It's already a month old, but I just stumbled over this ITtoolbox Interview with Jonathan Cheyer (Open Source Community Manager) and Murat Demiroglu (Senior Product Manager) from Solid Information Technology, in which Dru Lavigne talks with them about Solid (the company) and the solidDB for MySQL storage engine, which is currently in beta testing. I still remember Solid from my times at SUSE Linux, where it used to be a part of the Linux distribution along with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Adabas D and several other DBs...

Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, gives an interesting interview on FLOSS Weekly, Chris DiBona & Leo Laporte's open source podcast.  He talks about the origins of PHP, the challenge of letting go of control and how he helped make the development process more open.  This is a challenge for all open source projects (MySQL included) and there are good lessons to be learned here.

You can listen to this from the web or subscribe through iTunes.

• TWIT: Floss Weekly 12, MP3
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I got home today and sat down to read my home email list. Nothing new. But on a MySQL mailing list, there was an enquiry why performance was slowing in a given application. I didn’t even have to read the situation, nor the problem, it took less then the 200ms mentioned to identify the problem looking at the supplied schema.

In summary, the first table in the schema had a primary key of VARBINARY(255) and a engine type of Innodb. Hold on, wait, it’s a concatenated key of two VARBINARY(255) columns. And I should mention, that primary key was a foreign key in the next table. If this was a home website app with one user, ok well it’s still bad, but this application was having performance problems with reasonable volumes of transactions, it’s not a beginner application. (A recent reference If you don?t know your data, you don?t know your application). Where do people learn …

If you’re interested in looking at what goes into the MySQL documentation, there’s a new and kind of cool gizmo we’ve just installed that makes browsing the docs sources a breeze. Fisheye lets you browse by project, directory, author, date, and other criteria. It also provides an easy way to get to the complete changelogs, and even provides a customisable changelog RSS feed — for example, this feed has commits for just the NDB API documentation, and this is a feed of (all) my commits to the mysqldoc repository.

The …

Starting MySQL 4.1, MySQL had support for what is called derived tables, inline views or basically subselects in the from clause.
In MySQL 5.0 support for views was added.

These features are quite related to each other but how do they compare in terms of performance ?

Derived Tables in MySQL 5.0 seems to have different implementation from views, even though I would expect code base to be merged as it is quite the same task in terms of query optimization.

Derived Tables are still handled by materializing them in the temporary table, furthermore temporary table with no indexes (so you really do not want to join two derived tables for example).

One more thing to watch for is the fact derived table is going to be materialized even to execute EXPLAIN statement. So if you have done mistake in select in from clause, ie forgotten join condition you might have EXPLAIN running forever.

Views on other hand …

If you will try to compile nginx in Redhat Linux, you can get following error even if you have pcre-devel package installed:

Configuration summary + threads are not used + PCRE library is not found .... .... ./configure: error: the HTTP rewrite module requires the PCRE library. You can either disable the module by using --without-http_rewrite_module option, or install the PCRE library into the system, or build the PCRE library statically from the source with nginx by using --with-pcre= option.

If you are experiencing this small problem, you should simply use following parameter of configure script:

# ./configure --with-cc-opt="-I /usr/include/pcre"

And voila!

+ using system PCRE library

Now it can see and will use system PCRE library.

While the MySQL Server source trees are maintained using the BitKeeper revision control system, several other MySQL projects (Connectors, GUI-Tools and the Manual) use Subversion instead.

To make it easier for external developers in getting familiar with the code base of the respective project, we now installed the FishEye SVN repository browser, which provides a very nice interface to the hosted repositories and boasts an impressive number of additional features like searching, diffing and RSS feeds. …

What is it about the folks on Planet MySQL having twin brothers?

Roland Bouman
Sheeri Kritzer
Jay Pipes
Zach Urlocker

That’s 4 of the top 25 posters to Planet MySQL. Anyone else want to reveal having a twin? Anyone on here have a twin sister? If you’re a twin and aren’t on the Planet, note that here too……

database, mysql, positive technology

My desktop at work is a Windows machine. Why? Because it gives me what I need — shell access to servers so I can do real work on the machines, a text editor, an e-mail client and a web browser. That’s really all I need to do my job. Sure, I could put in for a Macintosh or install a Unix variant. But if it gives me what I want, why would I spend all that work changing things around, just to ultimately get the same requirements — shell, web browser, text editor, e-mail client….????

I love MySQL, it’s a great database. But in order to meet its tenets, it has sacrificed features. When database religious wars …

This article is part of “Looking For Optimal Solution” series, devoted to testing various Ruby On Rails deployment schemes and doing some simple benchmarks on these schemes. General idea of testing is to find subset of most optimal RoR deployment schemes for different situations.

This small article is about Rails+Mongrel setup and its performance. List of other tested deployment schemes, description of testing methodology and, of course, all benchmark results you can find on “Ruby On Rails Benchmark Summary and Findings” page.

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