We are always looking at different ways to help promote, inform and identify contributers, users and supports for Drizzle.

One way is to join the Linked In Drizzle group (click here when logged in). You will already see a few MySQL die hards, but also the need breed of names that are part of Drizzlemania.

For those that have been using Planet MySQL to follow the progress of Drizzle, we now have our own Planet Drizzle.

You can also get a RSS feed directly from http://feeds.feedburner.com/drizzle

I have been asked twice this week what version of MySQL I would choose for a new project.
As with most questions in life the answer is: It Depends?

In general I would now recommend for a new project to select 5.1, and he is why.

1. If it’s a new project and your not managing existing applications with older versions then 5.1 is slated for General Availability (GA) at some imminent time. Having been at Release Candidate (RC) for quite some time (almost 1 year), many people, both internally and in the community are just waiting for Sun/MySQL to get this version out.
2. MySQL 5.0 is in maintenance mode, it’s now 3 years old. MySQL is placing (I’m assuming) resourcing energies to current and future releases.
3. If your looking at releasing a product in the next 3 months for example, you do not want to consider the testing and deployment of a new version (e.g. 5.1) in the next 6-9 months.
…

Tonight I provided a scope in Best Design Practices for MySQL Applications - Part A of just how much there is to consider with a successful application. I only scratched the surface in some detail, a topic one could easily write a book on, and definitely provide a number more presentations.

At 42SQL we follow the “Scale 2 Success” (tm) approach covering Architecture, Availability, Scalability and Accountability. With this we are able to clearly provide a strategy towards building successful scalable enterprise solutions. For more information on how we may be able to help your organization with any performance and scalability needs, please use the Contact Form.

You can find a copy of my slides for this presentation at …

MySQL allows user specific options to be placed in a user options file under your home directory. This is handy if you use automated scripts or want to avoid typing in your MySQL user’s password everytime you login in. To do this, create the ~/.my.cnf with the options below:

[client]
user=mysqlusername
password=mysqlpassword

Then make sure no one else on the system can read this file. It’s essential for security as it contains your password in clear text!

$ chmod 600 ~/.my.cnf
$ ls -l ~/.my.cnf
-rw------- 1 alice alice 36 Aug 12 17:49 /home/alice/.my.cnf

Now you can just type mysql to login. Note that this will work for other MySQL clients like mysqldump. And you can always override the .my.cnf settings in the command line. For example:

$ mysql -ubob -pbobspassword

You can add other parameters to this file. For a full reference check out:
…

I came across another MySQL Monitoring product today, DBTuna. I’ve got a trial license of this commercial product so I’ll be looking into its installation, options and support and will be reporting back.

I came across this error recently when trying to modify the data type of a column.

ERROR 1025 (HY000): Error on rename of './sakila/#sql-1d91_5' to './sakila/inventory' (errno: 150)

Not the first time, and not the last time. A common problem with InnoDB tables, is the lack of information, you need to dig deeper with the following command (and appropriate security a well organized security profile will NOT have).

mysql> SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS;

...

------------------------
LATEST FOREIGN KEY ERROR
------------------------
080717 20:00:28 Error in foreign key constraint of table sakila/inventory:
there is no index in the table which would contain
the columns as the first columns, or the data types in the
table do not match the ones in the referenced table
or one of the ON ... SET NULL columns is declared NOT NULL. Constraint:
,
  CONSTRAINT "fk_inventory_film" FOREIGN KEY ("film_id") REFERENCES "film" ("film_id") ON UPDATE CASCADE …

Before I get to post my OSCON reflection I see I didn’t post this (which I reference).

At OSCON opening keynotes Tim O’Reilly Interviews Monty Widenius & Brian Aker. This provided some interesting answers in a Q & A session. Here is some of the discussion.

TO: So 6 months in. How is it with Sun?
BA: Really rewarding environment. My first question was? You are going to send me free H/W. No H/W has been delivered yet, or access to the masses, still hoping. Sun is a very engineering driven company.
MW. Thanks God we didn’t go public. Starting to do closed sourced components, going public this would have continued.

TO: Sun saved MySQL from public market/ insulated from market.
MW: 6 months in, Sun still trying to figure out what they bought. Sun has made a commitment to open source throughout the organization. …

Eric of Proven Scaling commented on a lack of IRC action in the normal mysql channels today when he visited the #drizzle channel on irc.freenode.net.

ebergen: I'm still in #mysql-dev and #planet.mysql but they are hardly active these days [1:51pm]
rbradfor: ebergen: funny, #drizzle is where the action is. [1:51pm]

There is active movement on the Drizzle project. Why is this? Well, I think most importantly is that there is active contribution from the community, at least 5 different companies and more individuals are pushing code to Drizzle, and it’s being accepted and incorporated. Something you can not say about the MySQL Community branch.

As I write this, there are 35 active people on the #drizzle channel now, and 137 members of the …

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