As we started to make the switch to MySQL, several of our managers and developers (and I) assumed we’d use clustering to improve availability and performance. (Performance, because they thought we’d be able to spread our load among clustered servers.)

I read up on storage engines and got to explain more than once that we couldn’t use clustering, much to their surprise and initial disbelief.

Clustering relies on a particular database engine (NDB) that is currently an in-memory-only engine. (Ie, all your data has to fit in memory.) Since our database is much bigger than our RAM, we couldn’t use it. (Future versions promise to allow data stored on disk.) We ended up using the InnoDB storage engine, and replication for availability and performance.

So what is a storage engine? If you don’t know, you need to find out before moving to MySQL.

MySQL implements a sort of data-handling architecture, into which …

I pulled the latest 5.1BK sources today and built mysqld. I must admit, it fared pretty well against my little charset tester. 0 failures and over 120 tests done which took >5 hours.

To give a clue to the score last time I run the same tests, here are the bugs I opened!

• 
  
• load data infile into table with big5 chinese fulltext index hangs 100% cpu
  
• corruption with character set macce collate macce_bin
  
• myisam corruption with character set cp932 collate cp932_japanese_ci
  
• repeatable myisam fulltext index corruption
  
…

Gotcha: Bug #29838

The bug itself seems so simple to repeat. I'm boggling how it was not seen before. :-0 I really tried too many overly-complex tests, IMHO. Sometimes, it's still best to keep it simple!

I got news from the MySQL people that my LOAD XML contribution is added to release 5.2. Check the manual page.

The aim of the contribution is to simplify reading of XML data into a MySQL database. The LOAD XML command supports three different xml formats:
- field values as attributes
- field values as tags
- the format produced by the mysql -x command, with the field name as an attribute and field value as a tag

If the LOAD XML command finds a matching field in the target table, the value is inserted, otherwise it is ignored. If you have used the LOAD DATA command (most of us have) you should recognize much of the functionality, LOAD XML works much the same way.

Zack Urlocker wrote an article today on InfoWorld titled Serving Two Markets where he comments on Matt Asay’s The open-source community’s double standard on MySQL (which is a piece of work itself) and says:

Part of the issue is that often discussions about the business of open source is seen as a “zero sum game” between community users and paying customers, meaning that in order for one group to benefit, the other group must lose. To me this polarizes the discussion in an unhealthy way.

I have to admit, I haven’t seen it that way at all. And I don’t see why anyone would. When RedHat split into …

A

One of the challenges open source companies have is that you serve two distinct markets: your customers as well as non-paying community users. Paradoxically, the non-paying users can be the most vocal and demanding. Matt Asay blogs about this as the "Open Source Community's Double Standard on MySQL." I had not thought about it quite the way Matt has framed the discussion, but his observations ring true to me. Part of the issue is that often discussions about the business of open source is seen as a "zero sum game" between community users and paying customers, meaning that in order... READ MORE

Hi everyone,
this is my first blog entry and my maiden language is french, so, it is not as easy as it should be. Also, I will never pretend being a good writer so, be warned. I joined MySQL earlier in July as a senior consultant and I have created this blog at the suggestion of Ronald Bradford, a senior consultant on the same team as I am. I am just back from vacation and I currently flying to Cupertino CA for a performance tuning and high availability course. I am rather new to MySQL so I hope to learn a lot, especially from the performance tuning part. What I really like from MySQL is the scalability it allows, I don’t know any other generally available database that allows a similar scaling.

I spend my last week of vacation doing camping with my wife and three daughters at the Oka national park camping near Montreal. It’s a very nice camping in a mature forest maid of large pines and oak trees. I have to say, there are some …

Recently I’ve been making more modifications to the MySQL source. Part of making modifications is testing them. For years I’ve been curious why there are both tests and mysql-test sub directories in the source tarballs. Arjen Lentz tells me that tests is old and that mysql-test is the current testing framework. This makes sense since the manual testing pages are all about mysql-test.

Are there plans to clean up the remnants of the old testing framework? What else is there in the tarball that’s outdated and needs to be removed?

Are you getting ready for MySQL 5.1? You should. I know that it's taken a long way from alpha to beta, but now it is really close to GA. Really. There is no way it's going to stay beta forever. Very soon someone in the high management will realize that all the outstanding bugs were fixed, and MySQL 5.1 is ready for prime time.
And then, you will have to get used to it. Meaning that there a lot of stuff that is so attractive, that you will want to explore the manual in search of guidance.
Let me give you a preview of what's there for you.

Partitioning

Better start reading some theory on this stuff. If you have performance problems with huge loads of …