I (relatively) recently added the FILES table to INFORMATION_SCHEMA (check out the patch). This was so that we could provide an SQL interface to check how much free space their was in ndb disk data files. You can see how to use this in my post entitled INFORMATION_SCHEMA.FILES (querying disk usage from SQL). We’ll have stuff hitting the manual at some point soon.

So how is an INFORMATION_SCHEMA table implemented in MySQL? Well, the first thing to realise is that …

AUSTRALIA PRESS: Telstra To Charge More For Fixed Lines

great - I get to pay more for a service I DON’T WANT! I just want internet, not a phone line (which I aparrently have to have to get ADSL).

So, earlier today I was playing around with compiling MySQL on a 64-bit platform, as there was a bug reported that there were problems allocating a large amount of memory to it. I compiled it, and tried running a few tests beyond the usual make test to see if I could make it run into problems.

I couldn’t. From a chat earlier in the morning, Stefan told me to try a really large table, with a stored procedure that repeatedly queried it. I tried that, but never got my out of memory errors. And my test box had 1GB of RAM.

So my question to readers are:

1. Have you had grief with MySQL 5 (or later, see 5.1 just hit beta) on a 32-bit or 64-bit platform, where you had issues allocating a large amount of memory to the MySQL server?
2. Do you have useful test harnesses designed to stress test your …

At the rate we're going, we soon won't have to wonder why there are no open source billionaires. Last year's $25 million buyout of GlueCode is dwarfed by the $222 million buyout of Snortfire. The rumored merger of Oracle and JBoss could fetch up to $400 million.

There's no question that mega-mergers of open source software companies will fundamentally change open source software, but probably not in the way you think: "Open source" itself is quite safe, but there will now be an "open source software industry," and it could be very different from what most of us in open source are used to.

The Great Idea: Merging Open Source and Commercial Software

On paper, merging open source project into a commercial software vendor is actually a pretty attractive proposition. An open source project brings a large number of users, who could help find bugs or come up with new and innovative uses for the software. Just …

I still didn't use the ARCHIVE storage engine in production but am preparing to. A lot of existing projects with a need for large amounts of historical data use a combination of multiple MyISAM tables merged into one using the MERGE engine: Historical data is kept in packed read-only tables, the current data is added to an unpacked table. Now the question arises how you could implement a similar combination using the ARCHIVE engine for historical data, given that partitioning is not yet available in MySQL 5.0 and won't support multiple storage engines in 5.1. That's …

I'm going to have three different sessions on the MySQL User Conference:

ext/mysqli - The New Glue Between MySQL 4.1 and PHP5

This one is about the improved MySQL extension in PHP 5. Actually this is a followup to my very first User Conference talk back in 2003, but since then both MySQL 4.1 and PHP 5 have matured so its time to have another look at this dynamic duo again.

Using MySQL Cluster as a Distributed PHP Session Storage

Here i'm going to present together with my new german coworker Bernhard Ocklin, we are going to present how to make use …

Andrew recently wrote about his plans to take the MySQL Certification exams and that he finds interesting new things that he learns from his studies. I can really confirm this - I also learnt a lot when I studied for my exams, which I took (and passed) in autumn last year.

This is a great opportunity to tell you about the PROCEDURE ANALYSE option, which I learn about in the Study Guide. I believe that this option isn't well known, since I didn't hear about it anywhere else than in the Study Guide - so it might be new to some people.

The best way to show you what it does is by an example - lets execute it …