So far we have received 16 entries for the Proven Scaling Free Ride to MySQL Conference and Expo 2007, which will be in Santa Clara, California, April 23-26. (A recap: We are providing free airfare, hotel, meals, and a full conference pass to three people who impress us with their submissions.) A few of the submissions so far have had the panel laughing hysterically (and we DO appreciate a bit of humour in our judging). A few of you have not tried at all. I thought I’d provide some tips on what helps and what hurts as you submit your entries:

• Helps: Showing that you have a sense of humour, and can tell a good story.
• Hurts: Leaving all of the entry blanks empty.
• Helps: Showing some humility, and that you will …

On Thursday I saw something I’d not seen before. An Empty Innodb Status. Now given the amount of output normally shown it was certainly a first. And it looked like:

mysql> SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS;
+--------+------+--------+
| Type   | Name | Status |
+--------+------+--------+
| InnoDB |      |        |
+--------+------+--------+
1 row in set (0.03 sec)

To answer some of the most obvious questions.

• Yes it was a working existing MySQL instance, with InnoDB correctly configured. Indeed we had been benchmarking for several hours.
• MySQL Server was running, indeed a command selecting data from the mysql schema worked just fine after seeing this (All other tables were Innodb).
• Absolutely nothing in the host MySQL error log. (This was the second most disappointing aspect)
• The Process List showed two queries that had been running for some time, everything was taking  ; 1 second. …

Charlie Babcock's GPLv3 story hit this morning. It's an interesting and thoughtful read, and goes to the heart of one of the big disagreements in open source: how far can a license go in seeking to ensure freedom?

There's a rift developing between camps within the free software movement over the next version of the most popular open source license, known as the General Public License, or GPL. And while that infighting might appear to be little more than a family squabble, its ramifications could be significant for how companies use open source software in the future.

A new version of the GPL, the third overall and the first revision since 1991, was supposed to be released this month. But controversy over several new provisions--and the authors' ambitions to thwart Microsoft's Linux pact with Novell--have delayed it until later …

mysql has quite a few open job listings. some positions of note: web developer, support engineer, maintenance developer, qa engineer, and performance architect. all of these positions are available world-wide, so you get to work from home. some of the other jobs from the full list are …

On Friday I posted PBXT version 0.9.85 which concludes my initial work on porting the engine to Windows NT/XP.

I have built a MySQL 5.1 executable (mysqld-nt.exe) to make it easy to try it out. The binary package can be downloaded from http://www.primebase.com/xt. Instructions on how to install are given in the README file.

If you would like to build it yourself, then download the source code from SourceForge.net, and follow the instruction in the windows-readme.txt file.

Unfortunately MySQL 5.1 does not support runtime loading of storage engines, as done on Linux and Mac OS X. Last I heard, this feature will also be a bit slow in coming, and is scheduled for 5.2. So if there is anybody else out there who would like to see this feature sooner, let your voices be heard!
…

For all those instant GUI people out there, there is an easy way to watch the present status of your MySQL Slaves using the watch command.

$ watch -n 1 -d "mysql -uroot -pxxxx mysql -e 'SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G'"

The watch provides a view of a file or command, and shows interval updates to this output (-n  seconds> option). You can also specific a granularity better then one second for example 0.5. -d also highlights the differences for you. So while you see the following output with your SHOW SLAVE STATUS, on a loaded system you will also see bin-log and relay-log changes, and perhaps Seconds_Behind_Master.

The question is, Why is Seconds_Behind_Master the last column in this display?


*************************** 1. row ***************************
Slave_IO_State: Waiting for master to send event
Master_Host: localhost
Master_User: repl
Master_Port: …

MySQL Table Sync efficiently finds and resolves data (not structural) differences between two MySQL tables, which may be on different servers. It offers two search algorithms to find the rows that differ, and several methods to bring the destination table into sync with the source.

Few days ago MySQL released MySQL 5.0.37 which I would call first real Community Version, because unlike previous versions which were released from the same source tree as Enterprise MySQL this one has some community features added, which is great.

Also over last half a year MySQL seems to have organized resources for Community Engineering team which means we'll likely get more cool contributions accepted into community version.

The great question however why MySQL did not announce the split just now when it really got some real meaning from technical standpoint ? I guess it is mainly to be able to sell to more customers which would not have to pay for MySQL running it under GPL but still would like convenience of having quick binary updates and running some kind of Certified version.

But lets leave this aside - this is how …

MySQL Toolkit’s Show Grants tool can now separate grants into individual statements, convert them into REVOKE statements, and help you remove users from a server, even if your server doesn’t support DROP USER. Changes The comment on my last post, combined with my need to revoke some grants today on a server that accidentally got grants replicated to it, prompted me to add more functionality to this tool. It can now: