I haven't been blogging about the things I used to -- how-tos and technical hacks -- because I've been working quite hard on MySQL Toolkit and, believe it or not, innotop. I've made it possible to write innotop plugins, which have been very useful to our team at work, and I'm working on documentation. Plugins won't make it into the upcoming release; it'll just be bug fixes and documentation. These projects have taken up most of my free time.

I've also tentatively joined a group of people working on a very large, exciting, secret project which may consume the rest of my summer and/or much of the rest of the year. (I've been turning down consulting gigs and other projects because of this). If this secret project works out, I'll be writing more about it here, you can count on that.

In the …

This release fixes some bugs and improves the chunking functionality. MySQL Table Checksum had a few minor bugs and one major bug with the chunking functionality. I also rewrote the chunking, though the behavior is backwards compatible. I am very happy with the way it works now, and will probably not make any more incompatible changes to it. The changes enabled me to add support for chunking on float, double and decimal columns.

It still doesn't support chunking on character-based columns, though I know now how I'll do it if I do. Also, support for ENUM and SET shouldn't be hard to add. I have no need for these features myself. If you need it, please file a bug report on the Sourceforge tracker.

Ask a simple question, get a simple, but subtle answer. I asked Savio Rodrigues, who replaced me on the Open Sources blog but originally blogged here, to comment on the state of open source at IBM. He gave me a bit more than that.

You know, IBM, the company that essentially carried open source into the enterprise on its back in 2000 when it pledged $1 billion to fund Linux. Lately, though, IBM's has been less flashy with its commitment to open source though, as Savio points out, no less involved. As Savio reports, however, IBM's commitment to open source is broader than source code. Open source without open standards isn't of much interest to Big Blue.

In this fifth installment of the Open Source @ Series on The Open …

Brian has written a library that implements "XML Row Storage", and has added it to his HTTP Storage Engine.

I've got a couple of hours to add it to my S3 Storage Engine.

I've already stumbled over the fact that my engine as it was won't build against a very recent MySQL 5.1 source tree. Type byte is now uchar, and the call parameters of get_server_by_name have changed.

SHOW CREATE TRIGGER was added two weeks ago into 5.1 branch - it turned out there is no way to do mysqlbackup without this statement when the trigger is defined in a character set that is not UTF-8.

And while we are on triggers, some most painful locking bugs with triggers are being fixed too (in 5.0) - Bug#26141 mixing table types in trigger causes full table lock on innodb table and Bug#24989 'Explicit or implicit commit' error/server crash with concurrent transactions. With these two fixes in, triggers should actually become usable with InnoDB.

Problem #1 - “[notice] child pid 13449 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)”

On a OpenBSD v3.7 i386 system running Apache v1.3.29 (not chrooted) with PHP v5.1.4 I upgraded HTML_BBCodeParser from version 1.1 to version 1.2.2 by running at command line “pear upgrade-all”. After the upgrades were complete the web site would not load a web page anymore. I looked at my HTTPD server logs and noticed I was receiving the following error message in error_log file, “[notice] child pid 13449 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)” whenever there was a HTTP request on port 80 or 443 to the web site. I couldn’t understand what the problem could be but then decided to uninstall HTML_BBCodeParser …

We've recently hired our first CIO at MySQL, and it's interesting to consider how the role of the CIO is different from what it used to be. MySQL has some particular challenges from an information management perspective because we have so many employees working from home around the world. Otherwise, I think the role of CIO at our company is not that different from most other young companies. But what's really changed is the nature of IT in the past six or seven years. Back in 1999 and 2000, a lot of IT effort was spent in scaling up. CEOs... READ MORE

I am moving halfway across the world. Therefore, for the remainder of July and all of August and September HackMySQL.com will not be actively maintained. This means no updates to scripts or articles and very limited response to feedback.

Oracle owns the database world. And this may be precisely its biggest problem.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, customers aren't planning to snap up its newest version of its industry-leading database, 11g. The reason? Oracle is improving its database at a much slower pace, providing fewer reasons to upgrade:

[I]t typically takes at least several months for a company to fully shift to a new version of Oracle's database software -- the larger the company, the longer it takes -- and lately Oracle has made several small, incremental changes in new releases rather than a few large, important ones that would compel a company to switch quickly, customers say....

...highlighting maturation in the database industry. The Independent Oracle Users Group, an independent organization for …

I just downloaded the latest Google Maps for my Treo.

Awesome :)

Why is that? They have added two of the features I have most wanted.
When I go and look for a location, I can select addresses from my
contact database. Looking up friend's addresses on the map is now
just two clicks.

Better? When I find a business via Google Maps I can then select to
have a vCard created for the business (and Google even gives you the
phone number in the vCard). The application also gives me the option
to call the address as well.

So I can now find a business, and add it to my contacts database.

And for the hell of it, I entered "Cuppertino, California" and then
selected "MySQL" as a local business.

What did I get?

Not only the offices address and phone number, but the URL for the
company as well! …