Lukas Smith wrote an interesting blog entry yesterday on his thoughts about the pluggable storage engine API released in MySQL 5.1. Although I did make a comment on the entry, I wanted to elaborate on what the pluggable storage engine layer in MySQL is all about, and what it isn't.

The pluggable storage engine API builds upon the foundation of the modular table handler architecture which allows different table handlers (now known as storage engines) to facilitate the reading and writing of data to and from a storage medium. The reason I say storage medium, and not disk, is that the handler mechanism was designed so that engines could be created that specifically handled the storage and retrieval of data to anything, not just a …

Long time no speak! Hey non-avid readers!

I’ve been keeping my head down lately working away in our support group, and haven’t had much time to get any tips down on my blog or even any thoughts in general.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been polishing up my presentation - MySQL for Oracle DBAs, which is on the last day - next Thursday, April 27th.

http://www.mysqluc.com/cs/mysqluc2006/view/e_sess/8465

If you’re reading this - and around at our user conference next week - seek me out and say “Hi!”.

I’ll work on a number of blog posts after the conference, which will give some of the information available in my presentation as well.

Look forward to saying “Hi!” to as many of you as possible!

Dear MySQL users, MaxDB users and friends,

we have two news for you. The bad one: no MaxDB series posting this week. The good one: german language MaxDB web seminar tomorrow!

My last week has been dominated by preparing the upcoming MaxDB web seminar on MaxDB performance tuning. The web seminar will be held in german tomorrow Thursday, 21.04.2006 at 10 CEST (MEZ). You can still register for the seminar at http://www.mysql.de/news-and-events/web-seminars/maxdb-performance.php. Don’t expect too much from the 45-minute talk. In 45-minutes one can’t do much more than talk about the very basics and try to give you an overview on the topic. Due to the web seminar and other duties we did not make it to write the next MaxDB series posting on transactions.

We have more good news for you. My co-worker C.J. Collier is …

Dear MySQL users, MaxDB users and friends,

we have two news for you. The bad one: no MaxDB series posting this week. The good one: german language MaxDB web seminar tomorrow!

My last week has been dominated by preparing the upcoming MaxDB web seminar on MaxDB performance tuning. The web seminar will be held in german tomorrow Thursday, 21.04.2006 at 10 CEST (MEZ). You can still register for the seminar at http://www.mysql.de/news-and-events/web-seminars/maxdb-performance.php. Don’t expect too much from the 45-minute talk. In 45-minutes one can’t do much more than talk about the very basics and try to give you an overview on the topic. Due to the web seminar and other duties we did not make it to write the next MaxDB series posting on transactions.

We have more good news for you. My co-worker C.J. Collier is …

Normal MySQL users are going through a flurry of announcements about new versions that make them salivate ath the thought of what can be done with these new goodies. In November, version 5.0 became generally available, thur ready for production, then version 5.1 entered beta.
Ah! It would be nice if I could just install the new versions and test them. Sometimes, though, you can't do that, because you don't have root access, or you have already an older MySQL server running.
For years, due to my consulting duties, I have maintained several non-conflicting, different versions of MySQL. I did that manually, using some scripts that I have developed and tuned over time. For me it is not a big hassle. I am used to the command line, I wrote the tools, I know what to take care of, it's easy. Not so for some of my co-workers, who need to use the same facilities but lack the same degree of confidence that I got with trial-and-error.
So …

Long time no speak! Hey non-avid readers!

I’ve been keeping my head down lately working away in our support group, and haven’t had much time to get any tips down on my blog or even any thoughts in general.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been polishing up my presentation - MySQL for Oracle DBAs, which is on the last day - next Thursday, April 27th.

http://www.mysqluc.com/cs/mysqluc2006/view/e_sess/8465

If you’re reading this - and around at our user conference next week - seek me out and say “Hi!”.

I’ll work on a number of blog posts after the conference, which will give some of the information available in my presentation as well.

Look forward to saying “Hi!” to as many of you as possible!

By tim

As I wrote last year, computer book sales are a pretty good technology trend indicator. The books people buy say something about the technologies they are trying to learn about, and often tell a story that analysts using more traditional metrics might miss. (For example, I organized the open source summit in 1998 after noticing that all of my 1997 bestsellers had something in common!)

At this point, we have a rich data set to work from. We get weekly point-of-sale data from all major retailers, for all publishers, via Neilsen BookScan's top 10,000 computer books service, load it into a MySQL data mart, and then do analysis and visualization of the data. I periodically do technology alerts based on this …

PostgreSQL: Documentation: Manuals: PostgreSQL 7.3: SQL Key Words

It’s very annoying that ‘user’ is a reserved word in postgresql. You also get really crappy error messages (at least with the various forms of quoting I’ve tried to use) when you try to create a table called ‘user’

$ psql web
Welcome to psql 7.4.8, the PostgreSQL interactive terminal.

Type:  \copyright for distribution terms
\h for help with SQL commands
\? for help on internal slash commands
\g or terminate with semicolon to execute query
\q to quit

web=# create table user (a int(10), b int); ERROR:  syntax error at or near “user” at character 14
web=# create table “user” (a int(10), b int);
ERROR:  syntax error at or near “(” at character 27
web=# create …

Peter Gulutzan, who I had the pleasure of meeting (and eating) with a number of times at the developer’s conference in Sorrento, has written a very good overview of the new MySQL Events features plugged into MySQL 5.1.

Events differ from triggers because you can set an event to happen at a specified time or a specific interval. Although sometimes referred to as CRON for MySQL, events are slightly more flexible, and database driven making them much more practical than running a script or other tool through the cron, at or similar tool.

I registered for today's "What's new in MySQL 5.1 - Partitioning, Row-based Replication and more" live webinar which is a hot and very interesting topic. Well in fact, it was quite a short experience.

I wasn't aware that I get the sound through telephone (although it was mentioned in the confirmation email, which I didn't read so carefully - my fault) and that I need a fixed telephone line to get the corresponding sound for the webinar. So I followed the instructions, but I called the number on my mobile phone first. I heard from a tape voice that these kind of numbers (toll free 0800s) are not available via my mobile phone supplier, so I tried it on the fixed telephone line and it worked well. But there was another minor problem that made it impossible for me to watch and listen to the webinar simultanously - my fixed telephone is too far away from my PC.

However, that's not such a big deal as the whole webinar will be …