The latest from the MySQL community

I am very confused.

I subscribe to several email lists including MySQL and Ruby on Rails lists. Generally, I keep my mailbox clean except for a folder in which I was archiving messages Ruby on Rails.

A few days ago I noticed that my Ruby on Rails folder reached 65535 messages. Today, I was looking to reply to an email from Keith Murphy (to which I had previously replied as well) and was surprised to find that the particular message didn't show up in my search. This particular message was sent on April 30 so I started scanning all my emails received on that day.

Surprisingly, I didn't find it even after a careful visual scan. Not only that, I noticed several of emails I received in the last 2 weeks missing. My initial reply to Keith was still sitting in my Sent mail folder. My trash folder also had several emails that I had deleted but not the ones that were missing.

For the life of me I …

Right now there is a discussion on Planet MySQL regarding MySQL / Linux swap problem. Peter Zaitsev originally brought the problem of MySQL swapping to light. Recently, Dathan Pattishall also wrote about it in his post Linux 64-bit, MySQL, Swap and Memory. Don McAskill followed up with his post, MySQL and the Linux Swap problem, and an interesting way to get around the issue: "make swap partitions out of RAM disks." Don also points to another article by Kevin regarding …

Zack Urlocker says MySQL 5.1 has zero bugs. He may have been misquoted, or quoted out of context, but there it is. I’ll quote enough of it that you can’t take it out of context twice:

Mickos also said MySQL 5.1 has upgraded its reliability and ease of use over 2005’s v5.0.

“Now we can admit it, but this version is much improved over 5.0, which we weren’t totally happy with,” Mickos confided.

He reported that more than 1,300 bugs (997 in 2007, 386 so far in 2008) have been fixed in v5.1, and that, according to standard DBT2 benchmarks, the performance of v5.1 is 10 to 15 percent better than the previous version.

“This version now has zero bugs,” Urlocker told eWEEK.

You can check for yourself at the MySQL bug …

information_schema.global_variables and information_schema.global_status are two useful tables for getting information on the MySQL® server configuration and status. They have been introduced in MySQL® version 5.1.

You know that some status variables are ‘raw’ and they need a little manipulation to bring a kind of useful information. For example, let’s consider the variable BYTES_RECEIVED (i.e. the number of bytes received from all clients).

If you just select that variable you don’t have a useful information, but if you calculate the ratio ‘Bytes Received per Second’

(`BYTES_RECEIVED`) / (`UPTIME`)

you have a more interesting value and you can see how this value is changing over time.

I’ve created a SQL Script that can help you calculate many interesting Hit Ratios and Derived Performance Metrics and I am posting it here so that you can have and idea on what ratios you can calculate to …

I’m going to be at beCamp 2008, the followup to the first beCamp, which I sadly missed.

beCamp is a BarCamp un-conference. Tonight was about meeting, greeting, and throwing ideas at the wall to see which ones stick. Literally. We stuck pieces of paper on the wall with our ideas — things we can either talk about or want to hear about — and then scratched our votes on them to see which are popular.

I live and breathe MySQL for a decent part of the day, so I hesitated, but then stuck “MySQL Performance” on the wall. It got quite a few votes, so I assume will be giving a talk on MySQL performance basics at some point during the conference. (The exact schedule is probably being determined right now, in my absence, but I’m so tired right now that I’ll just take my chances on it not being at 8:00 AM tomorrow.) [edit: I just checked the website and there won’t be …

Welcome to the 95th edition of the Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs! The number 95 seems to be a popular number, as it's also the outside temperature here near San Diego, so grab something refreshing to drink, edition 95 is taking off.


In the MySQL 'sphere...

Discussions from the MySQL Conference continue. Arjen Lentz starts an email list for community organized conferences named OurSQL-conference. As open source projects go, the discussion turned to source code and to keep the discussion alive, OurSQL-sources was created. Thanks to Sheeri K. Cabral for the OurSQL name. If you …

Welcome to the 95th edition of the Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs! The number 95 seems to be a popular number, as it's also the outside temperature here near San Diego, so grab something refreshing to drink, edition 95 is taking off.


In the MySQL 'sphere...

Discussions from the MySQL Conference continue. Arjen Lentz starts an email list for community organized conferences named OurSQL-conference. As open source projects go, the discussion turned to source code and to keep the discussion alive, OurSQL-sources was created. Thanks to Sheeri K. Cabral for the OurSQL name. If you …

I just came across this article about Sun’s numbers, and read “Schwartz plans to trim as many as 2,500 workers.” Does anyone know if MySQL will get hit? It seems like they still need help (quite a few job requisitions open), and this obviously won’t help matters much.

Peter has suggested this before, and I think it's a great idea. Basically, Peter's gripe is that currently, there is no way for community members to propose new worklog tasks for either the MySQL engineering team, or more likely, the external contributor community, to work on.

As a little background, the MySQL Forge Worklog system is simply a public-facing, read-only interface which shows our internal development roadmap tasks. We have an internal Worklog system which our engineering teams use to track progress along various milestones and projects. The Forge worklog shows all tasks which have been marked as "public" …

Some successful open-source companies are using a dual-licensing scheme. In short, software is released both through an open source version (e.g. licensed under the GNU GPL) and through a proprietary license usually reserved to paying customers. It?s great for attracting  OEM vendors since they can integrate the dual-licensed software into their proprietary application without fear of contamination. FUD is apparently good for business.

But this approach has important drawbacks (some of them nicely developed by Glyn Moody a few years ago and also discussed  here by Lajos Moczar) that make it question whether a dual-licensing model is really fair to …