As soon as I've finished writing this post about "Using join cache", it was apparent that "Using join cache" is poor wording. First, the corresponding server variable is called @@join_buffer_size, not join cache size, and second, there is really no cache involved.

We've had a discussion about how this should be called. Some sources use term Block nested-loops join but we've settled on "Using join buffer". Another change is that we've decided to move the note one line down to the table that "does the buffering". As a result, what was this

mysql> explain select * from t1, t2 where t1.col < 10 and t2.col < 'bar';
+----+-------------+-------+-------+-...-+-------------------------------+
| id | select_type | table | type  |     | Extra                         | …

It’s finally here: a single-file download for all the tools in MySQL Toolkit. During this process I also upgraded every package in the toolkit to a new release, combining new versioning and some simple non-functional changes with (mostly minor) changes I’d committed but not yet released. Details are at the end of this post. I ended up not using a Makefile for the build process, because I wanted to it to be more auto-magical than I know how to do with a Makefile.

On my earlier post, I got a comment that PlanetMySQL outage was related to a data center issue. However, something I am seeing tells me a different story.

Baron (Xaprb) released MySQL Archiver. However, today's PlanetMySQL outage seems to have caused an interesting effect: it seems to have gotten confused about the relationship between posts.

So here's what is happening:


The post was written by Baron. My name is linking to my blog (http://mysqldatabaseadministration.blogspot.com/). The post's title "MySQL Archiver 0.9.2 released" is linking to a post I made today (http://mysqldatabaseadministration.blogspot.com/2007/06/planetmysql-down.html).

Of course, the post should be linking to (http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2007/06/09/mysql-archiver-092-released/) and my …

I recently came across this blog post on using String.Compare instead of the tried and true method of converting one string to lowercase and comparing to a known lower case value.  It's important to remember that strings in .NET (as in Java) are immutable so the act of lower casing a string will always make a new string.  The memory subsystem for .NET is turned for  handling lots of small objects but the fewer objects you create, the fewer that have to be checked and managed by the garbage collection system.

Still I wondered what the time difference would be between the two approaches.  So I setup a very simple test where I compared the string "FooBar" to a string variable that contained the value "foobar" one million times.  The first test used the approach of …

This release fixes some minor bugs and adds a plugin mechanism. Now you can extend MySQL Archiver with your own code easily. You could use this to run setup and tear-down, hook code into the archiving process, and more. Possibilities include building summary tables in a data warehouse during archiving, handling dependencies such as foreign keys before archiving each row, or applying advanced logic to determine which rows to archive.

.. and more annoyingly, why I spend the night in Amsterdam, even though the Dutch PHP conference is not until next weekend. So there were apparently some pretty bad thunderstorms over France, Belgium and the Netherlands. As a result the plane that should take me to Amsterdam on the way to Sandjeford arrived about an hour late. Back in the day, when airlines still afforded themselves some ground time, this would not have been that big a deal, as I had no checked luggage and so ideally I could have switched planes in time as I had 1 hour stopover time in Amsterdam. Well these days it means that if the incoming plane comes one hour late, you will likely also be one hour late. Usually they can try to make up a few minutes by burning some more fuel. In this case the thunderstorms actually forced us to fly a non standard route, which took even longer.

Now when they broke the news in Zurich …

I am getting 2013: Lost connection to MySQL server during query
I think they need the services of MySQL Professional Services :)

This release fixes some minor bugs and adds a plugin mechanism. Now you can extend MySQL Archiver with your own code easily. You could use this to run setup and tear-down, hook code into the archiving process, and more. Possibilities include building summary tables in a data warehouse during archiving, handling dependencies such as foreign keys before archiving each row, or applying advanced logic to determine which rows to archive.

I came across Oracle Coherence today. Seems like this is another approach to clustering than Oracle RAC. Here is the marketing quote from the Oracle website: Oracle Coherence is a JCache-compliant in memory distributed data grid solution for clustered applications and application servers. Oracle Coherence makes sharing and managing data in a cluster as simple as [...]

You'll probably get bored of all my stories of why we need open software, but here's another great one:

We were working on shipping integration for the opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM system with a Global Freight Carrier. We needed to submit a ship request to them and print a shipping label. We set up an account with them, got a username, a password, an XML access key--everything is ready to go. We send the perfectly formatted XML according to their documentation requirements and kept getting an "Invalid/Missing Shipper Number" error.

We contact tech support on their website. We wait. We call our sales rep. He says there's nothing he can do. We tell him we'll ship with another equally global freight carrier. He gets his tech supervisor, who says that the only support is by email.

We wait. And wait.

And get really paranoid. We start …