The latest from the MySQL community

For those people starting with Kettle (Pentaho Data Integration) we created a Getting Started page on our Wiki.

Since I realized that for some people, simple and easy can never be simple and easy enough I created 8 mini-flash demos :

• Create a new transformation - create a step (flash demo, 0′20″)
• Create a hop between 2 steps (flash demo, 0′20″)
• Create a database connection (flash demo, 0′45″)
• …

To have online backups of MySQL, We recently bought a license for InnoBase/Oracle's InnoDB Hot Backup Tool, ibbackup. This tool, used in conjunction with innobackup, has worked great in creating a nightly backup, with no downtime during the backup. Not even nagios messages!

I run innobackup/ibbackup on one of our slaves (well, it's also a dual master, but not used by apps). innobackup produces a backup in a directory that I specified, and when run results in a time-stamped directory, as show below:


ls -l 2008-09-17_03-00-03/
total 276272
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 349 2008-09-17 03:00 backup-my.cnf
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 2008-09-17 03:55 grazr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 27 2008-09-17 03:55 ibbackup_binlog_info
-rw-r----- 1 root root 186109952 2008-09-17 03:55 ibbackup_logfile
-rw-r----- 1 root root 10485760 2008-09-17 03:00 ibdata1
-rw-r----- 1 root root …

Adobe support of Zend Framework announced at PHP conference READ MORE

TOTD #42 explained how to create a simple Java Server Faces application using NetBeans 6.1 and deploy on GlassFish. In the process it explained some basic JSF concepts as well. If you remember, it built an application that allows you to create a database of cities/country of your choice. In that application, any city/country combination can be entered twice and no errors are reported.

This blog entry extends TOTD #42 and show the list of cities, that have already been entered, starting with the letters entered in the text box. And instead of refreshing the entire page, it uses JSF Extensions to make an Ajax call to the endpoint and show the list of cities based upon …

Its no secret that all the MySQL Sun Database Group developers are here in Riga, Latvia for the developer’s meeting. I have my video camera on hand, and plan to conduct bite-sized interviews.

But that’s not why I’m writing this. This is for you. Since you can’t be here, is there something you’d like to ask a MySQL developer with regards to a bug you filed? A new feature request? A worklog item?

Write a comment, or drop me email at colin[at]mysql[dot]com. Be quick though, as the Q&A sessions I imagine, will be fairly impromptu.

There is a new tool that comes with MySQL that does backup / restore (MySQL 6.0 Backup Utility).   DBAs can now do backup / restore directly from the mysql command prompt.  For full details, see the documentation at:

 http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/6.0/en/backup-database-restore.html

 Additionally, Robin Schmacher, Director of Product Management at MySQL, gives a good introduction to the utility in this article.

Note: Version 6.0 is still in alpha, however, so changes are expected.

Quite commonly I get a question similar to this - "My Innodb Buffer Pool is already 90% full, should I be thinking about upgrading memory already?"
This is a wrong way to put the question. Unless you have very small database (read as database which is less than innodb_buffer_pool_size) You will have all buffer pool busy sooner or later.
How to figure out if it is time for upgrade when ?

Look at number of misses per second Check number of innodb file reads and writes per second and see how high are these. Decent drive can do some 150-200 IOs/sec this is how you can guess about the load. If you just get couple of reads per second your working set fits to the memory very well if it is hundreds you're likely to be IO bound or becoming one.

Look at Iowait iostat -dx 10 will show disk utilization. Low (less than 50%) means there are rarely anyone waiting from disk …

I saw some MySQL UDF code recently that uses the current_thd macro to get a THD object pointing to the current thread.

I was under the impression that this was not safe to do from a UDF? Am I wrong? Is a critical section needed to read or modify it?

The new MySQL 6.0 replacement API for the UDF interface looks like it specifically gives access to a THD object, similar to native functions. Is this just to make the interfaces more similar? Or is this because the current UDF interface (<=5.1) doesn't provide a safe way to access the current THD?

Ok, here’s your chance to make a recommendation on the front page layout for relationalnews.com , the new website that features news for all of the major relational database systems. Check out the three options below and leave a comment or email me with your own solution. If selected you will be credited one the site for your influence. 

The question is: we’re getting just over 1000 new articles per week from the feeds, and the current front page displays the title and summary of the latest 10 articles. This means lots of pagination clicking to see even the approximate 150 new articles for the current day. 

Option 1: display only the headlines, no article summaries, for the past 24 hours with links to the full article from the archive. Sorted by published date, limited to the past 24 hours …

At my current gig, we're trying to make a custom storage engine do something rather out of the ordinary.

Which isn't really a surprise, all new storage engines try to do something "out of the ordinary". If you need "ordinary", just use MyISAM or InnoDB. (Those two engines are, themselves, rather extraordinary...)

But in the process of trying to hunt one particular thing down, I am wishing again for a storage engine that is completely utterly blandly ordinary.

An example storage engine that has no tricks, no performance hacks, no elegant data structures, no clever code, and yet actually works, able to insert, update, delete, and select real data.

My "piggy engine" would be perfect, if I ever get around to finishing it.