The latest from the MySQL community

We've discussed today how we should implement MySQL Version advisory in mk-audit tool. One obvious questions was to look at the end of life - it is often bad idea to run MySQL versions past end of life as even security bugs may not be fixed in these (though do not get paranoid, if you're running MySQL in isolated environment the risk may be low).
So how does EOL schedule looks ?

MySQL defines Active Lifecycle and Extended Lifecycle for release where first one is 2 years since initial GA release and second is further 3 years of life in "critical bug fixes only" mode with releases available for premium (Silver+) Support offerings.

For MySQL Community users this means only releases within Active Life Cycle will be made. For example MySQL 4.1 had end of its …

After my previous post there were questions raised about Index Merge on Multiple Indexes vs Two Column Index efficiency. I mentioned in most cases when query can use both of the ways using multiple column index would be faster but I also went ahead to do some benchmarks today.

I'm using couple of simple tables:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. CREATE TABLE `t1000idxmerge` (
2.   `i` int(11) NOT NULL,
3.   `j` int(11) NOT NULL,
4.   `val` char(10) NOT NULL,
5.   KEY `i` (`i`),
6.   KEY `j` (`j`)
7. ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
8.  
9. CREATE TABLE `t1000idx2` (
10.   `i` int(11) NOT NULL,
11.   `j` int(11) NOT NULL,
12.   `val` char(10) NOT …

Next week I'll be doing a webcast with Paul Clenahan on the topic of how software developers and OEMs can leverage open source principles (not just open source). Paul is from Actuate (the company behind BIRT development and the BIRT Exchange).

It's not often that people talk about the community side of commercial software development. The principles behind open source, like open and modular architecture or user/developer extensibility are often ignored by commercial software firms. Some are starting to embrace the practices that have made open source successful without necessarily opening their source code. This is part of an ongoing shift in the software industry as it struggles to cope with commoditization, increased compeitiveness, and (in some sectors) the …

Newsflash: Perl 6 is not dead (in case you thought it was)!

I stumbled upon this most excellent series of posts by Moritz Lenz of perlgeek.de that describe the differences between Perl 5 and the upcoming Perl 6 (thanks to Andy Lester for the link). The posts are done in the form of tutorials, which helps comprehension. Simply awesome, Moritz.

It seems like Perl 6 is going to be a lot more object oriented, but such orientation is optional and not forced upon programmers, like in, say, Java. It warms my heart that I will be able to do this (you did see the …

Holy cow... It really works!! (Just like they promised!)

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Crisis has struck! This week’s Log Buffer editor had to beg off at the eleventh hour when his time vanished. It happens. But, in every crisis, an opportunity (well . . .  maybe, maybe not). The opportunity — an open discussion of this week’s best database blog articles. Readers in control.

Log Buffer is always looking for editors, so if you’d like to step forward and publish one on your own blog, read the Log Buffer guidelines and send me an email.

I’m going to go through my bookmarks and add my own presently. I hope to hear from you!

This post is the first in a series of articles which serves to highlight the services of the Launchpad platform which hosts the MySQL Server, MySQL Forge, MySQL Sandbox and Drizzle Server projects. I will be walking you through the various pieces of the platform and provide examples of using each of the services. I will cover in depth the source code management services which all three projects now rely upon. The code management services are the critical piece of the development platform. In addition, I will show you how to use the Blueprints, Bugs, Answers and Translations services that many MySQL ecosystem projects, including the MySQL Sandbox and …

You have a typical rpm installation of mysql, and the process is crashing. Here are the basic steps needed to find out more info about a crash:

• Configure the OS to be able to create corefiles. (Redhat details), (Solaris details)
  
• Tell mysqld to create a corefile by adding the following options to my.cnf:

[mysqld_safe]
core-file-size=unlimited

[mysqld]
core-fileUsually the corefile will be created in the datadir with a name like core.2921 where 2921 was the pid of the running process. The location is configurable on most OS's.

You'll need the following to study the core file:

• exact mysqld binary that created the core file
…

Patrick Galbraith wrote in his blog about switching to innodb_file_per_table.  For those that don't know about this setting, it places the data for the tables into .ibd files within the database dir instead of storing it in the ibdata files in the main datadir.  This is useful if you don't want to babysit your innodb tablespace.  At least, that was my main reason for wanting to use it.  There is still dictionary data stored in the ibdata file(s) so you can't just remove them.

Anyhow, the delima Patrick wrote about is recovering the space used by the ibdata files in the datadir after you have converted the tables to one file per table.  I commented on his blog, but thought it worth a full post to be sure others could find my solution.

1. 
   
2. Backup your data (cuz, you never know)
   
…