As I read from Brian Aker, the beta freeze for MySQL 5.1 is right ahead. Time to reflect on the features that I know they will be in 5.1, features that I don't know if they're in 5.1, features that I wished they were in 5.1 and features that will very likely not be in MySQL 5.1. There are still some questions open for me - maybe somebody who knows more can answer some of them ;-).

New features that I know for sure are Partitioning, which allows to spread the logical representation of a table on multiple physical storage locations, based on conditions. Row based Replication means that data can be transfered from the master to the slaves row by row rather than by SQL statements (it will be adjustable, which method to choose). The Task Scheduler will allow (as the name says) to schedule tasks (one-time or recurring) to execute Stored …

My friend Ron from the Brisbane MySQL Meetup is cooking up a new project that uses MySQL's new Sakila sample database. It's a tag-based Java/JSP framework called HTMLtags. If you're into Java, you might want to check this out. If you like it - and especially if you'd like to lend a hand with development - drop Ron a line. I'm sure he'd appreciate it! (I'd volunteer, but what I don't know about Java would fill a library.) BTW, Ron and I, along with Australia's newest MySQL AB employee, are also starting to cook up a new Open-Source-y Something, but it's still a secret for now.

As a service to the busy, here are SuSE 10.0 RPMs of 5.0.19 a/o 2005-12-27 — use the spec-file to roll your own from the sources. This is a QND build, no warranty given, no responsibility taken.

Reading Miguel's latest post reminds me that if we get the chance we really should try to embed Mono in MySQL at the very least as a UDF language, if not as an SP language, this year if we get the chance.

So many things to do...

Today was fairly productive, I pushed the last piece of code into 5.1 for mysqlslap that I wanted to make sure would make the 5.1 beta freeze date (January 4th for the those playing at home).

So what does mysqlslap do? Basically its a load generation application. It has three stages, create schema, load data, and a general purpose run.

If can take queries from the command line for each stage or it can read in queries from a file. Patrick Galbraith added a primitive operation for it to generate data for all three if you need be.

What you then do is specify bits likes --concurrency="1,8,64,1024" and it will run the tests at each concurrency level (--concurrency handles the general purpose stage while --concurrency-load will handle the load stage). You are not required to run all of the stages so its safe to just run general queries against existing data sets.

You can also run --iterations …

I recently migrated a Nucleus CMS from MySQL 4.x to MySQL 5.0 but upon migration, I get the following message

ERROR 1054 (42S22): Unknown column 'i.inumber' in 'on clause'

when running the query:

SELECT i.inumber as itemid, i.iblog as blog, i.ititle as title, i.ibody as body, m.mname as author, m.mrealname as authorname, i.itime, i.imore as more, m.mnumber as authorid, m.memail as authormail, m.murl as authorurl, c.cname as category, i.icat as catid, i.iclosed as closed, t.tags as tags, t.item_id as item_id FROM nucleus_item as i, nucleus_member as m, nucleus_category as c LEFT join nucleus_plug_tags as t ON t.item_id=i.itemid WHERE i.iauthor=m.mnumber and i.iblog=1 and i.icat=c.catid and i.idraft=0 and (( match (ititle,ibody,imore) against ('aids') > 0 ) or ( t.tags LIKE '%/aids/%') ) and i.itime<="2005-12-28 19:15:54" ORDER BY i.itime DESC;

The interesting thing is …

In the much-vaunted blogosphere, I find that people are either dull or too cowed to tell the truth undiluted. 2005 saw everyone and their dog starting a blog, but most are vapid and useless to a large audience. (That's not to say they're not important and useful to one's immediate peers.)

In open source, there are very few blogs I've found worth following. To be worth my time (and yours, I should think), the blogs need to impart real information - either objective news or, more likely, solid data gleaned from real-world experience. Most do neither. And of the two, I think the latter (i.e., experience) is more important than the news. No one has figured out open source completely yet as a business, leaving all sorts of room for idea-sharing. That's why we started the Open Source Business Conference, and it's what any good open source blog should do.

A few people have asked me which …

A few people have asked me which blogs I follow. (OK, two of the three inquirers were my children, but....) Here's a list. (Dave Rosenberg and I have complained before that there isn't much intelligent discussion of open source in the blogosphere. If you know of something worthwhile, please share, either directly (masay @ osbc . com) or in the comments. My primary objective in posting these is to elicit feedback on others I should be reading.)

The List

• InfoWorld's Open Resource by Dave Rosenberg...and me. I suppose this is a bit self-serving, but I was reading Dave's blog long before I joined it. Dave's blog is the best place to get unvarnished opinions on open source (plus web services and other random stuff). Dave doesn't bother to try to put a veneer on rubbish.
  
  
• …

There have been some reactions about my MySQL - PostgreSQL article that I wrote recently.

I received a kind email from Magnus Hagandar, who is one of PostgreSQL's developers (the PostgreSQL website states: "Has done major work on the Win32 port and wrote much of the Win32 Installer."). He answered some of my unclear questions about Postgresql (and allowed me to post it here in my blog, so here it is):

Hi!

Stumbled across
http://db4free.blogspot.com/2005/12/mysql-postgresql.html, thought I
should answer two questions for you. You get it in mail since you rblog
doesn't permit anon postings and I don't have an account :)


> When a transaction is started and you write a SQL statement that has a
> syntax error in it, PostgreSQL rolls back the transaction …