I’ll be presenting a webinar about the solidDB for MySQL product on Tuesday, Dec 5. The webinar includes my talk, followed by some time at the end for Q&A. If you’re interested, you can find more info about the webinar and register for the event. ¶

After my last tinkering around with the stream format for the Archive engine I decided to
see if I could improve on compression (this is under MySQL 5.1).

34,973,793 rows.

MyISAM: 4,253,705,712
Archive v2: 2,153,692,212
Archive v3: 836,812,832

The Schema:
CREATE TABLE `accesslog2` (
`id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`method` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`bytes_sent` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`protocol` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`uri` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`args` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`hostname` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`client` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`Referer` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`slash_user` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`e2_node` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`time` datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00'
)

So just a bit better :)
…

As some of you may already know, Solid is well on our way to launching our Generally Available release of solidDB for MySQL. As part of the launch process, we are running a Pilot Program that gives customers early access to our storage engine technology. Customers in the Pilot Program will get help from Solid in integrating solidDB for MySQL into their business. They will also have access to Solid?s technical support and product management staff. Finally, there are some attractive incentives for future purchases and many other benefits. ¶

There are still a few slots left in the program, so if you are interested in participating, please send mail to pilot-request@solidtech.com and we will send you further details. …

I wrote before about a generic, cross-platform way to simulate the SQL ROW_NUMBER() function in any RDBMS. There is a much more efficient way to do this on MySQL with user variables. Background Please see my previous article on how to simulate the ROW_NUMBER() function for the background. I’ll use the same table structure and data in this article. Unfortunately, that’s a quadratic algorithm, so it’s not something I’d do much (though I once did it over small sets of data in SQL Server 2000 at a jobsite).

All this time I was under the impression that boatloads of spam in our inboxes help promote porn but now I learn that hard drives promote porn.  Huh?  Well, I guess by that same logic the driveshaft in my car promotes car accidents.  Don't believe me?  Take the driveshaft out of your car and see how many car accidents that car is involved in.

It's really sad that we've come to a point where noone is responsible for themselves.  Everybody wants to be on Oprah and blame the neighbor, the dog, the parents, and the teacher.  Anyone but themselves.

And now it is apparently not your fault if you watch porn.  After all, the monitor just kept showing it long after you wanted to stop watching.  That damn hard drive just kept holding on to it long after you wanted …

It's not often that I get to pull Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming down off the shelf and immediately solve a problem with it. Today, I did.

A big "Thank you!" goes to my parents for giving it to me long ago.

The problem is that for the way almost all computers work, floating-point numbers do not follow the associative property. This results in wrong results and a good bit of hilarity.

I guess note number one about MyISAM to Innodb migration is warning what Innodb is very slow in COUNT(*) queries. The part which I often however see omitted is fact it only applies to COUNT(*) queries without WHERE clause.

So if you have query like SELECT COUNT(*) FROM USER It will be much faster for MyISAM (MEMORY and some others) tables because they would simply read number of rows in the table from stored value. Innodb will however need to perform full table scan or full index scan because it does not have such counter, it also can't be solved by simple singe counter for Innodb tables as different transactions may see different number of rows in the table.

If you have query like SELECT COUNT(*) FROM IMAGE WHERE USER_ID=5 this query will be executed same way both for MyISAM and Innodb tables by performing index rage scan. This can be faster or slower both for MyISAM and Innodb depending on …

This is a reminder to anyone who works in technology, particularly open source, that the job market is healthy. If you've been waiting for the right time to start looking, that time is here.

I'm just saying this because I get a continuous stream of requests from friends, former co-workers, open source community associates, and random people who read here. Things like "Mike, we desperately need a MySQL DBA. Do you know anyone?" or "Do you know anyone who is available to do some PHP/Perl work." My unscientific sense is that companies are paying more because good open source folks are in demand.

Rather than posting every individual job that comes along I'm just going to say it once in general...look around. You'll find them. These companies are out there actively looking, they aren't the very special, hidden, must-be-part-of-a-secret-society jobs. You should be able to find them with a little poking around.

Just a …

Adam Machanic has published on SQLblog.com the 21st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly, human-edited review of database blogs. You can publish an edition of Log Buffer too. It’s good fun and an excellent way to promote your own blog — The Pythian Group Blog and Log Buffer are widely-read and highly-rated. Read the Log [...]

Laurentiu Cristofor has an excellent blog post, Who needs encryption?, which presents some point blank facts about encryption and the correlations you can draw from those facts. This post isn't a SQL Server or even a database specific post. It's about encryption in general.

I love his Fact #1: Encryption does not eliminate the need to protect some data. I was recently talking with some peers about whole disk encryption technologies. The idea behind whole disk encryption technologies is if someone were able to steal the hard drive (such as by taking a laptop), as long as the hard drive was powered off, by powering it on they wouldn't immediately get access to to the data. They would have to decrypt the hard drive. Well, there's two ways to go about …