Hey, look! LinuxQuestions.org did a poll and it turns out that lots of GNU/Linux users like MySQL :)

http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=30709&src=site-marq

The question was asked if one could create a million tables in a MySQL database. So I put together a small php script to do just that. It ran all afternoon, all evening, and into the night. It hung during the creation of the 262,731st table. I was running Windows Server 2003, using the NTFS file system on a mirrored volume. Each table was an InnoDB table with a single tinyint field and no indexes. The ibdata1 file grew by more than 3GB during the process although no rows were ever inserterd. Windows file compression is enabled, however and the 4.4GB ibdata1 file actually occupies only 295 MB.

I posted back to the fellow after my script had run for several minutes my calculation that it would take about 27 hours just to create the tables and he might want to rethink his design. I never heard back from him.

Recently another forum post asked a question in a similar vein, about creating "more than a couple thousand" …

As you may or may not know I'm a sysop over at the Quest Pipelines MySQL forum. We don't get a great deal of visitors in the MySQL forums there, due in part I guess to the fact the forums on the MySQL website are so good.

However in addition to running the forums Quest produce a monthly database newsletter which is sent to over 28,000 database professionals. Subjects vary but the general format is an article on Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and for the last year or so MySQL. For me this is a great way to spread the MySQL word to other database users but unfortunately I'm insanely busy with the day job so I can't submit anything this month.

So if you have something written or would like to contribute then let the newsletter team know at

newsletter@quest-pipelines.com

Or have a look at the latest addition over at the MySQL area of the pipelines site.

…

Way to go! Almost 63% of voters chose MySQL as the Database of the Year over at LinuxQuestions.org.

Here's to another great year for MySQL and continuing success.

On January 16, the European Commission (EC) announced a consultation on the future of the European patent system. An SAP official has already said that “it’s starting again”, meaning that this is the next round of the European software patent debate!

Companies, organizations and individuals who would like to tell the EU their opinion on what its patent policy should look like have until the end of this month to answer the EC’s questionnaire. But in order to do so, one has to wade through hundreds of pages of legislative proposals and related documentation. That’s why I wrote up a position paper that everyone can use to make his or her contribution and write to the EC:
www.no-lobbyists-as-such.com/PATSTRATpositionpaper.pdf …

MySQL versions 4.1 and below use imprecise math in operations with DECIMAL data, which is supposed to be precise (that’s the whole point). There is no real solution to the problem, though there are workarounds. There is also at least one genuine bug in MySQL related to this problem. In this article I’ll explain the problems, demonstrate them in action, and show you how to work around them. The problem Many fractional values cannot be represented exactly as a floating-point number in computers.

You may wish to take a peek at TurboDbAdmin.

I personally really like phpMyAdmin and I reckon that Marc Delisle and his gang are doing a fantastic job, but... you can do some nifty things with AJAX, and it's not just eyecandy (What is AJAX?).

I understand there's also an web/AJAX version of the MySQL command-line client in the works somewhere... that could be useful for demonstrations, training, online exercises... it's fine to use GUI tools, but I do feel it's important to know the SQL commands that hide behind it. And sometimes the command-line is the only tool you have available, so it's a good skill to have.

14:34 < MThomas> Time to install and configure Sync Manager in development
                 environment: 4 days, one of which was 15 hours long.  Time to
                 install and configure in production: 30 minutes.

I’ve written a bit of documentation that might help you get things running in the same way:

• http://wiki.colliertech.org/index.php/MaxDB:Installation
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/syncman/part1.html
• Create a Synchronization Scenario

© cjcollier for C.J.'s WordPress of …

Mickael Marchand noticed a problem with the mysql-dfsg backport on amd64. I don't own such hardware, but fortunately Christian Hammers was able to reproduce that problem, which seems not to be Debian related, so he filed a bugreport to the MySQL bug tracking system.

Readers of PlanetMySQL may have recently noticed some posts on tuning MySQL server performance in five minutes or even in three minutes, I’d like to take things in the opposite direction, showing you how to tune performance in two to four days.

Actually I should say you can learn to tune performance in two to four days, tuning itself actually takes a long time and is a continuing process because things change constantly. I’m not talking about performance tuning in the ‘limit resource usage so the server does not crash’ sense that you see in limiting connections, but in the sense of getting the most from your server, making specific changes and measuring the results. Remember folks, if you don’t benchmark you have no idea if your changes have improved your situation or actually made it worse. Do you want to know if your server can handle a traffic spike? Better to simulate one ahead of time than find out the hard way.

So …