The latest from the MySQL community

A question that came up during the MySQL track at the UKOUG conference in Birmingham was "Can I exclude only a few databases from mysqldump? Let's say that I have 50 databases, and I want to dump all of them, except a few."
As many know, mysqldump has an option to ignore specific tables. SO if you have 1,000 tables in a databases, you can tell mysqldump to dump all the tables except a few ones.
There is no corresponding option to exclude one or more databases.
However, if you know your command line tools, the solution is easy:
First, we get the list of all databases:

mysql -B -N -e 'show databases'
information_schema
employees
five
four
mysql
one
performance_schema
six
test
three
two

-B forces batch mode (no dashes box around the data), while -N gets the result without the headers.
Now, let's say that we want to exclude databases four, …

I’ve just uploaded the new release of innotop to Google Code. Short version of the changelog: works on MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin; more efficient; supports Percona/MariaDB USER_STATISTICS data; fixes a bunch of small annoying bugs.

Longer version:

2010-11-06: version 1.8.0

   Changes:
   * Don't re-fetch SHOW VARIABLES every iteration; it's too slow on many hosts.
   * Add a filter to remove EVENT threads in SHOW PROCESSLIST (issue 32).
   * Add a timestamp to output in -n mode, when -t is specified (issue 37).
   * Add a new U mode, for Percona/MariaDB USER_STATISTICS (issue 39).
   * Add support for millisecond query time in Percona Server (issue 39).
   * Display a summary of queries executed in Query List mode (issue 26).

   Bugs fixed:
   * Made config-file …

Dear Perl and MySQL developers, admins and enthusiasts,

I’m please to announce the release of DBD::mysql 4.018! This release includes some code cleanups, added documentation as well as new features (database handle attributes) that allow you to be able to ascertain the server and client versions (Thank you to Robert M. Jansen). An example below, from the test for this new feature, shows you how you can use these new handle attributes:

print "$dbh->{mysql_clientinfo}\n";

5.2.0-MariaDB

print "$dbh->{mysql_clientversion}\n";

50200

print "$dbh->{mysql_serverversion}\n";

50200

You can obtain the latest DBD::mysql release source from Github:

git clone git://github.com/CaptTofu/DBD-mysql.git

Or CPAN:

http://search.cpan.org/~capttofu/DBD-mysql-4.018/lib/DBD/mysql.pm

The file:

file: $CPAN/authors/id/C/CA/CAPTTOFU/DBD-mysql-4.018.tar.gz
size: 133427 bytes
md5: …

Lately I worked quite a bit with Python and Linux, writing monitoring and automation utilities. I am in a transition period, so I thought I ought to write some Python stuff interfacing with MySQL for fun, and start positioning myself for expanded career horizon, I hope.

To get started, I thought it would be fun to rewrite a Perl utility I wrote before with Python. That script converts MySQL character sets to utf8, a very common task for wikis and blogs during an upgrade. This time, I did everything from scratch: firing up an Amazon EC2 Linux instance, hand install and configuring MySQL 5.1.50 (creating mysql user, group, wget tarball, setting directory ownership and permissions, creating symbolic to MySQL binaries, editing my.cnf, /etc/init.d/ and chkconfig automatic startup, environmental variables, the works), compiled and …

After enjoying the excellent hospitality of our host here in Pisa (6 courses) we were ready for our second day at YAPCEU 2010 here in sunny Pisa.

Larry’s new catch phrase “My Language is a four letter word” was the ‘Buzz word’ for today. We settled down to some very interesting talks, the highlight for me being Tim Bunce’s talk on using Devel::NYTProf to Optimize your code. Tim first gave us a quick and dirty overview of optimization which covered the basics of where to start and what to look for he followed up with real examples of Optimizer output and than wrapped up with a few before and after results on an optimization effort.

The rest of the day was dedicated in my opinion, to the future of DBs in with Nelson Ferraz giving an excellent presentation of his concepts for using Perl as to glue for a Data Warehouse application. Next on my agenda, Martin Berends reports on the present state of Perl 6 and interfaces …

What I'm up to lately (giving love to some projects):

* Fixing bugs in DBD::mysql, just released 4.015, 4.016, and next 4.017. I had a patch sent yesterday from a user/developer that I want to get out there
* Memcached::libmemcached - 0.4201 version - now using latest libmemcached 0.42. This is the only Perl client that supports binary protocol!

patg@patg-desktop:~/code_dev/perl-libmemcached$ PERL_DL_NONLAZY=1 /usr/bin/perl "-MExtUtils::Command::MM" "-e" "test_harness(0, 'blib/lib', 'blib/arch')" t/12-set-get-binary.t
t/12-set-get-binary....ok                                                   
All tests successful.
Files=1, …

1. Conflict Minerals and Blood Tech (Joey Devilla) -- electronic components have a human and environmental cost. I remember Saul Griffith asking me, "do you want to kill gorillas or dolphins?" for one component. Now we can add child militias and horrific rape to the list. (via Simon Willison)
2. Meteor -- an open source HTTP server that serves streaming data feeds (for apps that need Comet-style persistent connections). (via gianouts on Delicious)
3. …

I found I never published this post as it was sitting in my drafts few months now — it was written in 13th February, 2010. I’m publishing it without any changes.

I learn therefore I am!

I’ve just wrote few bits about learning a new technology and after skimming through my Google Reader, I noticed a great post by Chen Shapira — Deliberate Practice. That’s reminded me about another aspect of learning that I didn’t mention — learning is a continuous process.

There are two aspects…

• No matter how good I am and how much I know, my knowledge and expertize become outdated relatively quickly these days unless I keep up with the new stuff. Unfortunately, there is so much new …

So I told myself "I wish I had a tool that installed plugins instantly and painlessly, the way MySQL Sandbox installs a server.
There you go. So yesterday I had enough of suffering and have put together an installation script that does a good job of installing several plugins with little or no effort.
OverviewHow does it work? For now, it's a separate script, but it will soon end into SBtool, the Sandbox tool.
Plugins need different operations, and the difficult part is finding a clear way of …

A few years ago, during the MySQL Conference opening keynote, two world maps of MySQL downloads were displayed. With the lights down, they made an impression.
Oddly enough, to the best of my knowledge, the downloads map has not been drawn again since then. I asked my friend and colleague Markus Popp, and he provided the data from the downloads logs, leaving the implementation to me.
A first attempt with Google Maps API produced a chart that is nice to see for a single country or town, but hardly pleasant for the entire world.

Then, I abandoned the easy path, and looked at CPAN for inspiration, and immediately found something that could solve my problem. Using …