Now, I should probably be a good Planet MySQLer and check the MySQL Forge at http://forge.mysql.com, but Dean Swift’s “mystery festive stored procedure” linked at http://deepselect.blogspot.com/2006/12/merry-christmas.html is a pretty good interview question for a candidate. I would include the hint that it’s a Christmasy stored procedure.

I laughed out loud when I figured it out. I didn’t actually run it, but read the stored procedure to see if I could puzzle it out. And so I did. It took a few minutes, and I had to copy and paste it to a buffer that used word wrap and format it properly.

But this will show how good someone is under pressure. If you give it to them and walk away, there will be less pressure. Either way, …

Happy Chanukah and Merry Christmas to you! Just in time for the holidays, Solid has released the Generally Available version of solidDB for MySQL. Features of the GA release include:

• Both pessimistic and optimistic tables can now be specified in create table
• Performance enhancements
• New configuration parameters
• Documentation extended
• Online backup supported and documented
• New admin command checkpoint now supported and documented
• Support for insert into … on duplicate key … added
• Support for insert or update ignore added
• Support for drop table cascade added
• Support for geometry type added

Bits are available at http://dev.soliddb.com/download/ or you can go to a local mirror at our solidDB project at the …

Has anyone used MySQL Turbo Manager? What do they think?

From: http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=36474

Mentat Technologies, Inc. announced it will offer MySQL Turbo Manager Free Edition, a brand new, free graphical tool for database development and administration. With MySQL Turbo Manager Free Edition, you can browse database objects, run SQL statements and SQL scripts, edit and execute Stored Procedures. MySQL Turbo Manager works with any MySQL Server versions from 3.2.3 to 5.1 and supports all MySQL objects and all MySQL options.

You can download MySQL Turbo Manager Free Edition at: http://www.mentattech.com/themes/mentat/download.html

By Tim O'Reilly

While on a recent trip to Germany, I was interviewed about Web 2.0 by Der Spiegel. The interviewer focused on whether or not I'm getting tired of the froth around Web 2.0, but my own favorite bit of the exchange was this one:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: A thought experiment on the wisdom of crowds. Say you have a visitor from another planet, an alien, and you want to show him human culture. Would you show him the top ten videos on YouTube? Or a random sample of MySpace pages?

O'Reilly: No. There is an American comedian {Jack Handy] whose answer to that question was: "[We'd say] 'This isn't really our civilization, it's just something we're playing around with. Come back …

To show our gratitude towards those who help us, and to help MySQL users help us even better, we will soon be announcing a “Quality Contributor Programme“. As we have identified the best contributors of 2006 based on submitted bug reports, I asked a number of people last Friday and Saturday whether they would accept to be listed on our Quality Contributor list on our website at dev.mysql.com.

I am overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of the response during the past 48 hours. Let me already now give some pre-announcement recognition to some of those who have helped us make MySQL better.

Don’t worry: we do understand that the main reason users report bugs is to get them fixed. However, we still think we have plenty of opportunities of improving our ways when it comes to making it easier for you to help us, even if our bug fixing capacity should remain unchanged. Expect to soon hear more about this from …

From: http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingnews.jhtml?articleId=196700062

The short version is that among 380 wireless application developers surveyed,
30% use Microsoft SQL Server as a backend,
20% use MySQL,
16% use Oracle.

Microsoft can offer bundles, so they can just offer SQL Server cheaply so long as companies have the MSDN service (I don’t know if they do, but they can). MySQL and Oracle are standalone offerings — no bundles. And as an embedded database, a MySQL license must be bought.

So this research shows that when customers have to pay for a database, they choose MySQL over Oracle. Granted, they choose Microsoft SQL Server over both.

Now, many folks say I’m a MySQL nut. I am, but that’s not the point — I do not advocate that MySQL is the only …

Solid Information Technology, a provider of fast, always-on and affordable databases used in more than 3,000,000 mission-critical deployments worldwide, today announced that solidDB? for MySQL outperformed other MySQL transactional database engines in a public benchmark test. The benchmark results confirmed that solidDB for MySQL is the open source database that meets the performance and scalability requirements of high throughput, mission-critical applications. The publication of the results also coincided with the general availability of solidDB for MySQL, an open source relational database management system (RDBMS) that has been developed in partnership with MySQL AB and consists of the MySQL® server and solidDB Storage Engine.

Ever wondered how threads exchange data between themselves?

This sharing and exchange of data is made possible by inter-process communication, or IPC for short. There are several different types of inter-process communication for instance (IPC,System V IPC and POSIX IPC). In addition Solaris provides an additional advanced Solaris IPC.

According to Wikipedia:

Inter-Process Communication (IPC) is a set of techniques for the exchange of data between two or more threads in one or more processes. Processes may be running on one or more computers connected by a network. IPC techniques are divided into methods for message passing, synchronization, shared memory, and remote procedure calls (RPC). The method of IPC used may vary based on the bandwidth and latency of communication between the threads, and the type of data being …

There have been a few posts on PlanetMySQL regarding primary keys and the importance of choosing the right one. This is even more important when the table uses InnoDB. You've read different posts of why it is so important. Now, I'm all about benchmarks and showing the details. So I'll take a table from my previous posts about MySQL 5.1 partitioning and show what I found.

This table was created under MySQL 5.1.12-beta:

CREATE TABLE `big_table_test1` (
`entity_id` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`col1` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`col2` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`col3` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`col4` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`col5` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`col6` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`ymdh` datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
`imps` bigint(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`clicks` int(11) …