The article is Ten of the Biggest Mistakes Developers Make With Databases

Read it, read it now.

The current version of mysqldump can export a database to a tabbed output. This is nice, but it seems it can only do one database at a time.

I wrote a quick script to attempt to merge multiple tab dumps. It's incomplete -- and the chmod 777 in it is definitely evil.

Tab dumping is faster for MySQL to import than an SQL dump, and it produces a smaller file. With a bit of work, this is the way to get your exports as small as possible. This helps if you had to rebuild a slave on another network, and/or you pay too much for bandwidth!

Your thoughts appreciated.
See:

I’m in Sorrento for the annual MySQL internal developers meeting, and had some really excellent espresso after dinner tonight. The result is that it’s 2AM and I’m pulling code out of bitkeeper and looking at bugs rather than sleeping, even though I am supposed to get up at 6AM to go have breakfast.

I did Windows development for many years, but these last few months I’ve spent most of my time on Linux and OSX, mostly because Ubuntu just works so well on my laptop, especially now that I’ve got Tomboy and NetworkManager. I switched back to Windows during meetings last week in order to spend some time working on reproducing BUG#17719, delete of binlog fails on windows, and I’ve been forced to acknowledge that running the MySQL test suite on Windows isn’t nearly as smooth as it should be. Fortunately, Reggie has done some great stuff with CMake, and Magnus fixed …

I finally managed to hook into our wireless LAN here at our conference hotel. The flight from Hamburg to Naples via Munich was uneventful, I met Jan at Hamburg airport and we bumped into a whole bunch of MySQLers at the Munich airport already. From Naples airport it was another exciting hour to Sorrento in a small bus - I completely forgot that Italians have a slightly different driving style than us germans

I am looking forward to the meeting which officially starts tomorrow. I will be giving a presentation about the MySQL Community work and hope to encourage some more of our developers to become more active in there...

As part of my A call to arms! post about a month ago, I’ve had a number of unofficial comments of support. In addition, I’ve also been approached to assist in the completion of a MySQL Transactional support engine. More information on the PBXT engine will be forthcoming soon by it’s creator.

Anyway, I’ve taken on the responsiblity of assisting in testing this new storage engine. This will also give me the excuse of being able to pursue some other ideas about the performance of differing storage engines for differing tables in business circumstances, such as MyIsam verses InnoDB in a highly OLTP environment. Part of testing will be ensure ACID conformance in varying situations and multi-concurrency use. Of course the ability to also do performance and load testing would be a obvious extension.

Considering how I’m going to benchmark is an interesting …

I just read about OLAP4ALL's Materialized Views for MySQL software that "offers the functionality of Materialized Views in MySQL that are not natively supported in the MySQL database.".

What nags me about this is the fact that it is "implemented as a separate Java program running on the server where MySQL is installed".

The server-side of this should be doable using Stored Procedures and/or Triggers. For the client-side a bit of convenience functionality for query rewriting would be …

I just read about OLAP4ALL's Materialized Views for MySQL software that "offers the functionality of Materialized Views in MySQL that are not natively supported in the MySQL database.".

What nags me about this is the fact that it is "implemented as a separate Java program running on the server where MySQL is installed".

The server-side of this should be doable using Stored Procedures and/or Triggers. For the client-side a bit of convenience functionality for query rewriting would be needed.

Sounds like an interesting project that I would like to pursue when I find the time.

…

Apache JMeter is a 100% pure Java desktop application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions. Specifically it provides complete support for database testing via JDBC.

Some References: Homepage http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/  ·  Wiki Page  ·  User Manual

Initial Installation Steps

$ su -
$ cd /opt
$ wget http://apache.planetmirror.com.au/dist/jakarta/jmeter/binaries/jakarta-jmeter-2.1.1.tgz
$ wget …

This was an honor, but I must decline. We already have such an "ambassador." Thank you, Miguel.

14:15 <@miguel2> What is MaxDB?
14:15 <@tjfontaine> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaxDB
14:16 < cj> miguel2: it was written in pascal in the mid 70s.  it's a
            pre-relational database with all sorts of features [added] on
14:16 <@miguel2> Wait, is that a different DB?
14:16 < cj> miguel2: yep
14:16 <@miguel2> So its not MySQL?
14:16 < cj> miguel2: nope
14:16 <@miguel2> That is crazy talk
14:16 <@miguel2> crazy
14:17 <@miguel2> I dontbelieve you
14:17 < cj> miguel2: heh, okay.  MySQL doesn't have *any* pascal code
in the
            kernel, afaik
14:19 <@miguel2> Who uses that?
14:19 <@miguel2> So why dont they pay you to hack on Mono?
14:19 < cj> miguel2: that's something I'd like to know :)
14:19 <@miguel2> We need a firm MySQL commitment to Mono
14:19 …