mysqlreport v3.0a has been released which fixes a bug on line 93:

chomperc($mycnf{’pass’} = <STDIN>);

should be just

chomp($mycnf{’pass’} = <STDIN>);

Thanks to jeroen for pointing this out to me. This bug caused mysqlreport to die when using –pass to prompt for a password:

Undefined subroutine &main::chomperc called at mysqlreport line 93

In other news: thanks also to Aurimas for some technical clarifications in the mysqlreport Guide about temp tables.

I was woken up this morning not by someone telling me "the electric is out" but instead by someone telling me "the basement is quiet".

This means that all of the computers in the racks are off.

The computers are all on two circuits with each circuit have at least 30 minutes of power. I know that both circuits haven't likely popped, and my house has a transformer on the side of it (yes, on the side, not on the pole...) and I can draw up to 600 AMPS of power so I haven't pulled enough power to blow the house.

This means that one of the daemon squirrels my dog loathes must have spent the remaining moments of its life becoming charcoal while chewing on the line to the house.

All of this comes to mind before I get out of bed.

No dead squirrel on the pavement, and no lights on at the neighbors. Power must be dead in my area.

I've of course not waken up in time for …

I received an email yesterday from Alexander Muse, the CEO of Spur, concerning a potential problem arising from his open source release of the Big in Japan social media tools. All of the Big in Japan social media tools were released under the open source GNU General Public License (GPL) in November. One of these tools is called SocialMail, which allows email to be sent as RSS.

It seems that a new startup company, SocialMail, is not happy with the naming confusion. Although this type of conflict isn’t specific to open source licensing, it does raise some interesting questions concerning open source project brand protection. In this case, Alex is pursuing trademark protection. If you search the USPTO trademark database for “socialmail” ( …

Today I was working with application which uses Innodb and foreign keys and got into locking problems possibly due to foreign keys, so I did a little investigation on that matter.

Interesting enough it looks like most people do not think about foreign keys overhead in terms of locking. The overhead about checking referenced table is usually considered but not locking which also might be important.

So lets talk how locks seems to work with foreign keys in Innodb. I've only done a quick check so could be missing some details.

All Innodb Foreign Key related operations happen on data modification. So for example if you do SELECT FOR UPDATE on CHILD table it will not lock associated rows in PARENT table and so you can run into lock waits if you do updates to CHILD table which change parents because this is when row in PARENT table will be locked to perform update.

The checks are performed "originating" from the table …

Hi All -

I’ll pile on with Stewart and let you know that the new 5.1.14 beta is out with lots of fixes, plus other niceties for you to explore. We’ve seen a decent increase in 5.1 beta interest, with downloads of 5.1 for November experiencing over a 50% bump than what we saw in October.

In addition, I’ve been taking a sneak peek at some of our preliminary survey results (please participate!), and was interested to see that 23% of you have indicated you’re using 5.1 in production. Of course, we don’t recommend that you use 5.1 for production systems, but it’s nice to see that some of you are finding 5.1 of high enough quality to do so.

I have been working on an addition to MySQL the latest month's or so, adding XML import to MySQL. This weekend I decided that the version was good enough to submit to MySQL. You can find it at http://lists.mysql.com/internals/34169. Good enough to submit yes, probably not good enough for production, but feedback would be good.

But all in all I am quite satisfied with it.
- focus is on easy-of-use, with automatic matching of tags and attributes to field names
- support for three different xml formats: using tags for field values, using attributes or the format used by oth MySQL tools (not a good format, but anyway..)
- works very much like th CSV file load that has been a feature of MySQL for very long

I can think of some additions, like support for binary fields (probably does not work today), better handling of character encoding etc, improved handling of the SET clause etc. But then, there are …

Over at the DevZone, MySQL 5.1.14 Downloads the cool kids are grabbing the latest 5.1 beta. Lots of Cluster fixes in this release too. We’re getting to a much more polished state for NDB with each release and that’s a good thing to see.

On a totally different topic, i bought a really sweet smelling mango today and cannot wait for the right time sometime this afternoon to eat it. All the summer fruits are really nice at the moment (benefit of being in a warm December I guess) and I’m loving it.

Although 37-41 degrees (Celcius, duh) can be less fun with a rather warm laptop.

There is a much longer post I need to make on how to be productive in
writing open source software, but this is not that post.

The post is about getting projects started quickly, and distribution
of projects once you are done.

When I work on a new Apache module, its easy, I type apxs -g -n
"name" and I start coding. For perl I use h2xs to do the same thing.

But what about creating a standalone project?

I've found over time that I need to add around an hour to two, just
to create new projects. That is a waste of my time. This summer on a
train ride I started to work on a new idea and stopped myself and
instead wrote a skeleton project that I could use in the future.

Ideas don't always go anywhere. Most ideas are a few hours worth of
work that I then toss. I learn from these ideas and sometimes they
become projects. …

Last month, Paddy gave a great webinar on ZRM for MySQL. The playback is available as part of documentation in Zmanda Network, at no cost. You can register to Zmanda Network here. As a follow-up, we will be hosting a very hands on webinar on configuring ZRM for MySQL this Thursday, the 14th of Decemeber at 10.00 am PST. You can register for this webinar here.

Today, I've been given access to the Yahoo support contract with MySQL. I can now request things on Yahoo's behalf to be fixed and or added to MySQL for various versions.

This helps you because Yahoo has the same problems you might with MySQL.

This helps MySQL because to keep the product going companies need to buy support contracts or keep their support contract open.

What would you liked fixed or added?