After much pain and suffering (One of the four noble truths!), trying to figure out how to get UnixODBC and various ODBC drivers to play nicely, I Have this to show:


mysql> show variables like 'port';
+---------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+---------------+-------+
| port | 3306 |
+---------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.06 sec)

mysql> create table mysqlodbc_test (id int(4), name varchar(32));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.05 sec)


And:


mysql> show variables like 'port';
+---------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+---------------+-------+
| port | 5555 |
+---------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> show storage engines;
…

I wrote an article late last week about benchmark results for the two table-synchronization algorithms I’ve been implementing for the MySQL Table Sync tool. I’ve spent some time developing a test suite for the tool, and learned some really interesting things about the general problem of synchronizing tables. Progress on MySQL Table Sync My test suite caught some great bugs, but not as many as I’d expected, which is a great feeling.

In the spirit of April 1st — only the other way around — I'd like to disperse a spoof I've been working on for quite a while now. Last autumn I began to tell people about a new, revolutionary database called "CouchDb".

I explained CouchDb’s advanced design and state-of-the-art feature set, leaving everyone with the impression that a lot of technical problems that exist within traditional database systems have been taken care of. For example, CouchDb’s on- and offline replication feature is the basis for a super-easy to implement load balancing and …

While I am spending my week in Japan, I will be heading back to the US in time for the MySQL User's Conference April 23rd->26th.

I'll be speaking on the following topics:

Tutorial: MySQL 5.1 In-depth
Session: Replication and Clustering for Web Technologies
Session: Understanding MySQL's Pluggable Engine API
Tutorial: Writing Your Own Storage Engine

On top of those, I will be doing a a number of BOF's related to extending MySQL's technology.

It should be a good time.

A prompt is worth a thousand characters:

mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN postgres SONAME 'libpostgres_engine.so';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)


mysql> create table april (a int , b varchar(100)) ENGINE=postgres;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> show engines;
+------------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------------+--------------+-----+------------+
| Engine | Support | Comment | Transactions | XA | Savepoints |
+------------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------------+--------------+-----+------------+
| ndbcluster | DISABLED | Clustered, fault-tolerant tables | YES | NO | NO |
| MRG_MYISAM | YES | Collection of identical MyISAM tables | NO | NO | NO |
| BLACKHOLE | YES | /dev/null storage engine (anything you write to it disappears) | NO | NO | NO |
| CSV …

Peter Zaitsev was kind enough to share with me an idea for a script which I have now finished. mysqlidxchk checks MySQL databases/tables for unused indexes. Version 1.0 with documentation and guide is available for download: mysqlidxchk v1.0 (Linux or Windows).

Please report any bugs or problems you experience.

It was a tough decision, but after much deliberation, the Proven Scaling Free Ride panel has made their decision, and the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007 Free Ride winners have been chosen. To recap, each of the winners will receive:

• Round-trip airfare from their location to SJC, SFO, or OAK airport
• Transportation from the airport to hotel/conference
• Hotel accommodations
• A meal stipend
• A full conference pass, provided by MySQL AB (Thanks, MySQL!)

Without further ado, here are the winners and their stories:

Jan Lehnardt, a student from …

If anyone’s missed these excellent posts, I should really point them out.

• Chris DiBona tells us all that the moral is “Don’t Talk. Do. Don’t yammer. Launch. Release. Ship.” He’s right. Look at Microsoft talking about freeing their database, and wanting to release their beloved FoxPro code to the world, via CodePlex. Open source or not, they surely received a lot of positive karma last week. I don’t doubt their delivery aspect of things, but why talk about it before it happens - it means a lot more, doing it first, I’d think. With the possiblity of users expanding on this, maybe someone will work on a FoxPro to MySQL migration suite, that will be feature complete?
• Then Jeremy Zawodny tells us about how silly lame announcements are (really, they are) and we should …

This is a tale about Ruby On Rails, custom stored procedures for MySql 5 and how Rails 1.2.3 is not only opinionated against stored procedures but also actually incompatible with creating and sometimes calling (mysql) stored procedures. The tales does not end with a truly happy ending but some “hacks” are mentioned that I have found useful.

Background
The rails framework developers, being of the opinion that complexity is best located in the code and not in the database, does not advocate using stored procedures as a abstraction layer between the database and the application. Instead dynamic sql generated from RoR code is used. For typical application databases, this approach works very well indeed.

Examples where the traditional rails way of database thinking sometimes fails short are projects …