The latest from the MySQL community

I am happy to announce that mylvmbackup version 0.10 has been released.

You can download the updated package from the project home page or via the openSUSE Build Service.

This version fixes some bugs and includes new functionality:

• Applied patch from Marc Haber: added option --keep_snapshot that will skip the removal of the backup snapshot before terminating the script. Providing the option --backuptype=none will now skip creating a backup using the builtin backup modules. Both options provide more flexibility when using hooks for performing the actual backup tasks or when the snapshot is considered to be the actual backup.
• Added two new hooks: "backupsuccess" and "backupfailure" which are called respectively upon success of failure of the backup operation (Bug #264089) …

When optimizing queries for customers, the first thing I do with a slow query is figure out what it's trying to do. You can't fully optimize a query unless you know how to consider alternative ways to write it, and you can't do that unless you know what the query "means." I frequently run into a situation where I'm forced to stop and ask the developers what they were trying to do with COUNT(). This is database-agnostic, not related to MySQL.

The problem is when the COUNT() contains a column name, like this:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. SELECT count(col1) FROM TABLE;

If you know your SQL well, you know COUNT() has two meanings. 1) count the number of rows 2) count the number of values. Sometimes, but not always, these are the same thing. COUNT(*) always counts the number of rows in the result. If …

It is no secret that I am the Program Chair for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, and am truly excited about it (big shoes to fill in from Jay). I expect it to be a great conference, with over 2,000 attendees and lots and lots of great talks. The paper submissions have been coming through, the excellent voters have been voting, and the progress is impressive. Its a great learning experience.

Now, I’m excited to tell you that I’m also going to organise the Open Source Databases MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2009. Its going to be in Hobart, Tasmania, in January 2009, and again, I’m excited. Read the …

Greetings from the University of Latvia in Riga, where the local activities related to Software Freedom Day 2008 are in full swing! We've just finished the introductionary talk "Software freedom in Latvia"  by Evijs Taube (LATA) and Leo Trukš

Greetings from the University of Latvia in Riga, where the local activities related to Software Freedom Day 2008 are in full swing! We've just finished the introductionary talk "Software freedom in Latvia"  by Evijs Taube (LATA) and Leo Trukš

I had the pleasure of sitting right across the MySQL GUI Tools Team, and decided to try my hand at Workbench (Workbench for Linux, that is). Congratulations to the entire team for the great work! I am excited.

First up, the things you need on Ubuntu 8.04 (I created a fresh install, and installed all the updates), if you’re downloading the binary:

• liblua5.1-0
• libglitz1
• libzip1
• libmysqlclient15off
• mysql-common
• libglitz-glx1

Workbench on Linux

It works. It starts up. Its exciting. Of course, when I try to edit a table name or even create a table, it fails by segmentation fault. Segfaults are annoying… so the best way to debug it, is of course to run catchsegv. …

Well, I'm back in "Blighty" (that's slang for Britain). I've been trying for the last 2-3 weeks to find jobs in the UK.Since I wrote a while ago "Which Database to Choose When Looking for a Job", I wanted to continue it with some of my findings. I did a lot research on IT specific job sites and used 2 main searches, "database developer" (because that's what I want to do) and "mysql" to help me find job posts that I was interested in. 
Jobs Situation for "Database Developer"
I'll describe the results for this search in percentages. Firstly, 90% of the jobs are for MS SQL server. Those jobs usually stick to mainly developing and not administrating. In those 90% you have a good mix of junior positions(22-28k GBP per year), medium paid positions (30-45k GBP per year) and advanced positions (50-70k GBP per …

About 250 MySQL/Sun engineers are meeting in Riga, Latvia, for the annual internal MySQL Developers Meeting. 250 sounds like a large number. And a group picture is quite impressive.

Today is Software Freedom Day, which is organized at the local university, and includes talks by Mark Callaghan (Google), Mårten Mickos (MySQL), Domas Mituzas (Wikimedia Foundation).

The full program also mentions free beer, which is an irresistible combination!

Man, what did I do before strtotime().  Oh, I know, I had a 482 line function to parse date formats and return timestamps.  And I still could not do really cool stuff.  Like tonight I needed to figure out when Thanksgiving was in the US.  I knew it was the 4th Thursday in November.  So, I started with some math stuff and checking what day of the week Nov. 1 would fall on.  All that was making my head hurt.  So, I just tried this for fun.

strtotime("thursday, november ".date("Y")." + 3 weeks")

That gives me Thanksgiving.  Awesome.  It is cool for other stuff too.  At its very basic, it can take a MySQL datetime field and turn it into a timestamp.  Very handy for date calculations.  It also understands RFC 2822 and ISO 8601 date formats.  …

The 1.0 Alpha of Tungsten Replicator is out. Actually it's been out since Tuesday but it's been a busy week. Binary downloads are available here.

The Alpha release offers basic statement replication for MySQL 5.0 on Linux, Solaris, MacOSX, and Windows platforms. The setup is very simple, and there are procedures for master failover as well as performing consistency checks. If you work at it, you'll find bugs. That's a promise, not a threat. Please log them in the project JIRA. We gladly accept feature requests, too.

Meanwhile, the …