DataDirect Technologies, the unparalleled leader in data connectivity and mainframe integration and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation today announced its award-winning database drivers now support the MySQL Enterprise Server, the commercial version of the most widely used open-source database and an emerging force in business-critical software deployments.

BakBone Software(R) (Pink Sheets:BKBO), a leading provider of heterogeneous integrated data protection solutions, today announced version 8.0 of NetVault(R): Backup, the company's award-winning, flagship data protection solution.

This release of MySQL Toolkit adds a new tool, fixes some minor bugs, and adds new functionality to one of the helper scripts. New tool: MySQL Parallel Dump I wrote an introduction to MySQL Parallel Dump yesterday. It’s a much smarter way to dump your data if you have a lot of it, and it’s actually a very usable lightweight multi-threaded backup tool (it can do most dump-oriented backup jobs without a wrapper script, in my opinion).

Sorry, the MySQL conference in Japan and my vacation came up, but now we're finally ready to annouce the next (and hopefully last) beta of the next XAMPP release.

New in this beta are: PHP5 (5.2.4), Apache (2.2.6), phpMyAdmin (2.11.1), and eAccelerator (0.9.5.2).

XAMPP beta versions are always for testing purposes only. There will be no upgrade packages from and to beta versions. To all testers: Many thanks in advance!!

Get the downloads at XAMPP BETA.

If you are not familiar with tablespaces you may be wondering what the big deal about them is. Tablespaces are a logical addition to a database that helps maintenance, and potentially, can improve performance.

In Oracle and MySQL, a tablespace is a logical unit meant to store segments (i.e. tables and indexes). In Postgres, a tablespace is a physical unit. It is a symbolic link to a directory. Postgres does not allow tablespaces on operating systems that do not support symbolic links (such as windows).

The data file is the actual physical storage mechanism in Oracle and MySQL. Postgres stores tables in individual files. Postgres support of tablespaces is minimal. In MySQL and Oracle, performance can be improved by a more granular spread of data across disks. Ease of maintenance is maintained due to the logical grouping of tablespaces.

Oracle syntax for creating a tablespace is much the same as MySQL …

MySQL has a quite unique feature: the pluggable storage engine interface. Thanks to it MySQL supports different Storage Engines for different needs: MyISAM is perfect for heavy read, InnoDB for transational data and blackhole .... for sending data to /dev/null.

Thanks to some advance science we now have a wormhole Storage Engine. While the blackhole can only be written to but nothing ever comes back, the wormhole is the inverse of it. You get data from another galaxy, but all writes might have no effect on your side. Sounds useful ?

What's the deal ? The wormhole SE is a lua-based storage engine. The data is "stored" in a script-language. ... Ok, this explaination doesn't help very much. Let's take a look at an example:

The CREATE TABLE for a wormhole table is pretty simple. No magic:

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Don Marti is bloging on Linuxworld how he thinks Qumranet has a future, just not the future they might be looking at now.

Don claims that a software project will fail if someone orders a tool to be used that he himselve is never going to use, as he will never figure out what features are important and which ones are just irrelevant. People who actually use the software should be able to decide.

He gives a good pointer to where MySQL is heading and where they came from. Typically an organisation did't decide on using MySQL after a zillion meetings an a couple of purchacing procedures before to run out to the shop and buy it. No, people just needed a working rockstable database, they took what they had available, started using it and were pretty happy about it.

That's where opensource easily gained acceptance over the past decade, but how will …

Kevin Burton wrote recently about why SHOW SLAVE STATUS is really not a good way to monitor how far behind your replica servers are, and how replica network timeouts can mess up the replica lag. I’d like to chime in and say this is exactly why I thought Jeremy Cole’s MySQL Heartbeat script was such a natural fit for the MySQL Toolkit. It measures replica lag in a “show me the money” way: it looks for the effects of up-to-date replication, rather than asking the replica how far behind it thinks it is.

A while ago Peter Zaitsev wrote about his wishes for mysqldump. These included multi-threaded dumps and “safe” dumps that would wait for a server to restart if it crashed, then keep dumping other tables. I’ve had sketches of this done for a while, but during this week I fleshed it out while writing about backup and recovery for our upcoming book. I had my own list of features I wanted to add:

I remember the first time I downloaded MySQL. I think I was using Mandrake Linux. Anyway, the install was fairly painless but once it was installed, I had no clue how to run queries.

I was coming from an Oracle background and was used to SQL*Plus. I was also familiar with PostgreSQL and psql. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to get into MySQL.

So, for you developers and brand new users, you can easily start MySQL and start using it. This is not meant for a production installation, just for playing on your laptop or desktop.

Start MySQL by running mysqld (mysqld.exe on Windows). It will be in your MySQL home/bin directory. That gets the server portion of our program running.

The SQL*Plus equivalent is mysql (or mysql.exe). If you are logging in for the first time, you can use root. Once you are in, you can create other users.

To log in and run commands, type: …