The latest from the MySQL community

I’ve been working with a client recently who has SELinux on his servers.  It has been quite a struggle sometimes.

My colleages tell me that SELinux has a pretty noticeable performance impact.  I am not sure if we have benchmarks to support this; at any rate, the client said it’s OK, we’ll take the performance hit.

There have been a few problems (Nagios can’t run because it can’t write to its own pid file, etc etc).  Last night there was something new: “too many connections” when trying to connect to MySQL.  As a result the site was down, and it wasn’t possible to log in to MySQL and see why. But the oddest thing happened: mysqld would not shut down.  It was sitting basically idle, doing absolutely nothing, and wouldn’t stop. There was nothing in any log files to show what might be going on.

A MySQL Conference in Europe? Wrong: three MySQL Conferences in Europe!

Yes, this is the plan for next week - 21st of October in Munich and 23rd in London - and for mid November - 19th of November in Paris.

Each venue will host a full day of presentations, news and analysis on MySQL. You can have a look at the official web page for all the details, agenda and registration.

The content can satisfy the appetite of a technical audience and of more business-oriented IT managers at the same time. We will have sessions on performance, on scalability solutions and on Proxy, with hands-on the servers, difference parameters and tools. IT managers will probably find interesting a renewed set of HA solutions and some renewed views on the infrastructures used to power the Web.

Robin Schumacher, Director of …

If you use MySQL Replication, 99% of the times your main concern is to keep the master and the slave fully consistent and in sync. Some applications require exactly the opposite.

Let's take, for example, some reporting solutions. You may want to run reports against a data mart (ok, I can see some BI experts here jumping off their chairs - please forgive the simplification for the sake of this example), that is a subset of the whole historical data within your data warehouse. So, you may have a master server containing only the last 3 months of your sales and a slave containing three years of sales. Sales managers can happily to see current year/previous year rolling comparisons using the slave server and at the same time they can run faster current month/previous month reports on their master.

There are many ways to prepare the data mart and the historical DB. The easiest thing to do is to remove the oldest rows from the …

After receiving an email about talking with Robert David, Director of Sales at KickFire, I checked out recent news on KickFire, as there had been little written about this company aside from the big splash they made at the MySQL Users Conference back in April 2008.And, lo and behold, there was a piece of news, posted on October 14 - Kickfire Enters Into MySQL Enterprise Agreement With Sun

Matt Asay is pushing his favorite Open Source model again. The model where the majority of developers of a project work for a company and that company is creating a business around the project. There's nothing wrong with that model, but he seems to forget the other models time over time :)

Matt is absolutely right with 2 of the 3 things he wants you to consider.
A SI in the middle of a $50 million dollar project involving Alfresco not talking to Alfresco is just wrong. An SI not offering a support contract is also just wrong. But an SI forcing his customer to buy the commercially supported version from a vendor ? Where's the customer choice ?

The customer should have the option to choose for a commercially supported version or the free version. And preferably that should be an educated option.

Matt seems to forget about situations where …

The work on the next editions of MySQL Certification Exams is going well. My current focus is on the Developer exam. There is a little bit of overlap between the current Developer and DBA exams ('What is MySQL AB?') that need to be pruned. Most MySQL customers seem to have a lot of functional overlap between people titled Developers and DBAs. So what do you ask of an individual that quantifies their ability to develop software that accesses MySQL databases? Not their DBA skills or their joint Developer/DBA skills but just their developer skills.

The book used in the MySQL for Developers class is an amazing document. It covers many subjects in detail from basic SQL to query optimization. I am carefully picking my way through in search of prime exam material. This is what military analysts call a 'target rich environment' where there are so many things …

MySQL is the defacto database of choice for most WebScale and Cloud Computing deployments.

Every day you go to website like Facebook, CraigsList , eBay, Google, PriceGrabber, Yahoo!, and Zappos, you are touching a page that  uses MySQL.
MySQL's popularity is due in large part to its flexibility. MySQL supports over 20 platforms and scales to handle terabytes of data. And, because MySQL is open source, it can be customized to an application's unique specifications. This flexibility has two-fold benefits for ISVs: MySQL is better able to address their applications' specific needs and it won't impose restrictions on their future development.

Through the Sun Partner Advantage Program(SPA) , ISVs can now leverage Sun's entire portfolio of offerings - including MySQL. The SPA Program connects ISVs with free or deeply discounted technology offerings as …

Sorry for the outage, everyone. We’re looking into the causes of the downtime (and sponging the sweat off our keyboards), but for now we’re happy just to be back. Stay tuned for a real blog article soon.

Using SQL to generate SQL is a trick that is used by many DBA's and is a really useful way to achieve certain things. It's not that much used in applications, but for DBA's it is great, as it allows you to do certain things that would otherwise require a script or something like that. The idea is simple enough, you write a SQL statement that in turn will generate another SQL statement or set of statements, the generated SQL is written to a file, and then you run (for example run the mysql "source" command) on the file with the generated SQL.

Simple? Yes, but effective. As an example, using MySQL, lets say you wanted to have a script that would run "OPTIMIZE TABLE" on all tables with 1000 rows or more in the current database? You cannot do this with one SQL statement, right? To begin with, you can only run OPTIMIZE TABLE on one table at the time?
So we need an SQL statement that will generate a bunch of relevant OPTIMIZE TABLE …

VentureBeat and OStatic are among the news source reporting the launch of Cloudera a new vendor set up to provide support for Apache Hadoop and related projects.

Given the current economic outlook it’s great to see a new open source start-up rearing its head, and the list of founders indicates that this one has a good chance of survival. While VentureBeat is focused on the fact that Ex-Google, Yahoo, and Facebook employees are on the team, my eye was caught by the fact that Mike Oslon, Sleepycat Software founder and former CEO has been tempted out of semi-retirement.