The latest from the MySQL community

Alpha version 5.06 of the BLOB streaming engine for MySQL has been released. You can download the source code from www.blobstreaming.org/download. The documentation has also been updated.

What's new in 5.06:

• The BLOB streaming engine can now be used with MyISAM tables as well as tables created by any other MySQL storage engine. 
• The name of the PrimeBase BLOB streaming engine has been changed from MyBS to PBMS which stands for "PrimeBase Media Streaming".

This version introduces a couple of new term:

• streaming-enabled table: This is any table created by a streaming-enabled engine such as PBXT, or has triggers defined on blob referencing columns that notify the PBMS engine when BLOB references are inserted, updated, and deleted.
• BLOB reference column: This is a column in a stream-enabled table that contains PBMS BLOB references and …

What or who is Amira?Well... Many would know Amira is to David as My is to Monty.Amira also has all the same letters as Maria, except that it is in PDP "middle-endian" byte order.It is also the codename of a little known project while I was at MySQL: Soon after Oracle acquired Innobase OY, the powers that be at MySQL did not want to solely rely on InnoDB (or BerkeleyDB) as a transactional data

Belgian consultancy company Element 61 has just posted an opinion piece under the disguise of a review on open source ETL.

What a load of utter nonsens.  Try reading this:

Instead of using SQL statements to transform data, an Open Source ETL tool gives the developer a standard set of functions, error handling rules and database connections. The integration of all these different components is done by the Open Source ETL tool provider. The straightforward transformations can be implemented very quickly, without the hassle of writing queries, connecting to data sources or writing your own error handling process. When there are complex transformations to make, Open Source ETL tools will often not offer out-of-the-box solutions.

Well Mr Jan Claes, we’re perfectly capable of handling …

This one was to planned to leave the hangar late last week, but a well hidden bug in the table-comparison kept us from finishing the release. But now it’s ready, the next release of our current GA release of MySQL Workbench, Version 5.0.26.
We did some minor tweaking on the UI - the property-pane now shows object-properties for objects on the MySQL-Model-Page too and we’re using another algorithm for the Autolayout-Feature (this needs to be optimized, it’s a basic implementation for now). Please check out the new version right from our main download page.

The other day we began to encounter weird and random errors on small and innocent queries that shouldn’t give any errors at all. It all lead to one of our most basic health checks failing for no apparent reason.

The first clue that popped into our minds was related to case-sensitivity, since the failing check was looking for the column names of the only table in the schema with UPPER CASE name. This symptom was especially weird since all of this was happening on MySQL setups running on Windows, and so we’re not sure if this was being caused by some internal code library, MySQL, or Windows itself.

Since that was the only clue we then had, it seemed obvious that we should start fiddling with the lower_case_table_names system variable. After a couple of restarts, this approach was leading us nowhere, so we finally gave up on it. …

Can you hear me back there? Anyone have a problem hearing me?

Let's have a look here then... Blog is active, name chosen, sidebar seems to work. Hmmm this Sun blogging system isn't too bad. Looks like I can configure this pretty much how I want it as I get some time.

Well, this is Dups on the Sun/MySQL Web Team and this will be my technical blog of things done, of things to come, of things to do and of things a-happening for anything that isn't well, personal and about photography. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, you might want to mosey on over to http://www.dups.ca/blog and my photo blog at http://www.dups.ca

So what's my expertise?

I always joke that I am the dumbest person in the room. My "expertise" often involves me …

(Or “the return of 451 CAOS Links“)

Having been a bit busy for the last three weeks I have a bit of catching up to do on the latest open source software news. Here’s the headlines that caught my eye.

MySQL co-founder resigns from Sun
No, not that one. David Axmark resigned stating “I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them. It would be far better for me to “retire” from employment and work with MySQL and Sun on a less formal basis.” If I may paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one co-founder may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both …

The rationale for this change is that MIXED mode as default may break existing applications, where statements like the following are used:

UPDATE t1 SET a=1 WHERE @@server_id = 1; …

Letzte Woche endete das »XAMPP kompakt«-Preisausschreiben und gerade eben habe ich die Päckchen mit den Gewinnen zur Post gebracht. Zunächst zur Preisfrage: Wer gilt als der Vater des Apache Webservers? Die richtige Antwort ist: Rob McCool. Wer sich für weitere Details zu den Antworten interessiert, der sei auf meinen privaten Blogbeitrag zu diesem Thema hingewiesen.

Herzlichen Glückwunsch an die zehn Gewinner. Die Bücher und drei T-Shirts gehen an: Jan aus Hamburg, Michael aus Berlin, Daniel aus Pichl bei Wels in Österreich, Uwe aus Wiesenburg, Stephan aus Offenburg, Vadim aus Heidenheim und anderen, die aber nicht persönlich genannt werden wollen oder noch nicht auf meine Gewinnbenachrichtung reagiert haben. …

If you use MySQL, you may want to give OpenSolaris a try. Why? It's open source and has great features, like ZFS and DTrace, which make life a lot easier for MySQL DBAs.  

• ZFS is a 128-bit file system that automates common administrative tasks, protects data from corruption, provides compression, and allows for adding and removing storage easily (just to name a few things its capable of).  It is great for MySQL deployments in that DBAs can add or remove storage without restarting the database and fast snapshots are a breeze.  Additonally, ZFS shows better performance than UFS.  See these results performed by MySQL. 
• DTrace helps administrators analyze, debug, and optimize their application environment.  It's a great tool for MySQL DBAs since it …