This Thursday (April 2nd, 14:00 UTC), Patrick Crews will give a MySQL University session on How to Create a Test Case. This is an updated session of a talk we had in 2007, but this time it will be recorded (slides and audio). Patrick is a database engineer who works in the server QA department, so test cases are his daily bread.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, and more.) All MySQL …

Sun's Open Cloud Vision unveilled: Open Cloud Platform, an open infrastructure powered by Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris, and Open Storage software technologies.  Open APIs, Open formats and Open source.

On March 18th, at CommunityONE aka CloudONE, Sun unveiled the open cloud platform for powering public and private clouds. We also  announced that we are building our own Public Cloud. This will include a Storage and Compute Cloud. Our Cloud will be compatible with Amazon S3 and EC2 at the API level. Meaning, we will provide S3 and EC2 compatibility APIs in addition to our own, hence enabling an easy migration from Amazon services to Sun Cloud. All clouds - public, private or hybrid, built on Sun's Open Cloud platform will be interoperable and there will be minimal vendor lockin given the cloud platform will be built on open …

Sun's Open Cloud Vision unveilled: Open Cloud Platform, an open infrastructure powered by Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris, and Open Storage software technologies.  Open APIs, Open formats and Open source.

On March 18th, at CommunityONE aka CloudONE, Sun unveiled the open cloud platform for powering public and private clouds. We also  announced that we are building our own Public Cloud. This will include a Storage and Compute Cloud. Our Cloud will be compatible with Amazon S3 and EC2 at the API level. Meaning, we will provide S3 and EC2 compatibility APIs in addition to our own, hence enabling an easy migration from Amazon services to Sun Cloud. All clouds - public, private or hybrid, built on Sun's Open Cloud platform will be interoperable and there will be minimal vendor lockin given the cloud platform will be built on open …

Sun's Open Cloud Vision unveilled: Open Cloud Platform, an open infrastructure powered by Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris, and Open Storage software technologies.  Open APIs, Open formats and Open source.

On March 18th, at CommunityONE aka CloudONE, Sun unveiled the open cloud platform for powering public and private clouds. We also  announced that we are building our own Public Cloud. This will include a Storage and Compute Cloud. Our Cloud will be compatible with Amazon S3 and EC2 at the API level. Meaning, we will provide S3 and EC2 compatibility APIs in addition to our own, hence enabling an easy migration from Amazon services to Sun Cloud. All clouds - public, private or hybrid, built on Sun's Open Cloud platform will be interoperable and there will be minimal vendor lockin given the cloud platform will be built on open …

I am passing this along — I am not sure if most folks reading this can make it, as it is last-minute and in the Boston area, but I figured I’d let people know that the New England Database Society exists. It’s free, sponsored by Sun (and has been for years, long before Sun bought MySQL), and is hosted by my college database professor, Mitch Cherniack. (To that end, I should probably make sure to promote the Boston User Group here more often! I keep forgetting…)

You can find information on how to be a part of the mailing list at http://www.cs.brown.edu/sites/neds/

The next New England Database Society will be held on Friday, March 27 and the speaker is Christian Jensen of Aalborg University.

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[N]ew [E]ngland [D]atabase …

Encouraged by Baron Schwartz tip on result set comparison, here are a few more, on the same vein.
First, you can send a result set to a file. Probably you will say "yeah, I know, using SELECT INTO OUTFILE". Correct. Except that you can't rewrite to an existing file, if you want to, and you will get a raw output, not the well formatted one that you usually see on the command line. For example:

mysql > select 1 into outfile '/tmp/f1.txt';
mysql > \! cat /tmp/f1.txt
1

mysql > select 1 into outfile '/tmp/f1.txt';
ERROR 1086 (HY000): File '/tmp/f1.txt' already exists

BTW, \! command is a handy shortcut for executing a shell command.
Let's see what happens with the alternative …

Stopping All Servers
All 221 tests were successful.
The servers were restarted 14 times
Spent 1424.921 of 1521 seconds executing testcases

(All tests have passed on OpenSolaris on x86 for a while now).

There has been much talking about MySQL performance related to logging. Since MySQL 5.1.21, when Bug #30414 was reported (Slowdown (related to logging) in 5.1.21 vs. 5.1.20) I have been monitoring the performance of the server, both on 5.0 and 5.1.
Recently, I got a very powerful server, which makes these measurements meaningful.
Thus, I measured the performance of the server, using all publicly available sources, because I want this benchmark to be repeatable by everyone.
I will first describe the method used for the benchmarks, and then I report the results.The serverThe server is a Linux Red Hat Enterprise 5.2, running on a 8core processor, with 32 GB RAM and 1.5 TB storage.

$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2 (Tikanga)

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep "processor\|model name" | sort …

In MySQL 5.1.33 there is a fix for an apparently innocuous bug.
Bug #36540 CREATE EVENT and ALTER EVENT statements fail with large server_id.
This is a usability bug, that makes the DBA life unnecessarily hard. The reason for having a large server_id is because a DBA might want to use the IP address as server ID, to make sure that there are unique IDs, and to have an easy way of identifying the server through the IP.
All is well until you mix the server_id assignment with event creation:

 select version();
+-----------+
| version() |
+-----------+
| 5.1.32    | 
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

 set global server_id =inet_aton('192.168.2.55');
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

 select @@server_id;
+-------------+
| @@server_id |
+-------------+
| …

If you are a twitter user, you may like to know that there are many people from MySQL who are regular twitters.

For a start, you may want to follow these ones:

People

1. kajarno Kaj Arnö
2. datacharmer Giuseppe Maxia
3. bytebot Colin Charles
4. LenzGr Lenz Grimmer
5. dups Dups Wijayawardhana

Non-people

1. mysqlconf MySQL Users Conference, which is going to be used during the conference to collect feedback for the panel …