So I came across Google Patents the other day and thought that it was a pretty cool idea! Searching for whether a patent already exists had been a pretty hard job in the past, so having a readily available resource such as Google is a fantastic step forwards.

Especially in light of the recent Microsoft ‘FUD’.

Here’s a patent I came across whilst browsing around the various database related patents that exist out there:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=zLsYAAAAEBAJ&dq

Electronic shopping and merchandising system

Abstract
The present invention provides a merchant system for online shopping and merchandising. The merchant system architecture provides great flexibility for a merchant to adapt the merchant system to their …

Today, I noticed that one of my machines was giving a negative number for threads connected.

Anyone care to share why the threads would be displayed as a negative number in mysqladmin ex output:

| Aborted_connects           | 0          |
| Connections                | 186        |
| Max_used_connections       | 0          |
| Threads_connected          | -31        |
| Aborted_connects           | 0          |

I grew up on a farm. Lest anyone automatically load up their preconceived notions of farmers, my Dad was (and is) very interested in computers and purchased the original IBM PC back in the early/mid 80's. He found a lot of practical use in the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program, and could fly through the keyboard shortcuts (I guess they weren't really shortcuts in those days, as there wasn't a mouse) fast enough to put him on the same level with any Unix geek today with Emacs or Vi.

In the 90's, I remember him buying our 486/66 with 16MB of RAM from Micron and describing it as a computer that would "peel out on the lawn." My dad is a tractor-guy and has always been obsessed with horsepower. He still likes to rev up his …

For the mysql-proxy I'm exploring several ways to write a small SQL parser for the internal commands. As I want to use basic SQL to modify the config and the internal operations I need a parser. Some time ago I used lemon which is used in sqlite3, which is easier to use than yacc, but you still have to write the lexer/tokenizer.

This time I looked into ragel which is a state-machine compiler.

Time get rid of code like this:

....
} else if (0 == g_ascii_strncasecmp(s->str + NET_HEADER_SIZE + 1, 
     C("update proxy_config set value=0 where option=\"proxy.profiling\""))) {
....

Ragel is a bit different than lex/yacc. Ragel combines the two into one and builds a full state-machine for the input stream. Just one file, one state-machine for the parser and lexer.

%%{
  machine sql;

  SELECT = /SELECT/i;
  FROM   = /FROM/i;
  WHERE  = …

It's not new (Yahoo! Pipes is already there) but the Visual Studio integration is the kicker.  Check it out:  http://www.popfly.ms/Overview/

Hi,

MySQL Connector/Net 5.0.7 a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.

This is a bug fix release for the current production branch of Connector/Net.

Version 5.0.7 is suitable for use with any MySQL version including MySQL-4.1, MySQL-5.0, MySQL-5.1 beta or the MySQL-6.0 Falcon "Preview".

It is now available in source and binary form from the Connector/Net download pages at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/5.0.html and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

Bugs fixed

• Bug #27269 MySqlConnection.Clone does not mimic SqlConnection.Clone behavior
• Bug #27289 Transaction is not …

So if you like to try out new things, and you're not using VMWare yet, get with the program!Really, though - it's so easy now (and the VMServer is free) . Just download and install.VMWare lets you run mini virtualized server environments within your current operating system. Yea, there is a little overhead, but for testing and trying out new databases, configurations, applications, it's

It's not new (Yahoo! Pipes is already there) but the Visual Studio integration is the kicker.  Check it out:  http://www.popfly.ms/Overview/

The excellent Doug Burns has published the 45th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, on Doug’s Oracle Blog. Log Buffer thrives on the contributions of editors such as Doug and all the rest, and its dance-card is currently wide-open. If you’d like to draw some new readers to your blog, try [...]

When I first joined MySQL one of the things that was evident was the Support Engineers spent quite some time with customers issues that were focused on performance tuning. Performance tuning issues generally start with a engineer requesting a bunch of information from the customer such as:

• SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES
• SHOW GLOBAL STATUS (a number of times, to give us some rate information)
• SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST
• SHOW INNODB STATUS (if InnoDB is widely being used)
• vmstat output for a number of short periods
• iostat -dx output for a number of short periods

A lot of this output is pretty easy to go through when you know what you are looking for. However where we spend a lot of our time is looking through the SHOW GLOBAL STATUS output - trying to piece together the rates of change etc. so that we can get more insight in to what is hurting the database.

I also …