As you might have recognized already, I love to take a look into the Change logs from time to time and hope to find some goodies there. Here's an especially nice one in the Change log of 5.1.12:

INFORMATION_SCHEMA contains new tables, GLOBAL_STATUS, SESSION_STATUS, GLOBAL_VARIABLES, and SESSION_VARIABLES, that correspond to the output from the SHOW {GLOBAL|SESSION} STATUS and SHOW {GLOBAL|SESSION} VARIABLES statements.

This was reason enough for me to compile MySQL 5.1 from source and take a look:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 3 to server version: 5.1.12-beta-log

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> use information_schema
Database changed
mysql> show tables;
+---------------------------------------+
| Tables_in_information_schema          | …

Okay, so maybe I went a little overboard. But having switched to RSS in order to better interact with the MySQL forums, I seem to have embraced this new way of having content delivered to me whole-heartedly. Of course I added all of the available forum feeds immediately, but then also I added feeds to Planet MySQL as well as some of the constituent blogs directly, also a few NASA blogs and some from family&friends, well, before I knew it the list of feeds has stretched the entire height of my monitor, and I have a 21.3" monitor turned into portrait orientation.

I have to admit, I like staying on top of things and having my feeds polled at 15 minute intervals. I may have to figure …

Here are my slides from my talk at EuroOSCON 2006:

 Being A MySQL Developer, EuroOSCON 2006

Enjoy! 

I’ve had an introductory article to MySQL Cluster 5.1 Disk Data published in the September 2006 issue of International PHP Magazine.

If you’re using Cluster or you’re interested in doing so, and you’ve not yet tried out MySQL 5.1, you’ll find that disk data storage makes MySQL Cluster more flexible, scalable, and cheaper to run than MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 Cluster. In the article, I’ve outlined some reasons why this is so. The article covers the basics of creating disk-based Cluster tables, and discusses some Disk Data do’s and dont’s. There’s also some info about some other improvements to MySQL Cluster that are being made in 5.1, as well as some diagrams and sample PHP5 code for accessing a MySQL Cluster. Just in case you’re not that familiar with setting up a MySQL …

Over on the MySQL Index Analyzer site I have just released version 0.04 as a downloadable package.

This is the first GUI version that allows real analysis and has more features than the command line version.

A quick overview of what is new:

• Swing GUI
• Analysis features as on the command line
• Copying of generated ALTER TABLE statements to the clipboard
• Information on data and index size distribution
• Rudimentary analysis of possible disk space savings

So go have a look :)

Not so long ago Solid released solidDB for MySQL Beta 3 so I decided now is time to take a bit closer look on new transactional engine for MySQL. While my far goal is the performance and scalability testing before I wanted to look at basic transactional properties such as deadlock detection, select for update handling and phantom reads in the repeatable read isolation level.

Solid has OPTMISTIC (default) and PESSIMISTIC concurrency control, so it was interesting to test both.

We used default isolation mode which is REPEATABLE-READ for this test.

Test 1: Solid, deadlock detection, default (OPTIMISTIC) concurrency control.

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. CREATE TABLE `test2` (
2.   `id` int(11) NOT NULL,
3.   `names` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL, …

Steve Hamm has a great blog entry on Alfresco and other open source (and SaaS) companies that are destroying the incumbents in markets they founded in the first place. Alfresco, of course, we founded by John Newton, who founded Documentum (and, hence, the document management industry). Now Alfresco is cannibalizing that same market.

There are other examples. Paul Doscher and JasperSoft. John Roberts and SugarCRM. Etc. Many open source business managers formerly ran huge swaths of the proprietary market.

I'm just waiting for Larry Ellison to give up his day job at Oracle to get a job at MySQL....

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One of my resolutions recently was to start committing all code I write to my source control system.

Why?

Because of problems like this...

I need an Apache module to dump XML status pages. This would be for 1.3 and 2.0 servers... now this is something I have written like five times in my life.

The code has been written in my head, I just need to type it out. This is one of the projects that I am getting tired of writing over and over again... and you would think I would have gotten the hint the third time I wrote the code to save it. I do publish some of what I write, there are something like 60+ pieces of code I have made publicly available, but I don't do it all of the time.

And for some reason I have never bothered doing it with this particular bit of code.

This post is not about that code though... but about the idea it inspired this morning. One thing …

I’m not the first person to run into this and I certainly won’t be the last. This is also already covered in: Bug #19093 I just want to say again how annoying it is that the default for show status is session instead of global. It bit me again yesterday. I ran show status and was confused because most of Com_* is 0 yet uptime was a few days. Then it hit like a brick to the face that I was working on 5.0 instead of 4.1 and the default for show status is session. I know the default has changed and it still bites me. This is going to cause people hours of confusion the first time they do what I just did.

If you want the default changed please go to Bug #19093 and add a comment.

I am talking to Marten last night over skype about a couple of ongoing projects to spread MySQL and out of nowhere he says "What about Firefox?".

Now his idea, which I am now forgetting, was a little weird.... it was one of these mashup technology things that make your brain hurt a little bit.

Years ago, something like seven, I was sitting in an interview at a company and they were asking me about modifications that could be made to Apache and I was asked "Think you could write a module for Apache that would be a clone of Word Perfect?"

What do you say to ideas like this?

I politely said that, "no... its not really viable".

Marten's plan had a similar ring to it, but it got my thinking. How could Firefox be used to extend open source? In the open source world, we do not have much of a distribution channel for our software on the Windows platform. If we are lucky, they …