I requested this urgently for 5.1 and Brian made it happen: An information_schema table called processlist. This is the table version of the "SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST" output, and it is very cool. Using this table, you can create SQL to dig the processlist, and write stored procedures that spot, log and handle long running queries.

Even better: With the new log formats in 5.1, you can access the logs as CSV engine based SQL tables as well, and join the processlist table against the general query log or other logs. This allows you plenty of easy session tracing and easy profiling.

Even better: With the processlist table and 5.1 new feature "events" you can create new threads, monitor their execution, and in case of problems forcibly terminate them using other events or procedures. Or you can write a stored procedure using DROP …

When you are a road warrior, you will be using a lot of different internet connections from a lot of different providers. Sending your mail can be an adventure, because more and more services block outgoing connections using port 25 in order to prevent infected machines from sending spam.

Fortunately, there are alternatives, and I am not talking webmailers here. Most company mailers and freemail servers now offer their services on ports 587 (submission) and 465 (smtps) as well.

Submission is basically SMTP with AUTH SMTP requirement moved to a different port. Very often it is combined with STARTTLS for encryption to protect the passwords transported in authentication. You can test submission manually using the openssl command line client, if you are using openssl 0.9.7 or higher: $ openssl s_client -starttls smtp -connect …

I was asked about features in 5.1 this morning and one popped out that one of Elliot's new developers completed, which is the "PROCESSLIST" table.

As an example:

mysql> select * from PROCESSLIST WHERE command="query";
+----+------+------+--------------------+---------+------+----------- +-------------------------------------------------+
| ID | USER | HOST | DB | COMMAND | TIME | STATE | INFO |
+----+------+------+--------------------+---------+------+----------- +-------------------------------------------------+
| 2 | root | | information_schema | Query | 0 | preparing | select * from PROCESSLIST WHERE command="query" |
+----+------+------+--------------------+---------+------+----------- +-------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Adding show commands and turning them into information_schema table is pretty simple. I'll be leading …

LOL!

I noticed that in one of my previous blog entries (Importing XML data into MySQL using ExtractData()
) some of the literal XML snippets did not render at the Planet MySQL blog aggregate.

Then, the trouble was limited to my own entry: the escaped tags in the string arguments passed to the XML functions were not rendered.
Yesterday I did another little entry concerning the MySQL XML functions, but this time, my entry seems to wreck the remainder of the PlanetMySQL.org page! I guess this would be called 'XML injection vulnerability'.

Ironically, I entered a little warning in my blog entry for those that would be interested in reading the source snippets. For those in doubt - It was never my intention to manipulate or …

One of the things I learnt a year ago when I first started working with MySQL stored procedures was that you really need to have the latest version of MySQL running. By the time you have identified a possible bug and noted down the specifics a new version was available which invariably fixed the problem.

This is also true with release 5.1, I have recently started writing content on the event scheduler over at www.mysqldevelopment.com and found a few bugs early on. Given that 5.1 is still very much in development I tend not to raise bugs these days without first checking on the forums and then making sure I have the very latest release to test against.

One of the biggest issues I had was that one off events worked fine, but events that fired at intervals didn't. I say they didn't but one of the big problem with testing events is that you have to wait a long …

At noon today, the European Parliament will vote on a 67-item resolution concerning innovation policy. The proposed item 43 “calls on the Commission to ensure proper protection of intellectual property rights and to present as soon as possible a proposal for harmonisation and mutual recognition of patent laws in Member States […]“. While “mutual recognition of patent laws” is a term that can be interpreted in different ways, there is no doubt what the sponsor of this article, Mr. Klaus Heiner Lehne MEP (a German conservative), has in mind: the mutual recognition of national patents by the EU member states.

I recently received a copy of a memorandum that he sent to some of his MEP colleagues on November 29, 2005, entitled “Patent initiative for a new European patent law”. In the first part of the …

Alot of people ask me why Connector/Net does not allow converting of field values to various primitive types simply by calling the appropriate GetXXX methods on the datareader.  To better understand what they are asking, consider the case where you have a table with the first column of type int32.  For whatever reason, you've decided that you want that value to be in a long primitive.  So you do what seems logical and call GetInt64() on the reader object.  You are then greeted with an odd InvalidCast exception.  This seems strange considering that an int32 primitive can easily be cast to an int64 primitive simply by using the appropriate cast syntax.  Indeed this does seem odd until you understand what is going on under the hood.   When Connector/Net reads the resultset values off the wire, it parses that data into the appropriate primitives based on the field type reported by MySQL.  So INT columns are …

So far the MySQL Developer's Meeting is going well. Since I tend to run meetings I don't get a lot of time to just sit in a room and listen to what others are saying. I have heard good things about the "Future of Events" meeting and Peter Harvey I am told did an excellent job on the Doxygen talk. We have been talking to about moving to Doxygen for a couple of years and I believe there is finally some momentum to do it (though I did hear the typical "read the code" sorts of comments). Personally I sit on the fence about it, but I am happy to go either way.

There was clapping yesterday from one of the other rooms, so I should find out what talk that was.

So far I was happy with my group on refactorting our test case system. mysql-test is a pretty significant test case system and as far as looking around at what other open source projects do, I think we have one of the better ones. We came up with 16 points we should solve …

Here’s an easy way to add the latest headlines from PlanetMySQL to your sidebar (mind the wide lines):

<h2><a href=”http://www.planetmysql.org”>PlanetMySQL</a></h2><br />
<script language=”JavaScript” src=”http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2F
www.planetmysql.org%2Frss20.xml&num=5&targ=y&utf=y” type=”text/javascript”></script>

<noscript>
<a href=”http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2F
www.planetmysql.org%2Frss20.xml&num=5&targ=y&utf=y&html=y”>View RSS feed</a>
</noscript>

Yup, just paste that in and you are done.