Oracle's acquisition of Sun has opened up all sorts of questions: Will MySQL get the support it needs? What will become of the MySQL community? Where should database administrators put their efforts and resources?

Ronald Bradford can answer that last question. Bradford, an RDBMS expert and a speaker at the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo, has been guiding DBAs through key aspects of MySQL integration for years. In the following Q&A, he discusses the pros and cons of migrating from Oracle to MySQL (hint: it's not just about cost savings). He also weighs in on the future of MySQL and its community.

Jumping from Oracle to MySQL

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Learned something new from my own bug in BlitzDB today. The problem was that writing a DATE column index would always return a duplicate key error (regardless of what I feed it). There are two suspicious candidates that can cause this.

• Comparison Function has a defect.
• Key Generator has a defect.

The latter suspect was going to be tricky if it was true since BlitzDB currently uses Drizzle’s native “field packer” (except for VARCHAR) inherited from MySQL. This would mean that Drizzle’s field system has a bug in it which was somewhat difficult to believe. Furthermore, you should always blame yourself before you start suspecting other people’s code. So, I decided to look into the comparison function which was completely written by me. Turned out that’s where the bug was.

Comparison Function

Allow me to quickly clarify what I mean by “comparison function” in this context. …

Just a quick notice to let everyone know that there is a new version of Kontrollkit available. There are two new scripts included as well as some good updates to the my.cnf files. You can download the new version here: http://kontrollsoft.com/software-downloads kt-mysql-systemcheck – generates a report for point-in-time system status that is useful for troubleshooting MySQL [...]

If you have been reading the Kontrollbase performance reports and noticed that one alert says your connection usage vs max connections ration is too high but then recommends you to decrease the max_connections variable, then you will find this fix handy. Its two simple queries that execute on the Kontrollbase schema to update the max_connections [...]

I've table contains text column and its charset is latin1, and i can store Arabic text ( and non English character) in this column and retrieve it, i don't know how is it?

So how is that? and why I need utf8?

CREATE TABLE `post` ( `postid` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `threadid` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `parentid` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `

Building and installing the Ruby mysql gem on freshly-installed Red Hat based systems sometimes produces the frustratingly ambiguous error below:

# gem install mysql
/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb
checking for mysql_ssl_set()... no
checking for rb_str_set_len()... no
checking for rb_thread_start_timer()... no
checking for mysql.h... no
checking for mysql/mysql.h... no
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.

Searching the web for info on this error yields two basic solutions:

1. Install the mysql-devel package (this provides the mysql.h file in /usr/include/mysql/).
2. Run gem install mysql -- …

In case if you working on Windows environment for MySQL development (sometimes I use visual studio for easy debugging); and in case if you change the parser code (sql_yacc.yy) or if you are working directly from development branch (bzr launchpad), then the build breaks to generate the yacc files (sql_yacc.h and sql_yacc.cc) with an error bison: M4: Invalid argument as shown below:

      1>------ Build started: Project: sql, Configuration: Debug Win32 ------
1>Generating sql_yacc.h, sql_yacc.cc
2>------ Build started: Project: GenServerSource, Configuration: Debug Win32 ------
2>Generating sql_yacc.h, sql_yacc.cc
1>bison: m4: Invalid argument
1>Project : error PRJ0019: A tool returned an error code from "Generating sql_yacc.h, sql_yacc.cc"
1>sql - 1 error(s), 0 warning(s)
2>bison: m4: Invalid argument …

The time has come for major performance improvements to the reporter, stats-gather, alerter, and client scripts. This means that I will be rewriting the scripts in Python. A couple of reasons for this; to cut down on the number of modules that are required for the installation process (which also makes distributing the client script [...]

I had this patch for a while where one can get listing of both session and global temporary tables across all sessions. It really helped lot of times to understand the bottlenecks of some of the temporary table issues as MySQL never exposed them in the form of SHOW TABLES.

I also added a new status variable called ‘Created_tmp_heap_to_disk_tables‘, which keeps track of how many memory based temp tables are re-created back to disk based.

The patch is now ported to newer MySQL versions, both 5.0 and 5.1; and it works great on most of the platforms that I tested (Mac, Linux and Windows)

It introduces two new INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables, TEMPORARY_TABLES and GLOBAL_TEMPORARY_TABLES along with supporting regular SHOW syntax

 
SHOW [SESSION/GLOBAL] TEMPORARY TABLES [FROM db]

We have a new users’s group on Brijj for anyone that wants to keep up to date with discussions and wants to increase their network profile on the site. Join now: http://www.brijj.com/group/kontrollbase-users