The latest from the MySQL community

Marten Mickos, who runs the MySQL business inside of Sun, will be featured next week on Sun's "Innovation Insider" interactive web radio show.  Marten will be talking about the upcoming Software Feedom Day (September 20), business & technology innovation, MySQL 5.1, Swedish drinking songs and more.  Best of all, Marten will be available to answer the questions you post to the show.  The show is live Thursday September 4 at 12:30 pm pacific time and will be available for replay.

I have challenged Marten that he should do the show in a penguin suit to show our commitment to all platforms, but since it's radio, it may be hard to tell... 

• Blog Talk Radio: …

I am pleased to announce that the Beta version of PBXT has just been released. You can download the source code of the storage engine from www.primebase.org/download. I have also updated the documentation for this version.

Configuring and building the engine is easier than ever now. To configure PBXT all you have to do is specify the path to the MySQL source code tree (after building MySQL), for example:

./configure --with-mysql=/home/foo/mysql/mysql-5.1.26-rc

The PBXT configure command will retrieve all required options from the MySQL build. For example whether to do a debug or optimized build and where to install the plugin are determined automatically, depending on how you configured MySQL.

This was a source …

I recently needed to configure mysql failover on some of our test machines. Thanks to Sheeri’s helpful blog entry which provides a simple failover lua script, configuring failover is a simple matter. However, the machines are running centos-5.2 and centos doesn’t provide an rpm for mysql-proxy. This blog entry describes how to build your own.

The latest mysql-proxy (0.6.1) is apparently not backward-compatible with 0.6.0 and earlier. It incorrectly handles the case when one of the backend machines is down. Instead of just marking it as down, it errors out completely. This makes it rather difficult to use it for failover scenarios. People have complained about this for a while. Bugs 34793 and …

On August 22 2008, after reading a post by Lewis Cunningham, I did for the first time a quick evaluation of iCloud, an Internet Operating System by Xcerion.

From a User prospective, an O.S. is a set of applications and a kernel - i.e. the basis on which other applications run. An Internet O.S. is an O.S. that runs in the cloud. You have to image a Desktop with its own icons and a “start” toolbar - running on your browser.

When you double-click on an icon the application linked by that icon will be opened. You can move the window, resize it, maximize it and minimize it - all within your browser.

If you maximize you browser (F11 if you use Internet Explorer) an external …

Flying to Auckland this arvo (that's afternoon in Aussie ;-) for a week and a bit. If you would like to catch up, have dinner, talk MySQL, Drizzle, Open Source in general, smart business innovation, or any other interesting stuff, drop me a line or SMS (not call please I might be teaching) +61-438 210 269. I'll have transport.

The second public alpha version (1.0.14-alpha) of HoneyMonitor Audit Pro - the Edition of the HoneySoftware’s GUI for MySQL™ mainly oriented to Server Administration, Monitoring and Tuning - will be released soon.

In this article I’ll try to describe the new features implemented and the most important bugs fix of this version.

You will find the complete list of bugs fix and improvements in a next post - when we will release v.1.0.14-alpha - and in the Release Notes File included in the build.

Your questions, enhancement requests and comments are welcome.

Contents:

A. New Features

1. Audit System
1.0. Introduction
1.1. Replication
1.1.1. STMT - New connection Option
1.2. Support for the Maria Engine
1.3. Other bugs fix

2. Performance Reports
2.0. Introduction
2.1. Custom Reports
2.2. Report Templates

3. Other …

How dramatic a topic. Anyways, I just send of an email to the PDO list, where I CC'ed a long list of developers from the community and RDBMS vendors. I hope that this will become the starting point for work on a PDO version 1.1. This will hopefully will just be the first step towards even bigger things to come, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. I really think that today we have more developers and vendors interested than ever. Now we just need to figure out how to work together within the PHP development and legal model. But recent discussions, especially with various vendors, have made me more hopeful than ever that we have a chance to make it happen. Please join the discussion if you are interested.

That being said, I wanted to make a few additional points. Who did I include or know about: I contacted Ulf from Sun. …

How dramatic a topic. Anyways, I just send of an email to the PDO list, where I CC'ed a long list of developers from the community and RDBMS vendors. I hope that this will become the starting point for work on a PDO version 1.1. This will hopefully will just be the first step towards even bigger things to come, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. I really think that today we have more developers and vendors interested than ever. Now we just need to figure out how to work together within the PHP development and legal model. But recent discussions, especially with various vendors, have made me more hopeful than ever that we have a chance to make it happen. Please join the discussion if you are interested.

That being said, I wanted to make a few additional points. Who did I include or know about: I contacted Ulf from Sun. …

Though the event is still happening in Charlottesville, VA Nov. 14-16th (Fri night through Sunday), the new web page for OpenSQL Camp is http://www.opensqlcamp.org. The content has been ported over to MediaWiki, and a captcha has been put in place that is activated on any page change that adds an external URL.

Whether you are into MySQL, PostgreSQL, Drizzle, or some other open source SQL database, go forth and register for OpenSQL Camp, without having to login! (Disclosure: if you do not create a login, your IP is tracked.)

One should use timestamps rather than datetimes as timestamps are four bytes and datetimes are eight bytes, right?  This makes sense as smaller indexes and tables are faster than larger ones. However, when I was trying to quantify the improvement (I’m strange that way), I found the exact opposite - when used as a criteria, a timestamp is slower than a datetime. Often much slower.

For example, for this simple sql, when purchaseDate was a timestamp, the query took about 9.4 seconds and the datetime version took about 4.3 seconds. In this case the data was in memory.

    select sum(unit) from Sale where purchaseDate >= '2001-07-01' and purchaseDate < '2001-08-01'

I did other tests, such as when data wasn’t cached and there was io, and I found cases where datetimes were much faster than timestamps, differences so extreme I’m hesitant to report them until I have a better explanation of what is …