The latest from the MySQL community

With any code base of a reasonable size there are lots of issues you would normally take care of immediately when you come across them, however often there is just no time for it. In the end you will have to live with the knowledge that you had to leave some ugly hacks in it just to meet the deadline.

Because we have recently finished development of the next major release of our software product, there is some time now to do code cleanup and get some more automated tests on the way. Because one of the bugs that almost prevented us from holding our schedule was a particularly nasty - but well hidden one - there has (again) been some discussion about coding guidelines and quality.

People always seem to agree that you need to talk to each other, think in larger terms than just your specific problem at the time and strive for code readability and re-usability. For starters I personally would sometimes even do away with just a little …

As stated on my first post on this blog, I’m a MySQL DBA trying to draw a map of this new (to me) world called Oracle. The other day I was trying different things with Oracle, like (but not limited to) issuing kill -9 to random Oracle processes to see what would happen (on my own box of course!). The purpose? To study STARTUP statements and recovery techniques, and to get to know a little better the Oracle SQL dialect.

I was a little surprised by the results. They’re probably no news for most of you guys, but it is new to me, and I’d like to share my findings with other MySQL guys around the planet.

I created a simple test table:

SQL> CREATE TABLE names (
name_id NUMBER NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
name    VARCHAR2(6) NOT NULL
);
  2    3    4
Table created.

So far, so good, until I saw a …

Yes it's September but it's not too early to start planning on attending the biggest and best conference dedicated to providing you with the very latest and greatest information about the database you either are or soon will be using.

No matter if your second language is SQL, C#, Java, PHP, Ruby, or Boo (!) we'll have something for you.  Or rather you'll have something for all of us!  That's right our conference is great mainly because of great presentations by our users and the 2008 call for proposals is now open!

If you have an interesting story, lesson learned, or are simply an expert in some aspect of MySQL, we want to hear from you.  Hurry, the deadline is Oct 30.  By the way, I'm especially interested in hearing about possible .NET related presentations.  I would love to see talks on .NET 3.0, Silverlight integration, Entity …

I've updated the Skeleton Engine to now include support for DTrace:
http://tangent.org/543/Skeleton_Engine_for_MySQL.html

The skeleton engine is a framework for building a loadable storage engine for MySQL. Many of the engines in design and production have used it as the beginning point for their efforts.

possibly:

“Achieving Web 2.0 Social Networking Synergies with NDBAPI through MySQL Proxy”

(yet another possible cool thing coming from a quick hack at DevConf)

Even as MySQL and PosgreSQL yank the carpet out from under Oracle and Microsoft, Microsoft is turning the other cheek by cutting Oracle off at the knees on price, as Mary Jo Foley reports:

Microsoft officials announced on September 19 that they have no plans to increase the price of SQL Server 2008 beyond what the company already charges for SQL Server 2005. Microsoft execs also announced that, starting today, ...

So, here is an Alpha quality port of the MySQL Cluster management server to Win32 based on the current MySQL 5.0 tree.

This isn’t going into 5.0, so don’t expect to ever have that.

This isn’t going into 5.1 either, so don’t expect it there.

It’ll go into some future release at some level of general “supported” status that has yet to be decided.

ONLY USE THIS FOR EXPERIMENTAL PURPOSES.
IT IS EARLY RELEASE - IT HARMS PUPPIES!

But, it would be great for those who may be interested in having a ndb_mgmd on Win32 at some point to grab the binary, have a play and find some bugs.

For any bugs filed, please submit to bugs.mysql.com and explicitly mention that it’s version “5.0.50-ndbwin32r1″ and mention that it’s the specific build (i.e. it shouldn’t go through the normal bug verification procedure and instead end up with me looking at it directly).

…

“MySQL Cluster: We don’t need no stinkin FOREIGN KEYS”

and, of course: “Ban HP-UX Now!”

Any design for a “I’m Highly Available” shirt is pure speculation…. but totally awesome (and a cookie for anybody who a) makes them or b) wears them)

Yes, I really, really really dislike the Microsoft Windows platform. I think you have to approach insanity to even remotely consider using it in a HA environment.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t support it. Switching an entire software stack can be a lot of work. Much better to gradually move to complete freedom and sanity.

Each year I pick a topic to explore for conferences. I look at trends, do some research, and I write a slide deck to give a talk.

Then the learning begins. As I go around the country, and the world, giving the talk, I get to hear from others. Learning from the collective lets me find new ideas and refine my own thoughts on the topic. Some ideas I hear over and over, and these bubble to the top.

This year's topic was scaling. To date I've given the "Scaling" talk as a keynote three times, and as a regular session another four times (and I need to apologize to at least two conferences that I had to skip or I would have delivered it another two times).

At the moment Architects are looking at two forms of scaling, Macro and Micro. The computing clouds, distributed …