The latest from the MySQL community

I am so sick and tired of engaging into flame wars comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL especially when people haven't used both databases together. Both databases have their own strengths, however, if your application is not tuned for the underlying database, you are out of help.

Why do people hate MySQL so much without looking under its hood?

In my opinion, none is the right tool for *every* job.

• 5 reasons why you should never use PostgreSQL
  
• PostgreSQL vs. MySQL
• PostgreSQL vs. MySQL vs. Commercial databases
• …

Cool! I can now generate Xcode project files and build all of mysql (except NDB) from within it. I think it appears to compile faster. Now I can try to see if I can be more productive using Xcode... starting with some debugging.

I’ve added a LCA2007 section to my Gallery with a bunch of photos I took at and around the conference. Feel free to have a look. I’ve posted a bunch of these to flickr already, so you’ve likely seen some if you follow my flickr feed.

Note that this gallery install is usually running a top-of-tree mysql cluster install on a box that has a bunch of other load on it… so things may work, may not - whatever :)

Those of you listening in on Planet MySQL - you should be able to spot a few other MySQLers around there, and there’s photos from the MySQL miniconf.

I spent almost all day trying to find and fix really strange bug in one of our server-side applications written on Perl. And as I’ve figured out later, there is huge problem in Perl core libraries or, even, in interpreter.

Problem is following. If you are trying to use “threads” module with “Thread::Semaphore” module like it is mentioned in official Perl documentation (perlthrtut), you’ll get 4kb memory leak on every $semaphore->up call. So, simple test-case like following would cause huge memory leaks (100 Mbytes per second on my test server):

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Many moons ago I pushed in an example "daemon plugin" to the server. This week I have Calvin Sun, our team lead for Storage Engines, visiting me. I've been going over the plugin architecture and other internal pieces of the server with him. I'll be posting more about our joint work in a later post.

While going over the plugin structure with Calvin I noticed that the daemon plugin example doesn't give much of an example of what you can do. So I hacked a little more on it :)

You can find it here:
http://download.tangent.org/daemon_example-0.1.tgz

What it now demonstrates is how to create a "heart beat" file. Daemon plugins are raw plugins inside of MySQL, you can literally do anything with them. For hacking the server they are an excellent way of making use of your full imagination.

The Example creates a …

MySQL has no built-in functionality to calculate a table’s checksum in any storage engine but MyISAM (this is not true; I read the manual wrong, but it doesn’t eliminate the usefulness of the technique in this article). Table checksums can confirm that two tables are identical – useful to verify a replica server is in sync with its master (see my article on reliable MySQL replication for more). Fortunately, it’s easy to calculate a checksum on non-MyISAM tables with user variables.

Sorry for the short outage, due to a small coding glitch the script that updates the planet feeds got stuck and it took us a bit to find the problem... But thanks to Jay we now spotted the bug and it was fixed quickly!

Hi Folks,

This is an announcement for a webinar in German. Therefore only written in German. If you are interested in the security topic be sure to see the english webinar, which is stored here.

Web-2.0-Anwendungen absichern

Die verbesserte Einsatztauglichkeit der Web-2.0-Anwendungen wird auf Kosten von neuen Sicherheitsproblemen erworben. Sowohl die mächtige Logik im JavaScript als auch der permanente Login auf vielen Sites bergen Risiken, die anders und gezielt beantwortet werden müssen. Dieses Webseminar gibt einen Überblick, bewertet die Probleme und stellt Lösungswege vor.

Wenn Sie Web 2.0- und AJAX-Anwendungen entwickeln, ist dieser Vortrag genau das Richtige für Sie! Hier erfahren …

I was reading this morning, and came across a passage that really struck me: we are free to act, not to be acted upon. This jibes perfectly with what I've been reading in William James. Freedom is in action, not in waiting for others to act upon us.

In the open source world, many companies treat open source as a ball-and-chain to be endured (for the marketing benefits of saying they're "open source"), rather than as a tool that gives them essential liberties and advantages. Open source is a tool, even a weapon, for MySQL, Red Hat, and others. It's a cross to be borne by others. This is reflected in their licensing: open source, but not too much.

(Incidentally, this same phenomenon shows up in all aspects of software. …