The latest from the MySQL community

The 55th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, is published on the Ardent Performance Computing Blog, thanks to Jeremy Schneider. Hasan Tonguç Yilmaz’s Oracle Blog takes next week’s LB. Please send an email to the Log Buffer administrator if you’d like to edit and publish an edition of your own. Jeremy Schneider’s [...]

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.

With some effort just before my holiday, I have managed to complete the release of the next version of MyBS, the BLOB streaming engine for MySQL.

This version includes all the basic functionality required to stream BLOB data in and out of MySQL tables.

The main features are:

• Uploading of BLOB data directly into the database using HTTP PUT or GET methods.
  
• Downloaded of BLOB data directly from the database using HTTP GET.
  
• BLOB size may exceed 4GB - theoretical BLOB size limit of 256 Terabytes.
  
• BLOBs are stored in a repository which manages references from other storage engine tables.
  
• BLOBs are referenced by a URL.
  
• URLs referencing BLOBs in the repository have a unique access code, for security.
  
• The theoretical maximum repository size is 4 Zettabytes (2^72 bytes) per …

It is true you might be better of being unaware about problems, because in this case you might not run into them
Just couple of days ago Kaj Arno told me there are issues reported with SHOW PROFILE patch available in latest MySQL Community Edition and I've been troubleshooting customer affected by one of these very issues today.

The Bug can dramatically increase System CPU usage (about 10 times in this case)

The "fix" was to get MySQL 5.0.44 sources from Dorsal Source which base

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Of course you’ve heard about the fabulous pybots project, where community members have a distributed network of computers continuously testing every change in the development version of python against the development version of many different python applications. This ensures that any compatibility problems are caught early, well before the next version of python is released.

I’ve just about finished getting storm, the newly open sourced python object-relational mapper that we are using with Launchpad and Landscape, added into the pybots test suite. Just need to finish reading through an 18MB test log to figure out what I did wrong in the test script for the psycopg2 installation, and we should be all set, with storm being tested against MySQL, Postgresql, and SQLite. Rumour has it that Firebird support is coming soon (perhaps even …

It will be Sunday, September 23rd at Taste from 1PM to 10PM. I’ll be there, along with the Ubuntu Florida team. Hopefully develpers from MySQL and Pentaho will go also! Possible topics I am considering speaking on include Bazaar, Launchpad, Ubuntu, MySQL, hiring and managing an international development team, how to evolve your database schema without going insane, and using bluetooth PAN networking with laptops. If you are going, what would be most interesting to you?

We’ll be doing a linux install-fest, so bring along your laptops and ubuntu CDs. I’ll also be able to answer questions on how to use Bazaar with a variety of different development workflows. We also need sponsors, so check out the website to learn more.

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 …