The latest from the MySQL community

The great Internet is littered with some really useful MySQL-related articles, that I think you’ll enjoy reading just as much as I did.

• I’ve not given Google Gears too much of a look yet, but its definitely interesting and the tutorials at O’Reilly’s ONLamp site help one play with it: The Power of Google Gears (Part 1) and The Power of Google Gears (Part 2). Looks like the series is complete, and Part 2 concentrates on using Gears for offline data entry, then syncing it with a MySQL server once the application is online. Looks like the future of desktop software might end up being like this…
• While browsing a magazine store, I picked up the SysAdmin magazine that was months …

Kaj writes:We?re happy with the quality [of 5.1]

• More stable than 5.0 was four months after GA
• A better MySQL 5.0 (thousands of small fixes)

This would be because 5.0 was a complete disaster in terms of GA quality. Peruse bugs.mysql.com, it's all there. The number of open bugs around GA time, repeated API breakages (involving leaked symbols, inability to link against SSL, Postfix, and other apps/libraries), the number of (perhaps necessary but incompatible) behaviour changes in later updates, the number of regressions introduced by these may changes.

So, saying the current 5.1 quality is better than the 5.0 shambles is a) bogus and b) pure spin. Unworthy of a community rep. My opinion? Because all these things are public, a MySQL version can be considered stable when people …

Check out  this short demo of Management Console of MySQL backup 

tk

Today at OSCON, MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius and I presented the “State of the Dolphin” lightning talk.

My slides for this preso weren’t too graphic, which makes them all the easier to reuse in this blog:

Use our new software!

• Use MySQL 5.1, it?s soon going RC
• Use Falcon, it?s soon going Beta (new transactional storage engine, faster than InnoDB on large servers)
• Use MySQL Workbench (ER Tool), Now Beta
• Use MySQL Proxy, just released
• PHPers: Use mysqlnd (Native Driver)

Go test MySQL 5.1!

• We?re happy with the quality
  • More stable than 5.0 was four months after GA
  • RC happening very soon, GA within a few versions after that …

I had been wondering this lately, and so have been asking people: who are IBM's software customers? My company sells into a wide range of Global 2000 companies, but we almost never bump into IBM databases or application servers (or hardware, for that matter). I can count the number of times on two hands, yet we often run into Oracle, Microsoft, BEA Weblogic, even Sybase. Rarely IBM.

IBM is doing a ton of revenue in software sales. But to whom does it sell its software?

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Is your MySQL server doing an extra index scan on queries that need to check a key for matches or NULL? It’s easy for this to happen accidentally, but it’s also easy to fix, especially in MySQL 5.0 and up. Here’s how. If you read the manual page for EXPLAIN, you’ll see the ref_or_null “join type” (I think “access type” is really a better term) mentioned. If you see this in EXPLAIN, it means MySQL has to search the index for matches, then search again for NULLs.

A good three months ago, I had the pleasure of being the referee for seven DB egos. Now, the match has appeared as a Dev Zone article:

One of the most popular keynotes of the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007 was called “The Clash of the DB Egos”. It was a fight amongst seven database luminaries, all playing an important role either within MySQL AB or as providers of Storage Engines that work closely with MySQL. This article attempts at giving a picture of what the fight was about, through reciting the egos and the questions posed to them by the referee.

This is a small trick and it is, conceptually not new. It is common practice to add version numbers to resource files of a website. These are image-, CSS- and Javascript files. The reason to do so is to make sure users do get new versions of the files when you change them instead of when their browser decides to flush its cache. And you certainly don't want to tell your visitors to do a shift-reload for each small update you do. So you could do something like

    <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="prototype1.50.js"></script>

and update the version number whenever you change things. This is a maintenance nightmare, though, because you'll have multiple versions of the same file lingering around next to each other and all the beauty of version control (You do use it, right?) is lost.

What you can do instead, is adding a GET-parameter to the filename, like this

I got this:

in the mail yesterday .. Thnx MySQL !

I went to the keynotes, took some pictures, which I will post to flickr.

While walking to my first session of the day, I ran into one of the OLPC people. Carrying around those bright plastic devices is a great calling card. We chatted a bit, and he told me what evil underhanded stuff Intel, Microsoft, and the Gates Foundation has just pulled last month that seriously threatens to destroy the OLPC.

Now I'm in the "Managing Technical Debt" by Andy Lester. Good stuff, careful notes. But mostly stuff already know.

The exhibition floor. Someone has a Penguin Robot! $85. Runs Python, controlled by Python. Can be used as a VoIP phone. It reads email and rss feeds.

Someone is showing off their 3D printer in the lobby. It can actually print it's own parts. The guy says that the version 1.1 will be completely self-fabricated. It will need a couple of bucks of cheap electric chips, and then clever …