The latest from the MySQL community

Here is a little tid bit about a useful MySQL extension to the SQL standard, since I have given this same hint to several people in a short timeframe. A good friend from good old Berlin who runs a site for selling car parts was the first to ask, so I am giving him credit for bringing this nifty operator back to mind. Essentially the problem is that frequently we want to easily handle matching against some value or NULL with the same code. Obviously the standard expects you to switch from the standard equal operator to "IS" for matching a NULL. After all NULL is not equal to anything. Right, but its tedious to handle this in the code so MySQL invented the "<=>" operator aka the "NULL-safe equal to operator". Also very useful in combination with prepared statements.

Side note: I must …

So, here is a hypothetical problem:

There exists a table on a MS SQL "client" server (think, one step up from Access, or MS SQL Server stripped way down)

That machine is on the other side of a VPN link

I want to keep a table or the appearance of a table in MySQL that shadows that table, in close to real time as possible.

The MS SQL table doesnt have a "time this row was last updated" column.

The MS SQL developer cant/wont put on update triggers on his system.

So far, I've considered the following possible solutions:

* Have the PHP and Perl apps that speak to MySQL also keep a connection to the MS SQL table, and do the necessary joins and such in the app, instead of the database.

* Write a daemon that keeps a DBI::MSSQL connection and a DBI::MySQL connection open, and keeps polling the MS SQL table and writing it to MySQL. This is …

We are going to show the effects of the new patches applied to Percona HighPerf release. As you see from the following graphs, there is significant difference to normal version when the data bigger than buffer pool (right graph shows CPU usage)

The workload emulates TPC-C and has a same characteristic to DBT-2 (it is not DBT-2, but custom scripts, we will publish them eventually). There are no delays between transactions (no thinking time, no keying time), it uses MySQL C API and the server side prepared statement.

The server has 8core CPU and RAID storage (RAID10 / 6 disks). The data population is along to the scale factor 40WH (:=~4GB). It is enough bigger than the data cache of the storage.

main common settings

innodb_buffer_pool_size = 2048M
innodb_thread_concurrency = 0 …

If you are a football (soccer) fan, then F.C. Internazionale may mean something to you. Or perhaps its more common name, Inter Milan sounds familiar? Next in our Use Case Competition articles, here's Corrado Pandiani's experience, about using MySQL to power inter.it, one of the most popular soccer sites in Europe. Not only that, but inter.it is using the latest MySQL 5.1 technology.

Sacha asks whether switching support providers is really that difficult, while Bill brings up the question of open standards. READ MORE

CA and IBM, two of the so-called Big Four in systems management software, announced this week a federated configuration management database (CMDB) system for interoperability of their software. Something like this comoing from two of Big Four (BMC, CA, HP and IBM) wouldn’t normally hold much meaning for open source players such as GroundWork, Hyperic and Zenoss, but it actually does for a couple of reasons.

First, part of the technology that CA and IBM are using to link up their systems management software, which allows it to share information between the two CMDBs, is actually open source software itself from the Eclipse Cosmos Project. CA and IBM said the Eclipse Cosmos software accelerated implementation of the CMDB Federation (CMDBf) specification and the two vendors plan to contribute code …

I know this is not one of my normal type of posts, but I really wanted to get this out to raise some awareness on the topic of cancer which most of us do not think about because it does not affect us directly.  It is sad how many people are affected by cancer and how many people die every year because of losing fight with cancer.

It is wonderful when famous people who can help make a difference do things to help a cause.  One of those people is Lance Armstrong, winner of Tour de France a record-breaking seven consecutive years.  He is also a cancer survivor.   Today I found out that Lance Armstrong announced that he is coming back to professional cycling in order to raise cancer awareness. Below is the full press release from …

Dana Blankenhorn suggests that add-ons make good business sense for Acquia and other open-source vendors, and he's dead-on. Zimbra climbed to $20 million in just two years on the back of a successful add-on strategy to its open-source Microsoft Exchange killer. SugarCRM is doing well with such a strategy, too.

It's not, however, simply a way to make money. It's also a way to better define and feed community.

Seem counterintuitive? Perhaps it is for those companies like Red Hat, Acquia, and others that are built to harvest preexisting open-source communities (Linux and Drupal, respectively). But for companies like Zimbra, MySQL, etc., an add-on strategy enables a vendor to focus wholly on delivering a quality open-source project while simultaneously creating a robust, scalable business.

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OK, I'm not really bilingual at all. But, fortunately for our French dolphins out there, some French MySQL users have translated some articles on MySQL into French! Developpez.com, a French-language developer website, now has translated my Rolling Sums and Aggregates in MySQL article from a number of months ago. Thanks to Joris Crozier and Arnaud Feltz for doing the translation! If I could remember anything from my years of French class in high school, I suppose I could read the article, but alas, the mind has a habit of forgetting those things which we don't use on a daily basis.

Apart from my article, there are lots of other MySQL resources …