In the most recent edition of Database Trends and Applications (hardcopy), there’s an interview with Tom Kyte from Oracle with the focus being the new enhancements coming in Oracle11g. I’m a big fan of Mr. Kyte as he really knows his stuff and is not shy in admitting what Oracle doesn’t do well. Even though I’m no longer an in-the-trenches Oracle DBA, I still follow his columns because his advice can oftentimes apply to other DBMS’s in addition to Oracle.

I was intrigued to see the very first 11g enhancement he noted in his interview - Oracle will now sport a new memory cache that will cache the results (not just the raw data blocks) of SQL queries. Sound familiar? When I first came to MySQL, one thing that quickly caught my eye was the query cache. Now I know the query cache isn’t for everybody, but in the right situations, it can really be a godsend. Seems Oracle has now gotten the same message. And no wonder: for repetitively …

Oracle contributes TopLink to the Eclipse Foundation…Zend releases updated version of Zend Core…FSF seeks partnerships with hardware vendors…and more…

Oracle Proposes Open Source Persistence Project at Eclipse Foundation, Oracle (Press Release)

Oracle Becomes Board Member of Eclipse Foundation , Oracle (Press Release)

Eclipse Foundation Community Awards Announcement, Eclipse Foundation (Press Release)

…

With many other open source projects - like our friends from phpMyAdmin - we're showcasing our software at this year's DotOrg-Pavilion (open April 24th and 25th) and will be happy to talk to you about the past, the present and the future of XAMPP.

The MySQL Conference & Expo is taking place in Santa Clara, April 23-26, and it's not too late to qualify for the early bird discount: If you take advantage of early registration by March 14th you can save $200 off the standard conference fee.

For complete MySQL Conference & Expo details, visit: http://www.mysqlconf.com

Last few days I had a lot of a lot of questions at MySQL Performance Forum as well as from our customers regarding query optimization... which had one thing in common - It is not query which needed to be optimized.

Way too frequently people design schema first and then think how the queries they are looking to be answered can be expressed using that schema... which just does not work as a lot of rows needs to be traversed to get results you're looking for. Here are couple of examples:

GROUP BY Consider SELECT COUNT(*) cnt, page FROM log GROUP BY page ORDER BY cnt DESC limit 10, the query to display top popular pages. There are very many queries of this type in many web applications which do group by one field sort by another and then use LIMIT to output first few rows. This query is not going to be efficient as it needs to traverse a lot of rows …

I doubt that anyone will notice, but I thought it would be at least polite to mention that hackmysql.com is moving to a new host. Therefore, some time this week the site may be inaccessible.

Infrastructure management company dbaDirect, in a move similar to Oracle’s play to intercept Red Hat’s enterprise support for its own distribution of Linux, is now supporting the MySQL open source database with dbaDirect’s usual enterprise services that include on-demand technical expertise, patches and upgrades.

While Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux announcement last year was no surprise and consistent with the company’s history and strategy, the dbaDirect MySQL offering is more on the level of the larger industry (meaning not just companies that throw around a few billion in acquisitions and extensions each year).

With dbaDirect, we now have a mid-sized, typical enterprise IT services company (3,000 corporate databases managed) basing strategy on the …

Earlier today I had a nice IM chat with someone.  He or she is referred to below as Question and I’m Answer.  There where interesting questions and perhaps others find the answers interesting as well.  I seemed a shame to let the information in the chat log go to waste, so I’m posting it here on my blog.
Question: I have a qestion for you about the possibility of creating custom transformations.
Answer: sure
Question: my company already has quite a buit of business logice that is coded in C and/or C++ and this logic then calls some Corba services.  Would it be possible for use to integrate that logic into Kettle?
Answer: Not directly, however, it’s not that hard to write wrappers in JNI (java native interface) and create a plugin for it.
Question: That was my idea.  I was just wondering if there were any other ways
Answer: …

With my very heavy travel load and skilling load I’ve not had time to scratch myself. It hasn’t stopped the brain working overtime on various issues including the classic find a pattern in a string starting with a wildcard character. On a recent gig I saw the true classic.


SELECT columns
FROM users
WHERE username LIKE '%str%'
OR firstname LIKE '%str%'
OR lastname LIKE '%str%'

I went through the various options and comments on leading ‘%’, OR’s, combined columns, FULLTEXT (which doesn’t work in this case), merge indexing etc, however it perplexed me that nobody has really solved this problem, or at least shared their solutions.

I have an idea, a theory and while I’d love to prove/disprove it, I simply just don’t have the time. So here are my notes, hopefully somebody can comment positively/negatively, do some research, or encourage me to pursue it more. …

I've been wanting a query sniper for a while for MySQL (some people seem to call them "query killers"). They're basically programs which inspect the MySQL "show processlist" command and decide to kill some processes if they violate specified rules. I have a prototype of one in python, and couldn't find any other implementations until tonight when I came across Querybane, which is what Wikipedia use to do exactly the same thing.

Now, I need to think further about if querybane does what I want, especially given I can't find the source code. Perhaps it's hidden in the media wiki code somewhere? The only code for a project named "servmon" (it's parent project) that I can find is …

The following checklist was compiled in recent classes. Usage is simple: Check the listed things , and consider the actions on the right.

It's not commented, just use it as a cheat sheet. Check: Max_Used_Connections Action: Max_Connnections Check: Threads_% Action: Thread_Cache_Size Check: Opened_Tables, Open_Tables Action: Table_Cache Check: Created_Tmp_Tables, Created_Tmp_Disk_Tables Action: Tmp_Table_Size Check: Sort_% Action: Sort_Buffer Check: QCache_%, Com_Select Action: Query_Cache_% Check: Table_Locks_% Action: MyISAM -> InnoDB Check: Key_% Action: Key_Buffer_Size Check: SHOW INNODB STATUS Action: Innodb_Buffer_Pool_Size Check: PROCEDURE ANALYSE() Action: ALTER TABLE Check: (Slow) Query Log Action: EXPLAIN