The latest from the MySQL community

Yesterday I visited the MySQL Customer Conference in Munich, as I did last year. The agenda was quite similar to last year's agenda, but I was really surprised how much Sun hardware and software products were integrated (forced?) into most of the not so technical talks.

All in all the conference was okay, but not as good as last year.

It's been about a week since the initial launch of the first 5.0 packages and the OurDelta website, so it's time for some first impressions and an update on what's going on right now...

• 
  
• Immediately lots of hits on the site (from 67 distinct countries), most downloads and repo retrieves started happening a few days later.
  
• Interest spiked even more when we put up the Debian 4.0 (Etch) packages, apparently there was serious pent-up demand there!
  
• Lots of positive responses from clients, user groups, global MySQL community, and in fact also from within Sun/MySQL. That's very nice, as it provides confirmation we're doing something worthwhile!
  
• No negative responses, blog posts or articles that I know of (and yes I did search around a bit through Google, …

It’s been about a week since the initial launch of the first 5.0 packages and the OurDelta website, so it’s time for some first impressions and an update on what’s going on right now…

• Immediately lots of hits on the site (from 67 distinct countries), most downloads and repo retrieves started happening a few days later.
• Interest spiked even more when we put up the Debian 4.0 (Etch) packages, apparently there was serious pent-up demand there!
• Lots of positive responses from clients, user groups, global MySQL community, and in fact also from within Sun/MySQL. That’s very nice, as it provides confirmation we’re doing something worthwhile!
• No negative responses, blog posts or articles that I know of (and yes I did search around a bit through Google, Technorati, etc) which is of …

Today we released version 3.0 of Zmanda Recovery Manger for MySQL. Here are the highlights of the release.

The new version of ZRM supports Zmanda Management Console (ZMC) running on 32- and 64-bit Ubuntu and Debian. We received quite a few requests for providing such support in the past.

In addition to Linux and Solaris, the ZRM server can now run on Windows. We supported logical and VSS-based backup for MySQL on Windows for a long time, but sometimes it was a challenge to introduce ZRM running on Linux/Solaris to all-Windows shops. Based on feedback from customers, prospects and from our partner MySQL, we have developed the version of ZRM that can protect MySQL in all-Windows environments.

We expanded the number of supported snapshot technologies by adding EMC CLARiiON SnapView to the list. This mid-range storage array is a staple for many data …

That's always been my M.O., I guess, but last week was pretty busy:

Flyway

I went down to the Flyway Film Festival in Pepin, Wisconsin over the weekend to screen "Cottonwood", a short film I directed over the summer as part of the 48 Hour Film Project.

I gave a brief Q&A about the making of the film, then did some schmoozing at the filmmaker's reception. I had a great chat with the director of "Redneck Zombies"--the guy was hilarious.

"Cottonwood" is five minutes long--six with credits--and was written, shot, edited and scored in exactly forty-eight hours. And although "Cottonwood" looks like a film that was made in an absolute, …

"Why Falcon Doesn't Work Anymore"

Recap: After the MySQL Dev meeting in Riga, Philip "Troublemaker" Stoev, reported a serious problem with Falcon recovery. Ann suspected that the problem not a true recovery bug, which Jim confirmed.

The problem wasn't that we found a bug. The problem was that we didn't.

Run-up to Riga

The Falcon team was really rockin' in the last half of August and early September. With the Dev meeting looming, all changes for the 6.0.7 alpha had to be pushed by month's end, otherwise we'd lose weeks of QA testing.

Lots …

Have you ever heard about VoiceXML? It's a W3C standart that allows you to build web pages that are accessed by voice! It's very used for services like travel tickets selling, hotel reservation, bank account information and so on. In this post, we'll give you a general view of how to make a basic hotel reservation
application with VoiceXML and how to run it using Glassfish and MySQL.

First of all, for VoiceXML applications, we need a voice gateway. We used the Voxeo, it's free and provides you with phone numbers that you can call for free using Skype. All you need to do is create a free account in Voxeo and register your application by informing it's URL. After registering you'll receive the unique phone number for your application.

We'll assume you already know the basics of VoiceXML syntax for the …

Have you ever heard about VoiceXML? It’s a W3C standart that allows you to build web pages that are accessed by voice! It’s very used for services like travel tickets selling, hotel reservation, bank account information and so on. In this post, we’ll give you a general view of how to make a basic hotel reservation
application with VoiceXML and how to run it using Glassfish and MySQL.

First of all, for VoiceXML applications, we need a voice gateway. We used the Voxeo, it’s free and provides you with phone numbers that you can call for free using Skype. All you need to do is create a free account in Voxeo and register your application by informing it’s URL. After registering you’ll receive the unique phone number for your application.

We’ll assume you already know the basics of VoiceXML syntax for the …

My esteemed colleague Giuseppe Maxia dropped me a line to say that my previous example of using "Having", while completely accurate, would probably be slower than a join, especially just for fetching back two items across a large dataset. Well, I'm nothing if up to a bit of fact checking and certainly aggregate functions (such as count) are seen as slower in performance than a join.

The use of "Having" is really intended for a situation where you might have many items you want to match against in such a "many-to-many" table, not necessarily for two items. So I could definitely see Giuseppe being right.

The queries we will pit against each other are below.

In the right corner, the join query aka "The Italian Pasta-bruiser":

SELECT …

We have written before about the importance of using numeric types as keys, but maybe you've inherited a schema that you can't change or have chosen string types as keys for a specific reason. Either way, the character sets used on joined columns can have a significant impact on the performance of your queries.

Take the following example, using the InnoDB storage engine:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. CREATE TABLE `t1` (
2. `char_id` char(6) NOT NULL,
3. `v` varchar(128) NOT NULL,
4. PRIMARY KEY (`char_id`)
5. ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
6.  
7. CREATE TABLE `t2` (
8. `id` int UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
…