I have written a long, long blog entry How fast is mysqlnd-5.0.0-alpha?.I do not want to spam the Planets with all of it. It’s aimed at PHP and MySQL users that want to hear in detail what we know about the performance of the first alpha release of the MySQL native driver for PHP.

The following table demonstrates pretty well where we are with mysqlnd. For a first alpha it shows an acceptable performance.

As an example of a realistic benchmark, we have followed the decision of the german computer magazine c’t and choosen the Dell DVD Store. Last year a MySQL team had won ( …

Every time I walk into the MySQL office here in Machester by the Sea
I find myself eyeing the WRT54G and thinking to myself "Hmmmm I have
the latest image of DD-WRT on my laptop, and this router is a version
3,... it is such a shame its running that lousy firmware."

Thanks to age, and the wish to not become IT staff, I never flash it.

But is is tempting.

At Antioch I taught a class in operating system design when 386BSD
had just been out for a year or so. Learning "UNIX" was hot then and
there was a demand for the class. At the time 386BSD, which
eventually became FreeBSD, was the only route to go for a PC that got
you an un-crippled version of a UNIX like OS.

It came on 54 floppies. My students would download it, and run off to
find PC's to play with. Since Antioch had almost know Intel machines
at the time, almost …

I have to deal with it now and a lot of other people too, judging by the utf8/unicode/encoding topics on the django mailing list. I have found this one thread quite interesting and looks like the problem solver, but may be I also just need to learn a bit more about the bits and pieces that make this whole thing work. This message obviously tells how to make mysql completely aware and well-handling utf8.
Next thing on the list the django setting parameter DEFAULT_CHARSET.

Over-the-Top Tales from the Trenches.
Motto: Bringing order to the chaos of every day DBA life.

This diary has made you conversant in the world of RMAN standbys, duplicates and corruptions… exposed you to the world the hidden nature of shmmax. You have seen the nastiness of Oracle MONTHS_BETWEEN. What more worlds and mysteries are left for us to conquer? Do we weep like Alexander, or board a boat and discover America?

Actually, my aim in any posting is to make your job as a DBA in Oracle, SQLserver and …

Dear Developers,

we are proud to announce the first alpha version of the MySQL native driver for PHP: mysqlnd 5.0.0-alpha. The software is available for download on http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php-mysqlnd.

The MySQL native driver for PHP is an additional, alternative way to connect from PHP 6 to the MySQL Server 4.1 or newer. It is a replacement for libmysql, the MySQL Client Library. From now on you can use ext/mysqli either together with libmysql as you did in the past or with mysqlnd. The MySQL native driver for PHP requires PHP 6 and can connect to MySQL Servers 4.1 or newer.

We have no plans to remove …

Dear Developers,

we are proud to announce the first alpha version of the MySQL native driver for PHP: mysqlnd 5.0.0-alpha. The software is available for download on http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php-mysqlnd.

The MySQL native driver for PHP is an additional, alternative way to connect from PHP 6 to the MySQL Server 4.1 or newer. It is a replacement for libmysql, the MySQL Client Library. From now on you can use ext/mysqli either together with libmysql as you did in the past or with mysqlnd. The MySQL native driver for PHP requires PHP 6 and can connect to MySQL Servers 4.1 or …

Read here how to change all your DB to utf8, pretty simple, but you gotta know it. Even when your app runs in latin1 only, it reduces a couple problems in case you forgot some check and utf8 is slipping through. I will let you know if I can prove that right. But since Django is trying to be unicode compliant, it’s easier to use it than to work around it.
It does at least already eliminate the problem of getting this error:

Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE)

this was discussed here.
In short:

ALTER TABLE tbl_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET …

I have blogged about meeting up with Georg, Peter, Andrey and Ulf in Frankfurt last November to discuss the mysqlnd project. What is mysqlnd you may ask? You can find an answer in the FAQ section of the newly released mysqlnd project page on mysql.com. However, for the lazy reader I will briefly say what it is about

The idea behind the mysqlnd is to leverage the PHP infrastructure in order to communicate with the MySQL server. As such it is a replacement for libmysql and just like libmysql it can be used in any PHP extension. So while currently the reference implementation is done inside ext/mysqli, it is pretty certain that ext/pdo_mysql will also make use of mysqlnd eventually.

Now why would we care? One boring, yet important aspect, is that mysqlnd will be licensed under the PHP …

I’ve been looking for a good solution to manage full text search for large data chunks (2GB - 100GB). I’ve written a couple of solutions using Xapian with limited success, but unfortunately I haven’t been satisfied with it overall. Performance was good, but there were a number of issues with flexibility that have me ultimately looking for another solution.

At my usual day job, the topic was brought up and I mentioned Xapian and Lucene as solutions, however we’re looking to stay away from Java as it’s not currently in our architecture, and as I stated before: Xapian doesn’t quite have the capabilities I’m looking for to handle even my own systems. Someone brought up Sphinx as something that was being looked into, and I jumped into the typical research process.

One of the key elements that Sphinx seems to offer …

The MySQL Conference & Expo registration is now open.  This is the official MySQL conference put on jointly by MySQL and O'Reilly and once again, should be an excellent event.  There are more than 100 sessions focusing on a wide range of topics including the new Falcon storage engine, performance tuning, new features in MySQL 5.1, partitioning, monitoring and management, case studies, and more.  Many of these sessions are new for the first time, so even folks who have attended the conference in the past will benefit from many new topics. 

There are also more than a dozen tutorials on topics like scale out, Ruby on Rails, replication, high availability and writing your own storage engine (by MySQL technology guru …