Not long ago, Kaj announced the plan to develop a native driver for PHP. As Kaj explained, the new development will be licensed under the terms of the PHP license and donated to the PHP Group to solve any license issues.

Don’t get us wrong here. We will not break any existing PHP code or PHP applications! We want to develop another, technical superior option for PHP users to connect to MySQL. Most of the new developments will happen “under the hood” of PHP on the C level. We will write a replacement for the libmysql that can be used by PHP extension internally. We will not develop a new PHP extension, thus there will be no new API for PHP developers. You will be offered an additional, alternative option in PHP 6 to connect to the MySQL Server.

Not long ago, Kaj announced the plan to develop a native driver for PHP. As Kaj explained, the new development will be licensed under the terms of the PHP license and donated to the PHP Group to solve any license issues.

Don’t get us wrong here. We will not break any existing PHP code or PHP applications! We want to develop another, technical superior option for PHP users to connect to MySQL. Most of the new developments will happen “under the hood” of PHP on the C level. We will write a replacement for the libmysql that can be used by PHP extension internally. We will not develop a new PHP extension, thus there will be no new API for PHP developers. You will be offered an additional, alternative option in PHP 6 to connect to the MySQL Server.

I was talking to Dathan today at MySQL camp and he pointed out that one could use memcached as a cheap configuration database. Instead of just using it as a cache you would over-allocate the amount of memory needed so that entries would never be garbage collected.

For example, if you have 10M of configuration data just allocate 64M and this should give you plenty of head room.

Then you could have your clients poll at regular intervals and since memcached is fast you can have it push out changes at a fairly steady rate.

Of course you'd have to use multiple memcached servers each with a full snapshot of the configuration data. This way if one server crashes you don't lose any data.

You could even have a reference install automatically update settings via crontab so that editing the files on one image will be pushed out to the entire cluster automatically.

After speaking at Yahoo earlier, I drove a few miles down the street to Google for MySQL Camp. I caught the last session of the day, by Googlers saying how they used MySQL internal to Google. (I assume for the Adwords application.) Here are the stream-of-talking notes I took. The most fascinating bits I took out of it is how they take a partitioning/sharding strategy similar (but notably different in some ways) to WordPress.com and that they use DNS to manage all load balancing, high availability, datacenter failover, etc. DNS is a pretty powerful building block.

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I posted some code to the MySQL Forge at:

http://forge.mysql.com/snippets/view.php?id=52

Basically I gather some stats on my webservers in a very crude way. It runs a bunch of commands on the commandline (I run it every 5 minutes from a cron script). Please note that it adds to the load of the database server by running these commands, and it connects a few times to the database, so it actually increases things like “total # of connections” by the sheer fact that it runs.

This should run on most Unix machines, running most versions of MySQL. Please comment to this entry if you find something wrong or an incompatibility.

An explanation of the code follows:

This script will produce a string that looks like this:
(’value’,'value’,'value’,123,’value’),
and all you have to do is add a line at the …

I posted some code to the MySQL Forge at:

http://forge.mysql.com/snippets/view.php?id=52

Basically I gather some stats on my webservers in a very crude way. It runs a bunch of commands on the commandline (I run it every 5 minutes from a cron script). Please note that it adds to the load of the database server by running these commands, and it connects a few times to the database, so it actually increases things like “total # of connections” by the sheer fact that it runs.

This should run on most Unix machines, running most versions of MySQL. Please comment to this entry if you find something wrong or an incompatibility.

An explanation of the code follows:

This script will produce a string that looks like this:
(’value’,'value’,'value’,123,’value’),
and all you have to do is add a line at the …

Monty is sitting next to me and he noted that online ALTER TABLE will be available in MySQL 5.3 for adding columns and indexes. Is nice! This has been a feature in Microsoft SQL server for a while now.

NDB has this now in 5.1 (beta) for ALTER TABLE when adding new indexes.

I recently tested innotop on Microsoft Windows. There was one slight glitch, but I changed a couple lines of code, and now it runs out of the box under ActivePerl. Version 0.1.156 contains those changes for Windows compatibility. How to install I installed it under ActivePerl 5.8.8 build 819: Download and install ActivePerl After installation, open the Perl Package Manager from Start/Programs/ActivePerl 5.8.8 Build 819. Select Time-HiRes, DBD-mysql, and install them.

So, in going around the room at mysqlcamp this morning, only one person mentioned having using another database (SQL Server & Sybase). Another mentioned Access…..but that’s not a “real” database.

But many people mentioned connections to Oracle — be it “used to work for Oracle” or “used to use Oracle”. I think this speaks to how similar Oracle and MySQL are. Now, there are PLENTY of differences. But compared to Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, Ingres, Postgres and IBM DB2, it sounds like MySQL and Oracle are closer to each other than MySQL and any other database.

So, in going around the room at mysqlcamp this morning, only one person mentioned having using another database (SQL Server & Sybase). Another mentioned Access…..but that’s not a “real” database.

But many people mentioned connections to Oracle — be it “used to work for Oracle” or “used to use Oracle”. I think this speaks to how similar Oracle and MySQL are. Now, there are PLENTY of differences. But compared to Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, Ingres, Postgres and IBM DB2, it sounds like MySQL and Oracle are closer to each other than MySQL and any other database.