The latest from the MySQL community

How fast do you want your installation? Check this.

$ time ./express_install.pl ~/downloads/mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-i686.tar.gz --no_confirm
unpacking /Users/gmax/downloads/mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-i686.tar.gz
Executing ./install.pl --basedir=/Users/gmax/downloads/5.0.45 \
[...]
Installing MySQL system tables...
OK
Filling help tables...
OK
[...]
loading grants
sandbox server started
installation options saved to current_options.conf.
To repeat this installation with the same options,
use ./install.pl --conf_file=current_options.conf
----------------------------------------
Your sandbox server was installed in /Users/gmax/msb_5_0_45

real    0m6.773s
user    0m0.245s
sys 0m0.235s

Old times
MySQL has a long established rule of going from downloading to up and running in less than 15 minutes, as stated in various sources, like this …

For the past six months or so, we've been running MySQL 5.1 for various internal and external applications. MySQl 5.1 has been in beta for quite some time and as we move closer to a GA release, I believe its important for us to "eat our own dogfood" by running the software for most, if not all, of our applications. (The reason it's not all is that I don't have control over all of 'em, but that's a different story.) Of course, eating your own dogfood is not an entirely pain-free experience, but the idea is that we should be... READ MORE

One of the first rules you would learn about MySQL Performance Optimization is to avoid using functions when comparing constants or order by. Ie use indexed_col=N is good. function(indexed_col)=N is bad because MySQL Typically will be unable to use index on the column even if function is very simple such as arithmetic operation. Same can apply to order by, if you would like that to use the index for sorting. There are however some interesting exception.

Compare those two queries for example. If you look only at ORDER BY clause you would see first query which sorts by function is able to avoid order by while second which uses direct column value needs to do the filesort:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM tst WHERE i=5 AND date(d)=date(now()) ORDER BY date(d) \G
2. *************************** 1. row ***************************
3.   …

It might seem odd for Alfresco to be announcing that it has open sourced its JLAN technology - given that the company already releases 100% of its code under the GPL (with a FLOSS Exception) - but today the company announced that it has open sourced its JLAN technology as open source.

Why? Because while JLAN was available before as part of its open source content management solutions, it had also been available under a proprietary license (due to legacy reasons - Alfresco acquired the code from another party back in 2005). Today, JLAN is completely open and offered as a separate component.

Who cares? Well, anyone that wants to offer an embedded virtual file system that offers the only Java client and server implementation of Microsoft Window's CIFS (Common Internet File System) protocol, allowing content, system administration information, and …

Yesterday I've attended MySQL Customers Conference in London. This event is much smaller size than Users Conference (one day and about 170 people attending) and surely less geeky - there were no one from MySQL Development Support or Consulting teams and Sales Engineers were as close as you could get. Though Anders Karlsson and Ivan Zoratti are one of the best of the kind being more technical than quite a few of the teams mentioned.

It started with Robins presentation about MySQL features and Roadmap. Not what it was something new but it was good to hear about release plans for MySQL 5.1 (Q1 2008) and MySQL 6.0 (Q4 2008) - which sounds pretty ambitious to me but we shall see how many resources 5.1 will take after it is released to get all the issues resolved. Falcon will be default transactional storage engine in MySQL 6.0 - I did not truly understand if it will be recommended transactional storage engine or just default storage engine will …

Apple announced, as expected, a release date for Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. The date is October 26th, 2007 in case you missed it. Since everyone on the internet is a guru, and therefore, so am I, I will give you plebes reasons to upgrade to Leopard. But, first let me qualify myself worthy of such preachery (gurus can make up words).

1. I’ve been using Leopard since January 2007, since I’m an ADC Member, and I have early access.
2. I’ve been using it on my primary work machine since September 2007.
3. This is the internet, and somehow you found this post to read, therefore you don’t know any better..

I’m going to assume that the build shipped to us ADC members, has been updated and will not be the build that will be released to the masses, there are still bugs in my release, but it’s leaps and bounds ahead of the August release, and very close to stable.

…

The other day I had a case with an awful performance of a rather simple join. It was a join on tb1.vid = CONCAT('prefix-', tb2.id) with tb1.vid - indexed varchar(100) and tb2.id - int(11) column. No matter what I did - forced it to use key, forced a different join order, it did not want to use tb1.vid index for it. And no surprise it was way too slow, the number of rows analyzed was really huge:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> EXPLAIN
2.     -> SELECT
3.     ->  tb1.*
4.     -> FROM tb2
5.     -> STRAIGHT_JOIN tb1
6.     -> WHERE
7.     -> (
8.     ->    tb1.vid LIKE 'prefix-%' AND
9.     ->    tb1.vid = CONCAT('prefix-', tb2.ID) AND
…

A good two weeks ago, MySQL 5.1.22 was released. MySQL 5.1 is a new release of MySQL Server, with new features like

• partitioning (likely the top feature in 5.1)
• events (”crontab” triggers in the database)
• row-based replication
• table logs
• some XML functions

and also with major bug fixes, such as the AUTO_INCREMENT table-lock contention in InnoDB (fixed now in 5.1.22), as well as early indications of performance improvements of up to 20 % - 40 % on dual cores in some scenarios.

Jay Pipes has written an overview that compresses all of the pointers to 5.1 into one article, …

Sun recently announced the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 and Sun Blade T6320 systems based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor.  You can find lots of information on the various features and functionality provided by these servers.

One other cool feature is that these systems ship with Cool Stack pre-loaded. The Cool Stack 1.1 packages are available in /var/spool/pkg. You can install the ones you want using the pkgadd(1M) command as follows :

root@wgs40-82 # cd /var/spool/pkg
root@wgs40-82 # ls
CSKampSrc_sparc.pkg        CSKphplibs_sparc.pkg
CSKamp_sparc.pkg           …