amd64 and i386, but will not be uploaded to the backports.org archive until there's a stable release in lenny.

Take a look at the list of Open Issues in MySQL 5.1 before upgrading your servers.

Test-Commander Eric was working on the log-replay task and as he is at my place right now, we have put our heads together to get a working prototype together.

---
-- log queries going throw the proxy on request and
-- provide a commands to work on the logged queries
--
-- * PROXY SET GLOBAL replay.log_queries = (true|false)
--   log queries sequentially (used by SAVE)
-- * PROXY SET GLOBAL replay.fake_mysqld = (true|false)
--   return the logged resultset for known queries
--
-- * QUERYLOG SAVE INTO "filename"
--   dump the queries into a file and reset the log buffer
-- * QUERYLOG LOAD FROM "filename"
--   load logged queries back into the query_log (used by the
--   fake_mysqld)
-- * QUERYLOG SHOW

What is this useful for ? ... hmm ...

The first goal is creating a fake-mysqld allowing us to run proxy tests without have to have a mysqld on the box.

As a proof-of-concept we logged the SHOW GLOBAL STATUS going through the proxy …