Parallel with last years international PHP conference the folks at S&S organized a novelty: an open source database conference. It was a great success. We had people from most projects for end users to talk to: PostgreSQL, BerkleyDB, MySQL, SQLite, Apache Derby, HSQLDB, Firebird and MaxDB. I hope this year Ingres will also make it and maybe a few others I do not even know yet! For the projects themselves it was a great opportunity to sit down and discuss about the potential for cooperation. The conference will be held again, same time same place. So mark your calendar November 6th-8th opendbcon 2006 in Frankfurt germany.

The …

I’ve read at times people complaining about the response to bugs, and people bag the support of MySQL on the forums at times.

Well today I logged a bug, not the first and I’m sure it’s not the last. See LAST_INSERT_ID() does not return results for a problem in the latest Connector/J 5.0.3 that was released just recently.

Now it took me about 2 hours to log the bug, and probably at least 2 hours of frustration prior to that. The initial frustration 2 hours was unsuccessful debugging of what I was sure was valid code (and it was near midnight last night). The second 2 hours today was testing the problem between two environments, different database versions and different Connector/J versions, and providing a simple reproducable case of said problem.

So the timeline of the …

I’ve just come back from lunch. I’ve managed to eat Chinese food, in China, with chopsticks and not totally embarass myself. Ate some new food, new vegetables and a seemingly different type of seaweed than I have eaten before. It tasted good though. I even think Kit would have liked some of it (once she got over the fact that it looked different and some things were green things).
I arrived safely after a flight that was fine (except for getting up rather early to get to Sydney to then take a sane timed flight). Beijing seems to be a bit like the firefly world, except with less flying cars. You’ve got heaps of stuff in English and Chinese. It could be really interesting to live here and experience things.

There’s a national English language newspaper which is fairly up to date on world events - the fact that our dear Mr Howard is going to go to the election seems to be news here! It’s not packed with local news, which would …

MySQL is adding more tools to monitor its internals with every new release, but one thing it still lacks is a way to find out who is locking what, and therefore which transactions block which other ones. This is such a vital feature that I'm considering writing my own patch to the source! Still, it is possible, to a limited extent, to find out who's locking resources. In this article I'll explain how you can do that.

This article is the second in a series on how to use the innotop MySQL and InnoDB monitor.

I’ve made several improvements to the innotop InnoDB and MySQL monitor, and it’s ready to get from the innotop homepage. As usual, it’s a combination of bug fixes, new features, and enhancements to existing features. Changes since version 0.1.112 include More detailed lock information displayed in InnoDB Deadlock mode. A new section in Row Operations / Semaphores mode shows information about the wait array. I’ve expanded the test suite a lot.

For any DBA, broken replication represents a dreaded moment. Replication can break for many factors including when the master server issues a 'Duplicate entry' error. At that point you can either skip the slave counter (recommended) or ignore/skip the errors (slave-skip-errors=1062) if you are sure that ignoring such errors won't cause a nasty effect somewhere.

Depending on when you troubleshoot the situation, when replication resumes, slaves may fall significantly behind and the relay log files may start consuming huge amount of disk space. If you have ample free disk space then that is not an issue however, if you are tight on disk space then the relay-log-space-limit option can really come handy.

The relay-log-space-limit option limits the disk space used by the relay log files. You can specify the value in bytes, megabytes (10000M) …

A while ago I wrote a tutorial on the MySQL Sandbox.
Wallace Reis asked me permission to translate it, and I happily agreed.
And now there it is: the tutorial Portuguese translation (the first part, but the rest will come).
Thanks, Wallace!

OK, thanks for good comments from the MySQL Build Farm Part 1 post. I have gone ahead and created a new page, called MySQL Build Farm Initiative. This is intended to be the whiteboard and discussion area for the community to contribute ideas during this initial phase of the project. I have added Sebastian and Ronald's comments into this document. Feel free to add to the features list and add comments to the page.

I will be posting information later to the page based on my discussions with the build team about some of the internals of the build process. Hopefully this information can help others as we plan out the project.

Also, Marten, our …

By tim

There were a number of detailed blog entries covering some of the sessions from my O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing at OSCON. I thought I'd point to them for the benefit of those who weren't there. On ZDNet, Russell Shaw covered Danese Cooper's interview with Bill Hilf of Microsoft, my conversation with Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist, and my conversation with Ian Wilkes of Second Life. In each case, he captured some good quotes. A sampling:

Bill: "We are dealing with close mindedness inside and outside..."

Ian: "I did a count recently, and over an entire cluster there are five million user processes going on at any given time. There's geographical mapping at the front end, but at the back end …

Ahhh, finally back from OSCON. There was a mixup with the hotel rooms and I accidentally did not get reservations for my last night in Portland (Saturday). I checked four hotels and they were all out of rooms, and I was a bit freaked out about the possibility of spending the night on a couch in a lobby at the airport or a hotel.

Luckily, Scott Mathews from Dice.com offered to let me sleep on the floor of his hotel room. Lucky for me, that is. Unlucky for Scott, who had a fairly severe allergic reaction to the small tumbleweed of cat hair that was attached to my luggage. Unfortunately for Scott, he didn't realize the situation until the morning, when it was too late to do something about it...

Oh, and then the train system broke down when a tram accidentally disconnected the power line on the steel bridge going into downtown, causing a domino-effect breakdown of the system. So, into a town car Scott and I went, and off to the …