The latest from the MySQL community

Anyway, it was verified independently, but there was a catch. The script in the master was using SET storage_engine=InnoDB to create the tables necessary for the test. That looked good enough to me. The script was indeed creating InnoDB tables on the master. The trouble was that the "SET" command is not replicated. Thus the …

The MySQL Enterprise Monitor continuously monitors MySQL servers and alerts to potential problems before they impact the system. It helps eliminating security vulnerabilities, improves replication, optimizes performance, and more. Its newest feature, Quan (Query Analyzer), helps identify queries that could be tuned to improve performance. Quan enables database administrators to do the work that would otherwise require hours in just minutes, or even seconds, and it provides ongoing statistical information about the performance of your queries.

MySQL Enterprise Monitor is a commercial offering by Sun Microsystems, and so was the documentation. To help anyone (even if they're not customers) get a better and complete understanding of what exactly MySQL Enterprise Monitor is about and what it can do, we've decided to make its full documentation publicly available. This has been done now, and the docs are part of the MySQL Manual now; see: …

As part of an internal programme at Sun, I am a “SEED mentor” for another Sun employee (not a former employee of MySQL, but what we Sun Dolphins call Sun Classics). He is called Alok and lives in Bangalore, and sadly, our schedules crossed so that I couldn’t meet him when I was at our Bangalore offices in July. So I am mentoring someone I’ve met only over phone — but we’re getting along just fine.

Two of the topics we’ve discussed recently are blogging and books. So after hanging up after our 9 CET 12:30 Indian time mentoring session, I got the idea to combine the two: write a blog entry about the books I recommended Alok.

One thing Alok is contemplating at the moment is the degree to which he should spend time on developing his business skills vs his engineering skills. That’s a familiar topic for many of us in …

I’ve mentioned a number of times that the documentation repositories that we use to build the docs are freely available, and so they are, but how do you go about using them?

More and more people are getting interested in being able to work with the MySQL docs, judging by the queries we get, and internally we sometimes get specialized requests.

There are some limitations - although you can download and access the docs and generate your own versions in various formats, you are not allowed to distribute or supply that iinformation, it can only be employed for personal use. The reasons and disclaimer for that are available on the main page for each of the docs, such as the one on the 5.1 Manual.

Those issues aside, if you want to use and generate your own docs from the Subversion source tree then you’ll need the following:

• …

Martin Brown’s blog shows a pretty good way of navigating the MySQL Reference Manual. It’s worth noting, however, that finding the different topics has been a lot easier since mysql.com started using a Google appliance for its search.

I use the documentation all the time and have been doing so for years (I won’t claim that I can remember +2000 pages worth of ever-changing content). A few years back, I stopped using the search box on dev.mysql.com because the result sets were enormous, with lots of unrelated references. My technique was to do a Google site search:

For replication use the expression: replication site:http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/index.html

The …

Hooray! The MySQL reference manual has a new search system. It now uses a Google Appliance and the results should be a lot better. The old system was not very helpful. It used to break config variables into multiple words and search on them individually and give a billion results I didn’t care about. I’ve just tried to search for some things like key_buffer_size and got results I think are very useful.

I love the MySQL manual. It is a great example of quality software documentation. As someone recently mentioned, it is not released under a Free license though — that would be a great improvement, too!

When did this change happen, by the way? Maybe it’s been there for a while and I just missed it because I grew accustomed to using Google search instead.

Edit: I actually would suggest a …

When I was on the MySQL Documentation team one thing started to become apparent to me: the MySQL Reference Manual was exactly what it claimed to be: a document better suited to referencing than teaching new users. I make very good use of it because I know MySQL, I know what it can do, and all I want is the right syntax for what I am trying to use it for.

I saw a need for a User Guide, something well suited to new users who were not experienced with MySQL and potentially with DBMSes in general. As a side project I started working on a chapter of what could eventually be a MySQL produced user guide, lacking the depth of the reference manual but more suitable for newer users. This first chapter was on Indexing and while I think it showed promise, I left MySQL AB shortly after completing it.

Fast forward to today, where I see a blog post by Colin Charles …

While doing a standard audit for a new client, I recommended a few changes to get better performance. Because I had several changes, I used the documentation at

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/server-system-variables.html

and found that innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit is a dynamic variable. I was surprised, because most operations dealing with file sizes and operations are not dynamic. But the client proceeded with:

set global innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2;

and got:

ERROR 1193 (HY000): Unknown system variable 'innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit'

So I searched for others who may have had the same error, and ended up getting an unintentional googlewhack. Well, it’s not a real Googlewhack, because it has more than 2 …

With 130 entries in the “MySQL” category and no MySQL-related subcategories, my blog had become impossible to search and navigate easily.

And thus I created a number of new categories for the MySQL entries within my blog. They’re listed in the left navigation bar, below the months, as well as below:

• MySQL Server, MySQL Cluster, Falcon
• Connectors: PHP, Ruby on Rails
…

Stefan Hinz, MySQL’s Docs Team Lead, just showed me the new restructured documentation overview page http://dev.mysql.com/doc/. The intention of the restructuring is to make it easier for you to find the information you need.

We’ve amended the MySQL Reference Manual section with a subsection labeled “Excerpts from the Reference Manual“, examples of which are a standalone Connectors book (covering all MySQL connectors and APIs) and guides for each individual MySQL Connector.

The key new document there is the “MySQL Server Version Reference” that should make life easier for everyone who needs cross-version …