Roland Bouman, MySQL community extraordinaire and all-around top fellow, has officially joined MySQL AB as a Certification Developer. I couldn't be happier. Roland joins with Marcus Popp as MySQL AB continues to gobble up talented developers from the MySQL community.

Roland, a very warm welcome to you!

Well, I'm MySQL 5 Developer certified!

But on the official site at the certification pages there's not yet the "Certfied candidates" list of the 5.0 version.

Am I the first one ?

The type of questions that we get on the forums with regards to Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) has been shifting lately from this type of question:

How do I read data from database type xxx

going to this type of questions:

I want to read a list of e-mail addresses from a database table, set a variable and send the warehouse log files off to all these people.

That’s quite an evolution that’s been going on. It’s obvious that people are starting to find the obvious solutions to the first type of questions so now they just get stuck on doing more complex things. I guess that’s to be expected, really. It’s nice that for the most part, I can now say, “yes, with the new 2.3.0 release, that is most certainly possible”
However, IMHO, often there is something missing at the implementers side of the story as well. I guess what I’m saying is that all too often these …

23rd Mostra - “Heroes in Tyrol”, by Niki List (Austria-Sweeden-Germany)

I managed to see most of this film a few years ago. Anybody know where or how I can get a DVD of it? (with English subtitles). I know somebody in the wider community has to know where (hence why i’ll put this entry in the MySQL category - i know somebody there has to know something about this film).

Besides - it has drinking songs, and MySQLers will get the connection.

Over at my junkcode section, I have mysqlbug.py which is a plugin for the GNOME deskbar panel applet.

If you’ve used Quicksilver on MacOSX, then you know the kind of app that Deskbar Applet is.

This one lets you type “bug 1234″ and be given the action of “open mysql bug 1234″. If you type “edit bug 1234″ it gives you the option of editing that bug number.

We’ll see if this proves useful.

Many thanks to kamstrup (one of the Deskbar developers) on #deskbar on gimpnet for helping me out with the plugin.

I totally heart Deskbar. It’s awesome.

Finally. Now, I really feel my job with Inter Access has come to an end. After seven years and seven months, I'm leaving them to join.....MySQL!

The old job and how I got there
I started my IT career somewhere halfway 1998. At the time, I was busy becoming increasingly unsatisfied with working the irregular jobs I used to have then. I got my master's in Molecular Biology in 1997, and just did not succeed in finding a job related to my studies. Of course, this had a lot to do with the fact that I aspired having a job in bio-ethics, whereas my studies groomed me to become a Laboratory Researcher.

(I still find scientific research a very interesting thing, but when I started my studies, I did not realize that reading science books and consuming scientific knowledge are activities that are entirely different from constructing scientific facts. On top of …

There are a number of new job postings at MySQL worldwide.  The company has been growing rapidly so there are open positions in development, QA, documentation, consulting, support, training.  You can find more information on our web site under job listings.

• MySQL: Job Listings
• NewsForge: Finding an Open Source Job

MySQL Lists: commits: bk commit into 4.1 tree (stewart:1.2483) BUG#19894

The other day I committed this bug fix. A one bit patch. It is generally decided amongst the team that nobody will ever produce a smaller patch.

"What cache hit rate is good for optimal MySQL Performance" is typical question I'm asked. It could by MyISAM key_buffer or Innodb innodb_buffer_pool it does not really matter. In both cases trying to come up with constant "good" hit rate is looking for trouble. Well of course you can name 100% hit rate and all data fits in memory as perfect case but that is not the answer people are looking for.

First thing which needs to be understand is - cache hit ratio can be computed differently for different engines. For example for Innodb page hits are counted for all subsequent page accesses if page is scanned not just once. This means if you would have completely IO bound full table scan and you have 100 rows per page you will get 1 miss per page and 99 hits, making your hit ratio 99% for what would be 0% in many peoples mind.

But what is even more important is hit ratio is not directly relevant for performance. Take the following example …

Some weeks back I posted two diagrams with the architecture for SQLbusRT. One was for one database instance, and one was for multiple databases.

After reading a bit on about the triggers and events in MySQL 5.x, I decided to revise the architecture slightly. In my previous architecture, I had taken event handling outside of the database, but since MySQL supports triggers and events, there is no need to do this anymore.

I've not only taken out the event handling, I've also enhanced the readability of the diagram. To sum it up, these changes have been made:

• Event handling is now handled inside the database, and has therefore been taken out of the diagram
  
• The edges are now labeled for clarification
  
• Grey boxes have been added to show the process boundaries; every box is one single process
  

These changes result in the following diagram (click to …