In case you were wondering, after seeing this self-defined tutorial, backing up MySQL 5.1 partitioned tables does not require any particular additional technology.
This tutorial presents MySQL 5.1 in a short paragraph, and then starts talking about a commercial backup application, as if it were the only way of backing up partitioned tables.
The title, for sure, is misleading. Backing Up MySQL Partitioned Tables. Reading such a title, readers expect either a list of possible solutions, or being presented with the only existing way of dealing with this task. Instead, the only instructions that you get is how to use the above mentioned tool, which is definitely not the only way of getting the job done. It is also doubly misleading because, since partitioning is a new technology, the casual reader may think "oh? What's peculiar with …

A feature which hasn't been so public about the implementation
of partitioning is the support for atomicity of many ALTER TABLE
statements using partitioned tables.

This atomicity exists for
ALTER TABLE ADD PARTITION ....
ALTER TABLE REORGANIZE PARTITION ...
ALTER TABLE DROP PARTITION ...
ALTER TABLE COALESCE PARTITION

Given that partitioning often works with very large tables it
was desirable to have a higher level of security for ALTER TABLE
of partitioned tables. To support this a DDL log was implemented.
This DDL log will in future versions be used also for many other
meta data statements. The DDL log will record all files added,
renamed and dropped during an ALTER TABLE command as above.

The design is done in such a way that the ALTER TABLE will either
fail and then all temporary files will be removed (even in …

The Partition Helper is a Perl script that converts some …

With the delivery of MySQL 5.1 GA, our release policy sees a couple of changes in relation to that of MySQL 5.0.

First, initially we will deliver both MySQL Enterprise Server and MySQL Community Server in parallel. The bug fixes to the initial MySQL 5.1 GA releases will thus be delivered also in binary form for both MySQL Community Server and MySQL Enterprise Server.

Second, after a period of time, we will revert to the different release schedule for MySQL Enterprise Server and MySQL Community Server that we have been using. MySQL Enterprise Server will have more frequent binary releases. However, at this point, we do not have an exact date or a release number, when the first Enterprise only release will happen.

Third, we have done away with odd and even numbering. Whenever MySQL …

MySQL 5.1 is here! It’s announced! And it’s time for the overall winner, Position 1 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

1. Greg Haase (Lotame Solutions Inc., Elkridge, Maryland, USA): Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler to Prune Archive Tables. See Greg’s DevZone article, and his blog.

Thanks and congratulations, Greg! I absolutely hope you are in a position to take advantage of your free MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL …

I saw Monty's latest rant and I told myself "here we go again." I blogged before about deaf developers, and here's another symptom of the same disease.
This is another case of a developer, a brilliant one, mind you, one of the brightest in the open source arena, but a developer nonetheless, who has a non-user oriented mindset and is inflicting his view on the users.
I will stay clear of the reasons. Why the co-founder of MySQL decides to spoil the party on release day and ambushes his colleagues with a truckload of blame is beyond my understanding.
What concerns me is the patronizing plea that Monty uses against the users. "Don't use MySQL 5.1"? Really? What about the ones who have already been using it for …

With all due respect to Monty (and I mean that — much respect is due), I have some serious issues with his portrayal of the 5.1 release.  I hate to make my first entry on Planet MySQL about a controversy, but he encouraged people to blog about their experience with 5.1, so that’s what I’ll do here.

Overall Quality

As a long time user, I am very confident that the quality of 5.1 GA far exceeds that of the initial 5.0 GA release (5.0.15).  In fact, I would go further and suggest that the MySQL organization has if anything been too conservative about declaring 5.1 GA.

It’s obviously true that there are still many bugs open.  However no software is bug free, especially not those with codebase as large as MySQL.  So the question is not if they are bug free, but are the …

Hello, blog! Long time without posting. Here I am again.
My attention was caught a few days ago by a contest posted by Tokutek.
This is a company that makes a proprietary engine for MySQL. In their contest, they claim that it takes 20 days to insert 1 billion records into a InnoDB table, and that MyISAM is not even up to the task. In their example, InnoDB inserts 404 rows per second and MyISAM died after a few days of inserting 93 rows per second.
It looks farfetched to me. Surely you can do better than that.
Now, I don't have a quad 3.16Ghz Xeon server with 16GB RAM available like the one used by Tokutek, and so I tried with a modest quad 2.7Ghz AMD, 8GB RAM server. The problem is mostly the same. Once your index becomes bigger than the available RAM, you are in the glue. The only …

With the GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 coming up, we have picked the winners in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

To keep you in suspense, let me first announce those on positions 5 to 10:

5. Fourat Zouari (TriTUX.com, Tunis, Tunisia): Using Partitioning for Data Warehousing. See Fourat’s DevZone article, and his blog entry from May 2008.

6. Ryan Thiessen (Big Fish Games, Seattle, …

A few days ago I was describing a common grievance when using partitions.
When you care at a table, like the following

CREATE TABLE t1 ( d DATE ) 
PARTITION by range (to_days(d))
(
  partition p001 VALUES LESS THAN (to_days('2001-01-01')) 
, partition p002 VALUES LESS THAN (to_days('2001-02-01')) 
, partition p003 VALUES LESS THAN (to_days('2001-03-01'))
);

Then you have the problem of finding out the original values. SHOW CREATE TABLE doesn't help.
show create table t1\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Table: t1
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `t1` (
`d` date DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 /*!50100 PARTITION BY RANGE (to_days(d)) (PARTITION p001 VALUES LESS THAN (730851) ENGINE = MyISAM, PARTITION p002 VALUES LESS THAN (730882) ENGINE = MyISAM, PARTITION p003 VALUES LESS …