We had a great question from a reader yesterday:

Is there a todo/nice-to-have list anywhere for MySQL documentation? Or perhaps a list of Devs who require documentation support? Or is all documentation a function of the core Documentation team?

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OK, so today, I was following up on a headline about the free wireless network project called CUWiN. The project looks pretty awesome; check it out to see how a few people are creating a wireless network mesh from commodity (I mean, really commodity hardware - think 486!). I have no idea whether MySQL could be ovf use for the project -- perhaps, not sure... I might follow up on that at a later date once I find out more information about the project.

However, in perusing the CUWiN website, I happened to come across a really cool web page that maps the CUWiN local area network. So, I tracked the mashup project that is used to display this page through the link on the bottom of the page to the …

Many of you have responded very positively on the first and second partitioning articles that I wrote some time back. It?s clear that a lot of you are excited about the upcoming MySQL 5.1 release, and in particular, the new data partitioning feature that?s being offered. That?s no surprise because, as we covered in the previous two articles, partitioning has some excellent performance and management benefits for anyone who?s building data warehouses or other large databases with MySQL.

I saw this on a Channel 9 forum thread:

Library of Free Data Models

There are quite a few starter data models (what the author calls Kick-Start Data Models). Data modeling can be a very challenging endeavor to anyone who isn't familiar with the practice. There are some good examples in this collection which show how to take a problem space and distill it down into a workable set of entities and relationships. Of course, these represent starting points, as the author indicates. They won't fit every situation. However, they do provide a point to work from, especially for the novice data modeler.

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We are going to release several patches which are not included in official MySQL releases.
First one is automatically stack trace for x86_64 systems. Currently MySQL resolves stack in crash only for x86 boxes.
You can download patch for 5.0.22 source tree here.
How to use: place stack64.diff into main source dir; execute patch -p1 < stack64.diff.
One important one: flag -fno-omit-frame-pointer must be added to CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, by default GCC uses
-fomit-frame-pointer on x86_64 systems (on x86 by default -fno-omit-frame-pointer).

I must admit, I am a fickle browser user.  Much to the chagrin of colleagues, I often end up using IE as a browser on Windows.  My rationale is, that for good or for bad, it's what's used by the majority of users and so I try to make sure that the www.mysql.com site looks good in IE.  However, I also occasionally run Firefox and Opera, which until recently have been the only way to have a half-way decent tabbed browsing system.  Not only is Opera fast, it's introduced a number of innovative features including their "rewind" and "fast forward" buttons shown above, which enable …

Now this is the late "Part 1 of 2" (Part 2 was published first). Took me longer than expected, but I finally got it done.

In the beginning there was Windows...

I have been working with all versions of Windows starting with 3.0 on a 386SX16. Over the years I have gained extensive knowledge about many aspects of the inner workings, the weaknesses and strengths. Up to now I have been using Windows XP as my "main" operating system. It certainly has its flaws, but all told it is a fine piece of software.

I also believe to have a somewhat profound insight into Linux. I started with Debian Potato and have since used both newer Debian versions (Woody and Sarge) as well as several flavors of Red Hat (beginning with RH9, up to FC5) and some SuSE, too. Right now I am using Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 to write this. However the majority of the …

I was working with a customer today, and I noticed they used varchar(10) to store an ISBN. This got me thinking, is that the most efficient way of storing an ISBN?

Some quick googling revealed that it is always 10 characters in length, so while a varchar would take 11 bytes to store this, a char will only take 10 bytes (the extra byte in the varchar is required to maintain the length). But an ISBN is not a string, it's a number. To store a 10 digit number, I need a BIGINT(10) ZEROFILL; that brings it down to 8 bytes.

A bit more googling, and I find out that the tenth digit in the ISBN is actually a checksum. I think to myself for a second that if I can recreate that checksum, I can move down to an INT(9) ZEROFILL, which means 4 bytes. 4 bytes for storing what was previously 11 bytes!

Of course, I had to share my excitement with one of my colleagues, who …

As part of building Tailrank we need to build a high availability and high performance MySQL cluster capable of running on cheap commodity hardware and in high performance environments. Unfortunately MySQL really falls down in a lot of areas especially when you make it do real work.

Luckily this is Open Source which means we can fix things.

We've developed a load balanced JDBC connection pool (named lbpool) meant to be used in production environments:

Right now we're at beta1 which means you should not deploy this in production environments without testing. That said its being used on Tailrank.com right now and is very rock solid. We've had it in production for 60 days now.

Here's a brief intro (but you should def read the full site).

The lbpool project provides a load …

We used to maintain a list of MySQL User Groups on the MySQL Developer Zone, which made it a bit inconvenient for new User Groups to get listed there. We've now moved the User Group list and some additional info to the Wiki on MySQL Forge (which also has received a facelift, thanks a lot to Colin and Ronald!). If you know of any other MySQL User Groups not listed there, feel free to add them! We are also looking forward to seeing more helpful hints on how to successfully start and …