While I have spent a lot of time recently helping the MySQL community interact with and integrate with various Oracle User Groups including ODTUG, IOUG, NoCOUG, NYOUG, DAOG I thought I’d share some resources for the MySQL Community that wanted to know more about Oracle.

The Oracle family of products is huge. You only have to look at the acquisitions via Wikipedia to get an idea. The first thing is to narrow your search, e.g. Database, APEX, Middleware, BI, Hyperion, Financials, development via Java, PHP or Oracle Forms etc.

While Oracle is a commercial product you can download all software for FREE via Oracle Technology Network. There is also documentation, forums, blogs and events.

Some Oracle bloggers I have already been reading however I’m expanding my list. People you may want to …

I just don’t get this I don not know what the technology is behind the search box at MySQL Documentation but it annoys me when I want to see the syntax of a command and Search can’t find the page, when a dedicated page exists and I’m using the exact syntax of both the command the title of the page. In this example the search was for SHOW WARNINGS.

Google find the page as first link!

Wednesday night of the MySQL track of ODTUG Kaleidoscope will include an evening with Last Comic Standing comedian, John Heffron. It should be great way to unwind after day 3 of the conference. Black vodka anybody.

Check out the MySQL Schedule for more information of presentations for the 4 days. More details is also available here.

We have all been caught out with using SET and not realizing that the default GLOBAL Scope (since 5.0.2) does not change the current SESSION scope.

I was not aware until today that changing GLOBAL scope has some exceptions that also automatically affect SESSION scope.

What I expected with a change in the GLOBAL scope is no affect SESSION scope. For example.

mysql> SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES LIKE 'read_buffer_size';
+------------------+--------+
| Variable_name    | Value  |
+------------------+--------+
| read_buffer_size | 131072 |
+------------------+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SHOW SESSION VARIABLES LIKE 'read_buffer_size';
+------------------+--------+
| Variable_name    | Value  |
+------------------+--------+
| read_buffer_size | 131072 |
+------------------+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SET GLOBAL read_buffer_size=1024*256;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES LIKE …

By default MySQL allows you to create user accounts and privileges with no password. In my earlier MySQL Best Practices: User Security I describe how to address the default installation empty passwords.

For new user accounts, you can improve this default behavior using the SQL_MODE variable, with a value of NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER. As detailed via the 5.1 Reference Manual

NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER

Prevent the GRANT statement from automatically creating new users if it would otherwise do so, unless a nonempty password also is specified.

Having set this variable I attempted to show the error of operation to demonstrate in my upcoming “MySQL Idiosyncrasies that bite” presentation. …

Having just written an interview response about NoSQL concepts for a RDBMS audience it was poetic that an inconspicuous title “(4 of 3)” highlights that both a MySQL read scalable implementation via replication and a NoSQL solution can share a common lack of timely consistency of data. For the sake of Group Commit I hope my data is always consistent at some location at some point in time as soon as possible.

In attempting to comment to Kristian Nielsen’s Fixing MySQL group commit (part 4 of 3) I was forced to watch an ad before I could even add a comment. Go jump Live Journal, it’s quicker to write my own blog post.

And if anybody is still reading, I had just written the following.

“There is clearly a place for NoSQL solutions. The two primary types of products are a key/value store and a schema-less solution. You need to learn …

The Maatkit tools provide a suite of additional MySQL commands. There is one command I use constantly and that is mk-query-digest.

Unfortunately the documentation does leave a lot to be desired for usability. While throughout, it is a man page and not a user guide. Several of us have discussed writing better documentation however it’s always a matter of time. I have however learned a number of tips and I’d like to share them in smaller digests.

The first is showing additional display. Maatkit works on truncating per line output to a reasonable length of 73 characters?

One of those lines is the list of hosts that connected to MySQL for a query, for example.

# Hosts                  4 192.168.40... (2), 192.168.40... (2)... 2 more
# Hosts                  3 99.99.245.14 (12), …

While I use this tcpdump command for MySQL query analysis with mk-query-digest, I found recently that it didn’t work on FreeBSD

$ tcpdump -i bge0 port 3306 -s 65535 -x -n -q -tttt -c 5
tcpdump: syntax error

It left me perplexed and reading the man page seemed to indicate my options were valid. I tried a few variances just to be sure without success.

$ tcpdump -i bge0 -c 5 port 3306 -x
tcpdump: syntax error
$ tcpdump -i bge0 -c 5 port 3306 -q
tcpdump: syntax error
$ tcpdump -i bge0 -c 5 port 3306 -tttt
tcpdump: syntax error

The solution was actually quite simple in the end, it had nothing to do with the commands, it had everything to do with the order of them. Placing port as the last option solved the problem.

$ tcpdump -i bge0 -s 65535 -x -n -q -tttt -c 5  port 3306

$ uname -a
FreeBSD …

One thing I haven't seen anybody commenting on is the fact that with SAP acquiring Sybase, it will be the last major independent database company to be merged into a larger SW company. (To say this, you can qualify MySQL AB as a major database company, but disqualify, say, EnterpriseDB or InterBase, which imho is entirely reasonable.)

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While setting up MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.2 (Merlin) on a system which had been running version 2.1 I thought I’d try and see what difference the change from using normal innodb tables to using the compressed table format available in the innodb plugin.

I’ve been using a separate db backend for merlin because for me it’s easier to manage and also the database backend has been put on a dedicated server. I’ve also been trying the innodb_plugin on another busier server as I had performance problems with the normal 5.1.42 built-in innodb engine which the plugin managed to solve.

So given that I was using a separate db server I upgraded it to 5.1.47, configured the server to use the plugin (1.0.8) rather than to use the built-in innodb engine and then decided to …