Do you have an idea for improving MySQL? Or do you see a problem in the code you think you can fix? Do you want to see your contribution becoming a part of the MySQL Server codebase?

MySQL Engineering gives you the opportunity of having your code considered for inclusion in one of our upcoming releases.

How to contribute?

These are the steps to follow:

1. Make sure you have signed the Oracle Contributor Agreement (OCA).
2. File a bug report at http://bugs.mysql.com
3. Attach your code to the “contributor” tab in the bug report.

That is all.  At the time of writing, around 100 people have signed up as contributors to MySQL.

What happens then?

The bug system will automatically …

Two weeks ago we released an Alpha release of Percona Server with TokuDB. Right now I am on a final stage of evaluation of TokuDB for using in our project Percona Cloud Tools and it looks promising.

What is the most attractive in TokuDB? For me it is compression, but not just compression: TokuDB provides great performance over compressed data.

In my synthetic tests I saw a compression ratio of 10:1 (TokuDB LZMA to InnoDB uncompressed), in the real production data it is less, 6:1, but still impressive.

In our servers we have 4 x SSD Crucial M500 960GB combined in RAID5, which give 2877.0 GB of usable space. With TokuDB we should be able to pack around 15TB of raw data. Of course we can try InnoDB compression, …

At an extremely high level, replication in MongoDB and MySQL are similar. Both databases have exactly one machine, the primary (or master), that accepts writes from clients. With a single transaction (or atomic operation, in MongoDB’s case), the tables and oplog (or binary log in MySQL) are modified to reflect the change. The log captures what the change is so other secondaries (or slaves) can read the changes and process them, making the slaves identical to the master. (Note that I am NOT talking about multi-master replication.)

Underneath the covers, their implementations are quite different. And in peeking underneath the covers while developing TokuMX, I learned more about my favorite thing in …

This Thursday (20th March 2014) we’ll be hosted a free webinar covering advanced MySQL Replication topics as well as the latest developments. As always, the webinar is free but you need to register here – even if you can’t join live, you’ll then be sent a link to the replay.

More details on what to expect…

The biggest Web sites in the world rely on MySQL Replication to scale-out and provide High Availability for their data. Extend your knowledge of how MySQL Replication works and what you can achieve with it; join us for this technical webinar to explore some of the more advanced replication architectures as well as some of the latest product developments:

…

Shantanu asked a follow-up question on my Cleanup a MySQL Schema post from last month. He wanted to know if there was a way to capture foreign keys before removing them. The answer is yes, but how you do it depends on whether the primary key is based on a surrogate key using an auto incrementing sequence of a natural key using descriptive columns.

You can capture foreign keys with a simple query when they’re determined by a single column value. However, this script creates ALTER statements that will fail when a table holds a multiple column foreign key value. The SELECT statement would look like this when capturing all foreign key values in a MySQL Server:

      SELECT   CONCAT('ALTER TABLE',' ',tc.table_schema,'.',tc.table_name,' '
               ,'ADD CONSTRAINT',' …

Keynotes and Sessions:

Keynote: Getting Serious about MySQL and Hadoop at ContinuentRobert Hodges (CEO, Continuent) Hadoop for MySQL PeopleChris Schneider (Database Architect, Groupon.com) From Dolphins to Elephants: Real-Time MySQL to Hadoop ReplicationMC Brown (Director of Documentation, Continuent), Linas Virbalas (Senior Software Engineer, Continuent) Virtually Available MySQL, or How to

Percona Server version 5.6.16-64.1

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.6.16-64.1 on March 17th, 2014 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories.

Based on MySQL 5.6.16, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.6.16-64.1 is the current GA release in the Percona Server 5.6 series. All of Percona’s software …

Continuent, a leading provider of database clustering and replication software has five (5) new positions open:

Build/Test Engineer Senior Database Availability and Clustering Engineer Senior Database Replication Engineer Data Replication Sales Engineer Clustering and Replication Test Development Engineer

If you want to get in on the ground floor of a growing company in a challenging field

What good is a zero-length character column in a MySQL table? A zero-length character column has type of ‘char(0)’. If it is nullable, then it can at least store one bit. If it is not nullable, then the value for this column in all rows is a null string. IMO, not very useful. However, the MySQL Reference Manual says that there are valid uses for such a column, so TokuDB should support it. Unfortunately, we recently found and fixed a bug related to zero length character columns in TokuDB.

A Random Query Generator (RQG) trial generated a table with a ‘char(0)’ column and caused TokuDB to crash when executing an alter table statement that drops the column. The reason for the crash is related to the layout of the values …

I work for a firm that’s heavily invested in SQL – a team that needs to have developers who know their way around relational databases and MySQL in particular. I want to show you how I run interviews for our development positions.

Method

Everybody has their own methods and opinions on how to conduct technical interviews. I’ve found that I generally dislike interviews that focus either on whiteboard puzzles or obscure technical details, since they don’t really show how well the candidate is at what really matters: building functioning, quality apps. I really like running the interview like we’re talking about the design for a new product. I want to figure out the requirements, mull over the data model, and write some simple queries to make sure we can show the data we need to.

This process should show two things: the candidate has a good enough grip on the MySQL database that they can comfortably build a system …