The partitioning development for 5.1 is close to its completion (apart from the
stabilisation phase). An important part of this development is the ability to
prune away partitions not used in the query. Here follows some guidelines how
the optimiser handles this at the moment.

For most functions the optimizer can only handle equality conditions thus:
where partition_field = 2
or
where partiiton_field IN (2,3,4)

In this case the optimiser can use this independent of what the partition
function is. It will do so by actually applying the partition function on the
equal value thus:
partition_function(2) = partition 3
partition_function(3) = partition 5
partition_function(4) = partition 3

It will set a bit in partition_used bitmap to indicate which partitions are used
to indicate to the executer which partitions to scan. …

Here’s a little bit of SQL to convert all tables in the current database to the InnoDB storage engine. It’s written for MySQL 5.0, and relies on the column count of SHOW TABLE STATUS, so it might take tweaking to work on other versions.

The Department of Commerce's United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has created a partnership with the open source community to ensure that patent examiners have improved access to all available prior art relating to software code during the patent examination process.

In December the USPTO representatives met with members of the open source software community, which provided an opportunity for members to discuss with the USPTO prior art access issues related to software patent quality. The meeting focused on getting the best prior art references to the examiner during the initial examination process.

As a follow-up to their December 6th meeting, USPTO representatives will hold another meeting on February 16th, 2006. This meeting will be open to the public and will focus on further developing previously discussed initiatives as well as any new prior art initiatives offered at that time.

All members of the open …

For the geeky folks running a non-windows operating system on a windows system, what are you using, why, and do you like it?

I just found colinux, which looks good, and I’m installing mysql on it now. I’ve used cygwin and it’s just a pig, and things don’t work so well there.

VMware costs $$, and also isn’t really great either (I’ve had stability problems). What do folks think about these three?

I recommend you ONLY use single table mapping since SQL for fetch spec EOQualifiers may not be generated properly (known bug).....

Its done! After more than 2,5 years pondering on the design decisions in MDB we finally have a successor MDB2 with a first stable. Along with it the ibase, mysql, mysqli, mssql, pgsql, sqlite drivers have been marked stable.

In the past months a lot of people (Lorenzo, Helgi, David, Matthias and many others) have helped iron out the last issues, expand the test suite to uncover issues lurking within. Most PEAR packages support MDB2 and through the integration with these packages MDB2 matured as well. Of course there are still things to work on, but its good that we have made this milestone, because now users can rely on the MDB2 development team to maintain backwards compatibility.

Users interested in MDB2 should check out the wiki dedicated to …

Dear MySQL users, MaxDB users and friends,

last week we announced a MaxDB series on planetmysql.org with weekly postings every wednesday. This is the first posting with “real” content, it’s the first time we do this for you. We spend a considerable amount of time on making it as good as possible, but we know it won’t be perfect. Please help us to improve in the future and use the MaxDB Forum to tell us more about your expectations on us and how we can improve. Everybody at MySQL AB is eager to learn about your needs.

The first “real” posting has become a little theoretical an less practical. The reason is that we wanted to explain why you should use MaxDB first and what the concepts of the system are. If you don’t know what the MaxDB software …

Dear MySQL users, MaxDB users and friends,

last week we announced a MaxDB series on planetmysql.org with weekly postings every wednesday. This is the first posting with “real” content, it’s the first time we do this for you. We spend a considerable amount of time on making it as good as possible, but we know it won’t be perfect. Please help us to improve in the future and use the MaxDB Forum to tell us more about your expectations on us and how we can improve. Everybody at MySQL AB is eager to learn about your needs.

The first “real” posting has become a little theoretical an less practical. The reason is that we wanted to explain why you should use MaxDB first and what the concepts of the system are. If you don’t know what the MaxDB software …

For those that don't know a cartesian join is one that produces a cartesian product. A cartesian product is the result of joining two sets of data in such a way that all rows in one set are joined with all rows in the other. In MySQL this happens when we have two tables in an SQL statement but no join statement. For example...

mysql> select * from emp_dept;
+--------+---------+
| emp_id | dept_id |
+--------+---------+
|      1 |       1 |
|      2 |       1 |
|      3 |       2 |
|      4 |       2 |
+--------+---------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from dept;
+---------+------+
| dept_id | name |
+---------+------+
|       1 | IT   |
|       2 | HR   |
+---------+------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Normally these two tables would be joined using a join condition on dept_id so that we return only the rows where a …

Alfresco, the leading (or maybe even only!) supplier of open source enterprise content management software has received an additional $8 million in venture capital investment through Mayfield Fund and Accel Partners.  Alfresco is a sign of the growing scope of open source throughout the enterprise.  A few years back people questioned whether open source had a role beyond the operating system.  Sure, a few hackers would run Linux, but...

Now it's clear that open source is not only significant in IT infrastructure, but there's a growing role for open source applications, including content management, CRM, business intelligence, collaboration and email.  More and more companies are building enterprise grade applications on the LAMP stack and that will further drive the adoption of open source applications and infrastructure.

Congrats guys!  …