People keep asking me “what is going to happen to MySQL now that Oracle has screwed MySQL?” I bluntly disagree that any such thing has happened. This blog post is just my personal view and does not reflect my employer’s opinion, but Oracle might have saved MySQL from what I can see. There is no evidence that supports the hysterical doomsday theories. (Witness MySQL 5.5, probably the best MySQL release in history. Not exactly what I’d call “screwing.”)

I believe that a product with such a large, diverse, and important market presence needs a variety of companies involved with it in many different ways. One of the absolutely key things is a company to make money from it. MySQL needs Oracle, because no one else involved is both capable and trying to make MySQL, the product, a large-scale commercial success. It looks like Oracle is doing what I wish Sun could have done.

Now, is Oracle going to be community friendly, …

MyQuery, the ad-hoc query and scripting tool for MySQL, as always running on Windows, supporting servers on any platform, is now available in version 3.4.2. This version has a few minor bug-fixes in the "Break long lines" plugin that cleans up SQL text, and also a few additions to this plugin.
I have not heard of any issues with MyQuery itself since I released 3.4.1, but I will not take the 3.4 version into GA until I have fixed a few more things in the "Break long lines" plugin to turn it into a more full-features SQL beautifier with a lot more features than now.
Until then though, 3.4.2 is what you want, and the Compact Spaces option in the Break Long Lines plugin that is added with this release, should provide useful.

In addition to all this, if you want to meet up and discuss this tool, then I am at your service at the MySQL Usre Conference coming up next week.

Best regards
Anders Karlsson

Working at Percona has taught me to love being disruptive and creating innovative pricing models. In particular, their pay-as-you-go pricing in 15-minute increments, plus the ability to go from first contact to having them logged in and working in a few minutes with just a credit card, has been game-changing. I’ve always wanted to take that to the next level and create a new business, offering MySQL services with a radically simple pricing model.

Well, now I have. I’m offering the option to pay by the minute for MySQL consulting and support. And you don’t even need a credit card or approval from your boss. Best of all, I’ll talk geeky to you while I do it. Just call 1-900-SELECT and in no time at all, I’ll be fixing your servers while saying things like “I love the way you bash me with those shell scripts, you naughty boy! I’m gonna make you ‘friend class Baron’ so you’ll have access to my protected variables!”

I see that “Big Data” has become the new buzzword with a spike of hype around it. Everyone’s jumping on it. Companies are eager to promote their products as “Big Data,” just as they were eager to be associated with Web 2.0, Service-Oriented Architectures, and all the rest. Predictably, there’s basically zero agreement on what it means.

I’ve seen “Big Data” mentioned in the context of 1TB, which I think is rather moderate sized. But worse yet, I’ve seen 100GB labeled Big Data. I’ve even seen 5GB labeled Big Data. No links — I don’t want to draw attention to them.

I don’t know what Big Data is, but the stick-of-gum-sized flash drive in my pocket holds 16GB. It’s pretty Small. I mean, I forget it’s even there — it’s definitely not Big. I don’t know where I’d draw the line, but if it fits in a commodity server’s memory, which 100GB can do easily these days, it’s not Big Data. I don’t even …

This is a test to see if people will vote this down on Planet MySQL. If you’ll vote down some of the posts that have gotten negative marks recently, like Allan Packer saying that he’s still working on Sparc supercluster, or Drizzle going GA, or Percona Server and XtraBackup being available on Solaris, or mk-query-digest filter how-tos, or TokuDB announcing online add of columns, or XtraBackup Manager, or using WordPress on Drizzle, well…

Then you’re probably the kind of person who’ll vote negatively about MySQL saving the lives of baby seals.

Seriously: is it at all possible that the above posts, which got thumbs-down votes, are actually bad news for anyone? I usually don’t look at the Planet, and only read through my RSS feeds, but for some reason today I actually browsed to it, and I was just amazed at how many posts that are nothing but great steps forward for the MySQL community have negative votes! Who …

Today I was looking for the ALTER TABLE EXCHANGE PARTITION feature for a customer, and it looks like it did not get included into MySQL 5.5, although there is a hint of it in the documentation index, and you can find quite a few blog posts and presentations about it. The command simply throws a syntax error:

alter table t exchange partition p1 with table t2;

The worklog is still open, although a related bug report it mentions is closed and pushed into trunk. (It confused me for a moment until I realized that what was pushed into trunk, and released in 5.5, was TRUNCATE PARTITION support.)

Here’s hoping this gets included in a future release — this is a great feature that can make partitions much more amenable to operational tasks such as moving data …

Earlier today my colleague Depesz posted a nice write up showing one of the use cases for the new 9.1 feature, "Writable CTE's". It certainly shows one handy thing that this feature will enable, but it's not the only one. Here's a quick little bit of SQL I have been playing with for some time that re-implements the infamous "UPSERT" command (a long time sticking point for people trying to make MySQL apps more cross-database compatible) into Postgres.

pagila=# select * from actor where first_name = 'AMBER' and last_name = 'LEE';
actor_id | first_name | last_name | last_update
----------+------------+-----------+-------------
(0 rows)

pagila=# with upsert as
pagila-# (update actor set last_update = now() where first_name = 'AMBER' and last_name = 'LEE' returning actor_id)
pagila-# insert into …

I’ll be speaking at IOUG’s Collaborate conference in Florida the week of April 10-14. My session is called MySQL Performance Basics. For those who know MySQL, this won’t be exciting, but if you’re new to it, I hope it will be a good orientation to what you should focus on and ignore.

Sheeri Cabral posted a good round-up of the MySQL talks at Collaborate on the PalominoDB blog.

Related posts:

1. O’Reilly MySQL 2011 conference CfP is open
2. …

I wish I could be at the Hotsos Symposium. I would keep my mouth very tightly closed and my ears wide open, and try to learn from people who are completely out of my league about performance analysis topics I won’t grok for another decade (if I’m lucky). But I just can’t cram in that much travel.

If you’re like me, why don’t you go to the O’Reilly MySQL Conference instead? I’ll be trying my feeble best to bring some of the Oracle performance scientist’s mentality to this event, with presentations such as my Forecasting MySQL Performance and Scalability session. And a lot of smart people will be there from many …

Hi Everyone,

I would like to personally invite you to a GreenSQL Express Webinar,
I’ll be demonstrating GreenSQL Express, the free and simple way to keep your information private and safe.

On Wednesday, March 16th (just 2 weeks from now),
It’s called “How to Protect Sensitive Information in Minutes: Setting up GreenSQL Express with Basic Security Rules”

If you’re serious about protecting your data, you need to hear and see how it’s done. I’ll talk about:

1. Why you need a Database firewall / security solution
2. Where and How to install GreenSQL Express in your infrastructure
3. How to use GreenSQL Express to protect you database
4. How to create the security polices you need in minutes
5. How to protect your database from SQL injection attacks
6. How to implement a separation of duties in your database access
7. How to maintain business continuity …