A couple of buddies pointed me toward Sys-Con Media's Top 150 Information Technology Heroes, and I have to admit it was fun (once you click past the obstructing ad anyway). While my first reaction was to want to point out omissions (see below), what's not to like about a list that mixes Dennis Ritchie, Luca Cardelli, Edsger Dijkstra, and Charles Babbage?

However, you have to get a bit cranky with the fact that Jim Gray was left out. (His omission is even more surprising given recent events should have kept him on the authors' mind.) Jim's work on transactions was foundational for both relational databases and transaction processing (TP) monitors. Moreover, the whole web/Java application server category (WebLogic, WebSphere, .NET, ...) is really just a TP monitor rearchitected for web processing. (By the way, the reason it was not called a web/Java TP monitor in the first …

As many of you have already discovered, Connector/Net 5.0.5 does not work correctly with Tools for Visual Studio.  The symptom is that when the plugin tries to enumerate all the tables in the database, it reports that it gets back an improper data type.  The cause of this problem is somewhat involved so I thought I would blog on it.

Since the early days of the connector, binary data was not always handled correctly.  Specifically, columns that were reported to the connector as CHAR and VARCHAR were returned as System.String.  This is, of course, not always correct.  The case that prompted the changes was a bug report that SELECT _binary "foo" would return foo as a System.String instead of System.Byte[] as it should.

The fix is to always respect the binary markers that the server sends, which 5.0.5 does.  The problem is that MySQL incorrectly reports some columns as binary such as the name column from …

While reading "Crossing the Chasm" by Jeffrey Moore, I discovered that I never actually questioned the features we added in the recent releases.
I came to MySQL with a background similar to Peter Zaitsev's, we worked together in Spylog. MySQL was used there as storage for an in-house scale-out application that served TBytes of data per month and hundreds of thousands of requests per day.
The thing is, almost none of the features implemented in the recent years I would use for that sort of appliance.
Top things on my list would be:
- integrated inverse indexes/full-text search, both InnoDB and MyISAM. And these indexes would need to scale well to give low response times for at least 500 MB tables.
- scaling to multi-core CPUs and high amount of memory (64GB and more)
- better and faster networking that would not spawn off a thread for every connection, so that the server can actually handle a connection per …

a mere seventeen months since the last release, we finally managed to release version 3.51.14 of connector/odbc. while much of the development energy around connector/odbc is going into the rewrite from scratch, there?s a few of us that have been working on getting the old workhorse of 3.51 back into shape and releasable.

kent from the build team has constructed a new build tool that lets him crank out builds (and test them) on too many platforms, bogdan and tonci (and others) from the support team have really dug in and solved some annoying problems our customers have run across, and georg and i have been getting into the code and cleaning up some of the other issues. there were also a number of fixes from peter …

Although a few posts have already been made about this, I thought I’d post a nice quick article by Peter Gulutzan and Dmitri Lenev on what to do with the upcoming daylight savings time changes and MySQL. This is in case you aren’t using the OS for your time zone info. You can find this out by issuing the following query:


SELECT @@global.time_zone;


If you get back ?SYSTEM?, then the MySQL server is looking to the OS for timezone data, which is the default setting.

DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME CHANGES
By Peter Gulutzan and Dmitri Lenev

This year many American states and Canadian provinces will switch to daylight saving time on March 11 (the second Sunday of March) instead of switching on the first Sunday of April as happened during previous years.

If you populated the mysql.time_zone_transition according to the instructions in the MySQL Reference Manual, “ …

Long time no blogging! I hope PlanetMySQL finally picks up my posts again, I really miss the additional audience

We recently received a request from the OpenISR project about adding the Eclipse public license to our FLOSS License Exception. As it turns out, it is almost identical to the Common Public License (CPL), which was already included in the exception. So the decision was fairly easy - version 0.6 of the FLOSS License Exception now also covers the Eclipse public license.

What is the FLOSS License exception all about anyway? Our intent:

We want specified Free/Libre and Open Source Software applications to be able to …

Your common-cold-bedeviled editor tardily submits the 35th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, for your perusal. Starting with the latest about The DisaSTer™ (may or may not be real disaster), Herod T., Yet Another Oracle DBA, elaborates on his rant of last week with the provocative question, “When did oracle start [...]

Let the open source IPO market begin in earnest! With MySQL gearing up for an IPO, and this Sourcefire offering set to go [PDF], life continues to look good for open source exits. Sourcefire is issuing 5,770,000 shares at the price of $15 (which I'm hearing floating around) at a $350M valuation. Not bad.

But one thing that has me concerned is how Sourcefire apparently treats open source. LIke something to be exploited, but not replenished and fed. (I stress "apparently" because it may well be that the company does a wide range of things for the community. I'm just going off the prospectus.)

In the prospectus, Sourcefire cites the open source community as one of its primary strengths:

The Snort user community, with over 100,000 registered users and over 3 million downloads to date, has enabled us to …

So, I'm playing with 5.0.33 and there are a few gotcha:

If you use innodb and like to backup your databases using ibbackup, make sure your license is for ibackup-3.0. 2.0 will report that the iblog files are corrupt.


Otherwise it's a straight forward upgrade for me, so far.

I have a mysql 4.0 database that was about 200GB in size, most of that data was removed yet the ibdata file is still 200GB. So, what I did was

mysqldump --single-transaction -uroot -p --all-databases --master-data=1 > all_databases.sql


once backed up I trashed the old datafile and rebuilt it into an empty 5.0 datafile.

Next I added the option innodb_file_per_table so, I can shrink data on a table basis in the future.

mysql -uroot < all_databases.sql

wala done.


In a few hours I turned that 200 GB datafile into 27 …

After quite some months of silence, here is finally a new post on SQLbusRT.

The SQLbusRT project was actually the final project of the Master program I was in, and the last months have been very hectic. But, luckily I've succeeded, because on the 23rd of February I received my Master degree!

Click here for the slides of my final presentation. Unfortunately for some of you, these slides are in Dutch.

There is still a lot of work to be done in the SQLbusRT project. We would like to investigate the use of temporal and/or active databases, efficient query handling, request priority, matching of similar queries and much more. For this we are looking for one or more new Master students willing to take SQLbusRT to the next level.

If you are a Dutch Bachelor or Master student, and you are interested in a final project on …