I’ve just released changes to two of the tools in MySQL Toolkit. MySQL Table Checksum got some convenient functionality to help you recursively check replicas for bad replicated checksum chunks. MySQL Archiver got statistics-gathering functionality to help you optimize your archiving and purging jobs, plus a few important bug fixes. Changes in MySQL Archiver: Made –time suffix optional. Added –statistics option to gather and print timing statistics. Added signal handling so mysql-archiver exits cleanly when it can.

Sadly, it’s not my bug, it’s a bug in the MySQL Documentation.

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=29915

I’m actually quite surprised nobody has run into this before, and in fact many sources quote this stating that %I and %h are the same thing.

I can’t be the only person in the world that’s ever needed hours with stripped leading zeros before. The irony is that before the submitted bug I was 5 points away from being a Basic Quality Contributor, and it would be very funny to me if this is the bug that pushed me over to qualify for a free Basic license….particularly since my company JUST bought a few licenses a month ago.

Several MySQLers will be at Oscon next week in Portland.  Speakers from MySQL include Kaj Arno, Jay Pipes, Marten Mickos and Brian Aker. We have a booth at the show and will be recruiting for some of our open jobs, which are listed at http://jobs.mysql.com .  There's also a joint reception with Zend planned for Tuesday July 24 at 5:30 pm at the DoubleTree Cantina bar.  I hope to see many Oscon regulars there!

• Oscon: Main, Keynotes, …

If you have configured a large query_cache in your MySQL configuration file, and your database freezes sporadically, take a look at the bugs #21074 and #26460 in the MySQL bug tracking system. Under heavy load with a large query cache, invalidating part of the cache could cause the server to freeze (that is, to be unable to service other operations until the invalidation was complete).

The bugfix was pushed into the 5.1 branch a few days ago, so it will be part of the next release 5.1.21-beta. Unfortunately it wasn't pushed into the 5.0 branch yet, hence the only way to workaround this problem in production environments is to reduce the query cache.

This is always mentioned that InnoDB is slower in giving results for COUNT(*) as compared to MyISAM. But as Peter points out in his blog that this fact only applies to COUNT(*) queries without WHERE clause. This text is from Peter's blog only - "If you have query like SELECT COUNT(*) FROM IMAGE WHERE USER_ID=5 this query will be executed same way both for MyISAM and Innodb tables by performing index rage scan. This can be faster or slower both for MyISAM and Innodb depending on various conditions." Let's see what EXPLAIN has in store for us.

   1: mysql> CREATE TABLE `test_index` (

   2:   `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,

   3:   `x` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,

   4:   `y` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,

   5:   `z` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'testing',

   6:   PRIMARY KEY (`id`),

   7: …

This article details how to setup MySQL 4.1 or later on Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.x. Additionally it tells you how to add java support and configure MySQL so that all new database tables use the InnoDB transaction-safe database engine instead of the default MyISAM engine. This is essential if you are writing applications with technologies such as WebObjects that automatically utilize the ACID commit or rollback capabilities of a transaction-safe database.

Dear Kettle fan,

While this first milestone release of Kettle version 3 is absolutely NOT YET READY FOR PRODUCTION, it’s a nice way to see the speed of our new architecture for yourself.
Version 3.0 is a complete refactoring of the complete Kettle code base and as such it will take a while for things to settle down again.
That being said, we have a number of tests that tell us this might be a good time to tell the world we’re still very much alive.

As noted above, this release focuses on performance.  Version 3.0 was reworked to completely separate data and metadata.  This has led to significant performance gains across the board.  At the same time we expect all your old transformations to run unchanged.  (if not, it’s a bug)

Get your new software fix over here: …

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to speak with Scott Swigart about MySQL, open source, development and community challenges, and other stuff. He sent me a link to the published interview, available on HowSoftwareIsBuilt.com. It was very interesting reading the comments of some of the other interviewees, like Stormy Peters, from OpenLogic, and Patrick Hogan, from NASA.

This article details how to setup MySQL 4.1 or later on Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.x. Additionally it tells you how to add java support and configure MySQL so that all new database tables use the InnoDB transaction-safe database engine instead of the default MyISAM engine. This is essential if you are writing applications with technologies such as WebObjects that automatically utilize the ACID commit or rollback capabilities of a transaction-safe database.