In reviewing some of my notes I thought it was relevant to ensure this small MySQL gem is documented for my history purposes.

Historically I’ve seen people do a complex SELECT statement twice, first to get a COUNT(*) and then to retrieve the data, perhaps in a paginated format. In MySQL you can combined both SELECT statements into 1 SQL. You still need a second SQL statement, but it is less impactful to your system.

Here is how?

mysql> select sql_calc_found_rows * from mysql.user limit 2;
...
2 rows in set (0.01 sec)

mysql> select found_rows();
+--------------+
| found_rows() |
+--------------+
|            5 |
+--------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

As half of the world population already knows, the MySQL conference is coming in less than 3 weeks. Since this event only happens once a year, lasts only 4 days, and costs more than a Russian mail-order bride, I'd really like to get the most out of it. Considering that the schedule is completely packed, with 8 (!!) events going on in parallel, I imagine things can get a little frantic. Additionally, I've never been to a conference of such size before and I'm not sure what to expect.

…

This article contains my notes and detailed instructions on setting up a MySQL cluster. After reading it, you should have a good understanding of what a MySQL cluster is capable of, how and why it works, and how to set one of these bad boys up. Note that I'm primarily a developer, with an interest in systems administration but I think that every developer should be able to understand and set up a MySQL cluster, at least to make the dev environment more robust.

Notes

• High availability. If one or some of the machines go down, the cluster will stay up, as long as there is at least one copy of all data still present. The more redundant copies of data there are, the more machines you can afford to lose.
• Scalability. Distributed architecture allows for load balancing. If your MySQL …

On several occasions this year I’ve been prompted to mention in conversation Ingres as an alternative Open Source Database. Jonathan Levin in A list of Open-Source Alternatives to Business Applications was the latest example where Ingres was not mentioned and perhaps it should have been.

Want features like online backup, online alter, multi-master replication, parallel queries and partitioning. These are all long existing features in a more mature product then MySQL presently. Is this a sleeping giant that nobody remembers about? Ingres has been around a long time, in fact my experience extends back to 1988 (that’s 20 years).

From a product perspective they have created a number of pre-packaged product stacks, for example …

Top marks to Jay Pipes for getting the Forge 2.0 finally out after quite some time, as well as in the midst of the MySQL Conference he is organizing.

I am worried however about some of the content, as shown in the screenshot below, the opening page lists Worklog tasks/features for versions 6.x or 7.x , that’s ok, but features in 9.x. Where is the practicality of thinking more then 2 releases ahead, and just having a future bucket. Indeed, we have 5.1 and 6.0 already frozen and not releases, so 6.x is already 3 releases out.

Tonight we were told at the NY PHP Meeting MySQL 5.1 is not due to late Q2, so that’s at least June 2008.
The …

Tonight’s New York PHP community meeting was a talk by Philip Antoniades the MySQL Systems Engineering Manager.

With an interesting topic opener “A New Hope” I could not resist to hear Philip’s official MySQL presentation.

Some small points I took away from the presentation.

• Sun is committed to Postgres with Josh Berkus and a team of 20 people.
• Solaris.next is the next version of Sun, I thought that was a cool internal name, be it obvious
• A marketing slide of the highest traffic websites listed Meebo, yousendit, alexaholic, techcrunch, feedburneer, istockphoto and vimeo as reported by Pingdom. Not sure were they get their data, but Google, Yahoo, FaceBook, Wikipedia, MySpace, Fotolog are sites I think of as high traffic. Indeed 3 of these listed sites I’ve never heard of. …

Navicat For MySQL is a GUI for MySQL developers. I've tried a few tools before but somehow got attached to Navicat due to a few nice features that I'm not going to go into right now. Navicat suffers from a couple of annoying bugs and random crashes. I don't know if I can help fix the random ones but if I can at least file the ones I can reproduce, everyone wins. I have the latest as of today version 8.0.23.

Bug [NAL-15328]: Structure Sync Fails to notice encoding differences

64 bit MySQL (5.0) is now integrated into OpenSolaris. It will be available in build 87. 64 bit should work with 32 bit generated data-files and vice versa, although MySQL recommends you to do a full dump and reload, at least in production.

To enable the 64 bit server in SMF do:

% svcadm disable mysql:version_50
% svccfg                                               
svc:> select mysql:version_50
svc:/application/database/mysql:version_50> setprop mysql/enable_64bit=true
svc:/application/database/mysql:version_50> quit
% svcadm refresh mysql:version_50
% svcadm enable mysql:version_50

Also check out the latest Netbeans 6.1 beta with integrated MySQL support.

64 bit MySQL (5.0) is now integrated into OpenSolaris. It will be available in build 87. 64 bit should work with 32 bit generated data-files and vice versa, although MySQL recommends you to do a full dump and reload, at least in production.

To enable the 64 bit server in SMF do:

% svcadm disable mysql:version_50
% svccfg                                               
svc:> select mysql:version_50
svc:/application/database/mysql:version_50> setprop mysql/enable_64bit=true
svc:/application/database/mysql:version_50> quit
% svcadm refresh mysql:version_50
% svcadm enable mysql:version_50

Also check out the latest Netbeans 6.1 beta with integrated MySQL support.

April 14-17th is going to be an exciting time. Why? Because the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo is going to be held in Santa Clara, CA. Who would want to miss out on a chance to lurk around, let alone talk to, some of the smartest people in the MySQL world? Well, those who don't have at least $1000+, of course. A 3 day pass to the conference without tutorials costs a whopping $1199. A full pass would dry up your pockets $1499.

Well, "good news everyone". Thanks to Sheeri Cabral of The Pythian Group, PlanetMySQL.org, Jeremy, and, …