The latest from the MySQL community

I wrote a couple weeks ago about my work on the Backup and Recovery chapter for High Performance MySQL, 2nd Edition. Thanks for your comments and suggestions, and thanks to those of you who helped me over email as well.

I've had several questions about what is included in the chapter, so I thought I'd post the outline as it stands now.

I’ve come in late for Monty’s session - everything seems to be running a bit early - how odd.

Monty’s is covering mistakes in building communities - he’s talking about Dream Box and how they have let their community fragment so deeply. Then he talks about how MySQL has provided a strong central point for the development of the server.

At this point someone asks how much contributed code is in MySQL. Monty says very little in the core server (but mentioning the Windows port as a large and notable exception). He should mention that the non-server contributions are huge, but he gets sidetracked.

He heads back to his slides and start discussion stats from MySQL’s past - how many copies have been distributed (and estimated 100 million+ - about 40k downloads per day.) Lots and lots of books (about 250 in English, 200 in German, 200 in French, 50 in Japanese and 20+ in Spanish. Also in Chinese, Russina, Portuguese, …

I did not attend the talk Monty gave at OpenMind 2007. I only have Zak's recollections to go by and among various interesting tidbits I found the following note by Zak: "DBMS implementations must change. FLOSS DBMS will be able to react most quickly to changes in what people want and what hardware offers. They can react quickly, because FLOSS DBMS focus on serving users first and worrying about standards, marketing and so on afterwards."

Now I actually agree on the point regarding standards .. well sort of. I guess that Zak simply had to leave out some context in his notes in order to not end up with a full length transcript. I assume the point that Monty was trying to make is that FLOSS has the advantage in adapting to change, because that change is happening in …

After a break, Tommi Mikkonen of the Tampere University of Technology introduces Monty Widenius (who is, as most readers of this blog will know is one of the founders of MySQL AB)

Monty takes the stage wearing a suit - a nice suit - something I don’t recall having seen before.

He starts with an overview of the near past of DBMSs, talking about the state of databases around 1995, covering the state of proprietary and open products around this time.

He then quickly moves to discussing the rise of databases in web apps in the mid-to-late ninties. He’s covering a lot of metaphorical ground pretty quickly, perhaps too quickly for a crowd that may not be familiar with DBMS or web apps. If I had been thinking, I would have sat in the back of the room so that I could see how well-suited the content is the for the audience.

Monty has started discussing how the use of …

As a few people have commented, one of the more exciting pieces to
the 5.1 RC release is Heikki's scaling patch for autoincrements on
multiprocessor machines. In versions previous to the 5.1 RC Innodb
could have issues with load if you had multiple CPU's competing with
threads over who got to assign autoincrements.

The following graph shows the change in a test where mysqlslap was
used to generate a write test. In this case a specific load was
applied as a single user and then the load was split among many users.



?
The second graph shows a "scaling" test where each client adds the
same load as the last. As you can see this also makes a significant
difference in performance.


?
As load increases in the second graph, Innodb scales linearly. It is
great to see the Innodb development team working on …

Ingres acquires systems integrators. 3Com and Digium announce product partnership. DataDirect launches MySQL drivers. (and more)

Ingres Announces Services Acquisitions in EMEA and APAC, Ingres (Press Release)

3Com and Digium Partner to Deliver 3Com Asterisk, 3COM / Digium (Press Release)

DataDirect Technologies Brings Superior Data Connectivity to MySQL Database, DataDirect Technologies (Press Release)

Trolltech and Motorola expand agreement on Linux-based phone platform, Trolltech (Press Release)

…

MySQL AB today announced that the Swedish National Police are implementing an enterprise-wide project for building all future IT systems on an open source software (OSS) infrastructure based upon Linux, MySQL and JBoss. Several existing systems are currently being migrated and all future projects will be developed on this OSS foundation.

Per-Ola Sjöswärd, Executive IT-strategist for the Swedish National Police, will present at the upcoming MySQL Customer Conference in London, October 16, as well as during a free Web seminar on October 24.

I wrote a couple weeks ago about my work on the Backup and Recovery chapter for High Performance MySQL, 2nd Edition. Thanks for your comments and suggestions, and thanks to those of you who helped me over email as well. I’ve had several questions about what is included in the chapter, so I thought I’d post the outline as it stands now: [Introduction] It's All About Recovery Topics We Won't Cover Why Backups?

This release of MySQL Toolkit adds a new parallel dump tool for multi-threaded backups, fixes some minor bugs, and adds new functionality to one of the helper scripts.

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:

root@127.0.0.1:test> show create table t1\G
CREATE TABLE `t1` (
  `id` int(11) DEFAULT …