I've been very busy since OSCON, so my blog pipeline is full. Hopefully I can properly catch up on some topics I've been meaning to discuss in the next few weeks. If you've been busy like me, you might be wondering how to catch up and keep up with the things that are most important to you. I've found that having my own planet (blog aggregator) has helped tremendously. If your tastes are similar (PHP, web application security, etc.), you might like mine, cleverly (yeah, right) dubbed Planet Chris. Other planets you might find interesting are Planet PHP, Planet Web Security, and Planet MySQL, although I highly recommend creating your own. I haven't …

MySQL Has API to run Multiple Queries at once. This feature was designed mainly with saving network round trip in mind and got a little traction due to associated security risks and not significant gains in most cases.

What would make MySQL Multiple Queries API more usable ?

Allow to run queries in parallel - The great benefit of knowning all queries at once is of course you can run them in parallel. Asynchrnous submission API would be even better but even multi query working this way would be much better. I know there is a work going on on breaking connection=thread=transaction mapping which may allow having multiple working threads for same transaction within same connection which could possibly allow to implement it.

Optimize query set The other thing you can do when you …

MuleSource launches MuleForge. Talend integrates with SugarCRM. Microsoft issues press release on Open XML standards vote. (and more)

MuleSource Launches MuleForge.org to Accelerate Universal Integration of Data and Services, MuleSource (Press Release)

Talend Announces Data Integration for SugarCRM, Talend (Press Release)

Strong Global Support for Open XML as It Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process, Microsoft (Press Release)

Virtual Iron Integrates SLES 10 Kernel and Drivers in Latest Release, …

If you’re new to MySQL, you might not know that in the default configuration ‘a’='A’. Ie, string comparisons are by default case-insensitive. If this is a surprise to you, read up on Chapter 9 of the online manual, on character sets and collations.

The default character set is latin1 and the default collation is latin1_swedish_ci (’ci’ stands for ‘case-insensitive). If you don’t want ‘a’ to equal ‘A’, you can change this by setting the variables ‘character-set-server’ and ‘collation-server’ in your config file or your startup options. For example, we want to support unicode, so we use character-set-server=’utf8′ in our config file. We also added the following (in the [mysqld] section) so that clients will use the right character set and collation, too: init_connect=’set names utf8; set collation_connection=utf8_bin’.

On the other hand, by default in linux, …

MySQL is not so heavily-instrumented as Oracle. (Back to tuning using ratios rather than the wait interface… sigh…) But it does offer (among other tools) the slow query log. Turn it on (put ‘log_slow_queries‘ in your config file), and all queries that take longer than long_query_time seconds (also set in your config file) will be logged to a slow query log file, along with the time they took to execute. Then you can use mysqldumpslow to analyze the output. You can see, for example, which slow queries are taking the most cumulative time on your server, or are being executed most frequently. (The manual doesn’t say much about it, and mysqldumpslow ––help doesn’t give too much help, but I think mysqldumpslow -s t and mysqldumpslow -s c do that.)

If you use InnoDB, though (as we do), be aware that the “lock time” logged in the slow query log only counts time for …

I usually get a feel for "what's hot" in the marketplace by the number of books on the shelves at my favorite bookstore. A couple years ago there was six shelves at my Borders store filled with books on Oracle. Oracle for Dummies, PL/SQL, and scores of Certification books. I was quite surprised to find only three books on Oracle at the same store this past weekend.

MySQL still has some respect with about a 1/2 shelf. .Net clocked in with about 5 or 6 shelves with a smattering here and there of Java and the associated technologies. Good old Perl shared half a shelf with PHP. But I feel left behind because I don't know Excel Macros (about 12 shelves).

Maybe Oracle has really achieved a self-tuning, self-managing database and we don't need books anymore.

Please excuse me while I apply four more patches to my "up-to-date" 10.2.0.3 installation.

Dear data integration fans,

Once in a while, there are discussions on various blogs (usually with me smack in the middle of it) debating the differences between code generation and model based execution, how this impacts the way we approach databases, the open nature of it all, etc.

With this blog entry I want to push the notion that Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) didn’t just evolve by chance into the state it is today as a streaming, metadata driven, model based engine. I made some careful design choices early on…

Open as possible

The goal of Kettle from the beginning was to be as open as possible. My definition of “as open as possible” included:

• open source with an LGPL license (see this JBoss link [PDF] for a nice explanation)
…

There's more noise about Solaris competing with Linux over at slashdot. I can understand the argument that Sun should direct their efforts to Linux. You know, Peace, Love, Linux. But which business would throw away their crown jewel to compete in the delivery of a product that already has a leading vendor (by some distance over #2)? Can you imagine asking MySQL to get into the Oracle support business (imagining that Oracle open sources their products)? Or let's pressure Alfresco to jump into the (future :-) open sourced MS SharePoint project. Yes, I know, it's ludicrous to ask MySQL or... READ MORE

What you see in the graph is a comparison of the read() versus
aio_read() in Archive. This is using Fedora Core 7. The test is
pretty simple. Read 10,000 rows, 1000 times per user. Increase the
number of users. No aggregate function was run, I did not see where
that was really needed for this test (aggregate functions/queries are
the main SELECT type used against Archive tables).

From the graph it is pretty obvious that aio_read() makes a
difference. I am going to run this later on the T1000 and see what
happens there (I've got other tests running on it right now so no
comparison for the moment...).

The open question for me now is how this compares to my hand written
AIO method. This code is pretty much ready to go (it won't be in MySQL 5.1,
it will got in the next version (which is either 5.2 or 6.0)). The
burnin test has been running …

And we thought it was all about peace, love, and...Solaris. But no, Sun is gearing up for one of the classic open source battles. We've had the various Linux distributions duking it out, and we've had MySQL versus PostgreSQL. Now we're getting Solaris versus Linux, and this is a fight that I believe may actually be worth having.

Why? Because it means more choice for customers, and not just any choice, but a choice between two exceptional operating systems, both completely open source.

Sun's strategy is becoming clearer with Solaris:

...