The latest from the MySQL community

Skoll is a Community-Based Testing project out of the University of Maryland. Their first testing framework comes for MySQL. Watch Sandro Fouché, graduate researcher on this project, take you through what Skoll is, how it’s beneficial, and how you can use it with an actual demo. The Skoll testing client for MySQL can be downloaded here:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/skoll/contribute/

The video can be played or downloaded using the “play” or “download” link from the original article at http://www.technocation.org.

Since I know a lot of MySQLers use Perl, I wanted to pass this along. Today was the first I’d heard of this survey, so I’m thinking that there are a lot of other folks who use Perl occasionally as I do (or even regularly) that are in the dark. Apparently it began in late July, and announced at OSCON 2007, so I apologize if you’ve heard about it over and over.

Take the survey now, as you only have until September 30th to do so!

http://perlsurvey.org/

At the MySQL Developers Meeting in Heidelberg there were show off sessions where each team had a chance of showing their best to others.
As part of this shut out presentation, I demonstrated some MySQL Proxy magic.

This is a sample session from that presentation.

mysql> select 1 + 1;
+-------------------------------+
| ERROR                         |
+-------------------------------+
| Don't understand these digits |
+-------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

# Hmmm!
# Let's try to make it understand ...

mysql> set sql_mode='english_digits'; # You did not know we could do that. Did you?
Query OK, 42 rows affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> select 1 + 1;
+--------+
| result |
+--------+
| two    |
+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec) …

MySQL has had this Enterprise Monitor around for a while, but I’ve not had the chance to try it. Well, all this changed briefly in July, when I was doing my APAC tour, and folk wanted to see Enterprise Monitor at work. Back then, I showed them some canned screenshots, and in Singapore, Kim Seong (famous on #mysql) from our partners Global Link, had some kind of special login, so they demoed it. It wasn’t until this week that I actually tried it (besides, it wasn’t until the UC-J that it was re-launched with new features), and found some time to play with it. And I was blown away.

An excessive table scan, you say?

With new …

Augusto Bott at Pythian recently posted a good entry detailing some differences between Oracle and MySQL from a MySQL DBA's perspective, From MySQL to Oracle: A Few Differences. My viewpoint is exactly the opposite, I know Oracle extremely well but I have a lot of learning to do with MySQL.

Augusto ran into a SQL*Plus issue, where it is less than obvious where a SQL syntax error is. He could get around this error by using SQL Developer, Oracle's free SQL Development IDE. SQL Developer can connect to and browse MySQL databases in addition to Oracle and SQL Server.

He also noticed some syntactic differences between …

I don’t know about you, but the idea behind MySQL University is pretty amazing. It is truly a great way to come learn with us. The sessions are normally done via IRC and voice streaming, which is also recorded, however, seeing it in person at the MySQL DevMeeting, was just fabulous.

There are obviously so many more Uni sessions that I wish I went to, but I’m lucky in the sense that they’re all recorded, so expect to see them online soon. Kudos to the scribes!

I attended a few interesting sessions yesterday:

• How to Create a Test Case by Omer and Matthias - this was highly interesting, as I got a deeper understanding of our test framework. More importantly, I’ve found out that this is obviously an extension to mysql-test, and …