I generally find MySQL Sever sufficiently tested, meaning at least minor version upgrades rarely cause the problems. Of course it is not perfect and I remember number of big issues when some releases could not be used due to behavior changes in them and when something had to be rolled back in the next release.

But generally I think MySQL is doing much better than a lot of other projects in this respect.

Major version upgrades become more painful recently. In MySQL 3.22->3.23 upgrades or 3.23->4.0 upgrades you really could just swap binary and try out new version and if you need to get back you just swap binaries to the old version. I think it was great.
In MySQL 4.1 and later more caution is required because you could screw your data, for example by specifying utf8 as default character set together not to mention infamous timestamp format change which forced to change a lot of applications.
MySQL 5.0 added more …

I know Alexa is very controversial and we don't like to compare with Flickr, but...

Blue: Fotolog
Red: Flickr
Green: Bebo

We reached 8 million members recently (7 weeks from 7 million) and are currently ranked 18th on Alexa (yeah, I know it jumps around :)).

I added bebo because rumor is that Yahoo! wants to grab it for a cool billion.

The value of timely information regarding maintenance releases, including specific information of what bugs have been fixed and when and where to get the upgrade, proves very compelling for those DBAs and developers with little to no bandwidth. The good news is MySQL Enterprise takes the guesswork out of deciding which version of the MySQL server you should be running by providing regularly scheduled Monthly Updates and quarterly Service Packs for the Enterprise Server.

In the process of upgrading my desktop installation of MySQL I noticed that, unlike triggers, stored procedures are not automatically dumped, that's a "not so nice" feature of mysqldump, sic, here is a snippet for those who don't have time to check the manual

C:\Documents and Settings\user>mysqldump -uroot --single-transaction --routines
--databases test remote_test > c:/backup_mysql_20_05_07.sql

-- routines does the trick.
--single-transaction is InnoDB specific for a consistent backup (doesn't apply to MyISAM and other table handlers)
--databases is used because I want to backup only a specific number of databases

Note that after MySQL 5.0.11 triggers are dumped automagically (option enabled by default), use --skip-triggers if downgrading your table structure.

Note also that before 5.0.11 triggers were not dumped and routines had to wait till 5.0.13 …

From the recent MySQL Conference a number of things resonate strongly almost daily with me. These included:

1. Guy Kawasaki - Don?t let the bozos grind you down.
   • Boy, the bozos have ground me down this week. I slept for 16 hrs today, the first day of solid rest in 3 weeks.
2. Paul Tuckfield - YouTube and his various caching tip insights.
   • I’ve seen the promising results of Paul Tuckfield’s comment of pre-fetching for Replication written recently by Farhan.
3. …

Check the forum announcement for more information installation instructions and compatibility notes.

Please report any issues and/or feedback at the Virtual Appliances Discussion Forums (forums.virtualappliances.net).

LAMP

http://virtualappliances.net/download/archive/VirtualAppliancesLAMP-xen-1.0.113.tar.bz2
http://virtualappliances.net/download/archive/VirtualAppliancesLAMP-xen-1.0.113.zip

Cacti

…

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   = …

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 …