The latest from the MySQL community

Since Heikki Tuuri and Peter Zaitsev‘s presentations at the MySQL User Conference 2008, I really wanted to try MySQL 5.1 with InnoDB plugin in production work to see how it compares to my current setups (MySQL 5.0.48 with integrated InnoDB).

First of all, the upgrade to MySQL 5.1.23-rc went without any particular quirks – I did not have to dump and reload tables, a simple mysql_upgrade script run was sufficient to put my DB to MySQL 5.1-readiness.

When starting a new MySQL instance you know that you have to do some warm-up work before getting any indicators – the buffer pool will be empty of indexes and data so most operations in the first hour of uptime will be IO-bound. You can also use clever …

I've been thinking about this for a while now, sparked by Ronald Bradford's brainstorming about a global hackathon, and I think it's something that is completely doable, and would have great benefit for MySQL and also the external contributor community. The idea is similar to the PEAR Bug Triage event that occurred a few weeks ago. Basically, the idea is to set aside a time period (1 day, 2 days?) in which the global external contributor community and the MySQL developers come together in a virtual setting and tackle a list of fixable, but low priority, outstanding bugs in the MySQL server and client.

Current Roadblocks

So, what needs to happen for this to become a reality? These are the things I see as current barriers to the event, and issues I hope can be addressed in short order so …

The 95th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published by Mark Schoonover on his Mark’s IT Blog.

We can look forward to LB#98 Jeff Smith’s Jeff’s SQL Server Blog on May 23rd. There’s always plenty of room for more editors, so don’t waste another minute — send an email to me, the Log Buffer coordinator, and get started!

Without further ado, here is Mark Schoonover’s Log Buffer #95.

These icons link to social …

A study just released by the Chief Marketing Officer Council showed that a large percentage of marketers are unhappy with their CRM systems. Specifically:

• 45% believe CRM systems are not effective enough
• 85% do not think they can integrate disparate customer data sources well
• 94% do not believe they have an excellent knowledge of customer demographics or transaction histories

As a result, even though nearly a third of the companies surveyed have customer churn rates of over 10%, two thirds have no system in place to go after these lost customers. In effect, most companies' marketing efforts resemble a "leaking bucket" -- a lot of effort is spent getting customers in, but not much is done to keep them.

Part of the problem may be cultural. Perhaps we think of …

Last night, I was fortunate enough to give a presentation called "Join-fu: The Art of SQL Tuning" at the local Columbus PHP Meetup group. There were about 14 people there, and it was a great time. Lots of good questions! Anyway, I created a new slide deck with some new material on LEFT-join-fu and managing many-to-many relationships that folks might find handy. Below are the slides in OpenOffice Impress and PDF format. Enjoy.

• Join-fu: The Art of SQL Tuning (OpenOffice Impress)
• Join-fu: The Art of SQL Tuning (PDF)

I couldn’t resist downloading NetBeans 6.1, with GlassFish and the MySQL bundle, the moment I found out it was released. Pulling it down while at the Star Alliance Gold lounge in Singapore was easy enough, and it only took me an hour (its a pretty big bundle - 164MB, as opposed to 6.0.1 where it only weighed in at 143MB for the OS X bundle).

Instead of the 4 packages in 6.0.1, I now only see 2 files - MySQL.prefPane (because we only fixed this in 5.0.51b, which probably didn’t make the release cut-off - the included version is 5.0.51a-community), and NetBeans IDE with MySQL.mpkg. The install is slated to take 526MB and takes a good two minutes.

I noticed that it doesn’t uninstall NetBeans 6.0.1, so my Applications folder now has two versions, including two versions of Glassfish (UR1 from …

If you’re waiting for High Performance MySQL Second Edition to hit the shelf, you’re not the only one. I am too! I can’t wait to actually hold it in my hands.

But you don’t have to wait idly. No, not at all! You can pre-order it and then you’ll get it as soon as possible. Plus your pre-order will help them …

I’m headed to the OpenSolaris Developers Summit right now.

After that, I’ll be at CommunityOne, with the rest of the MySQL team. Just check out the schedule (its in PDF format though). Its truly packed, so if you’ve not signed up to come, do so, immediately. I’m also particularly interested in participating in the RedMonk Unconference. All in all, I think CommunityOne looks like it would be well suited for a week-long event, rather than a day-long event - so many places to be, so little time!

And after that, JavaOne! Its going to be packed all week long, but the good news is that I’ll be in downtown San …

On July 12 2007 I posted Bug #29768 - ‘ALTER EVENT .. RENAME TO .. drops the event if event_scheduler is ON’ - for MySQL® 5.1.20-beta and Miguel verified it one hour after my post with MySQL® 5.1.21-beta.

Some months later, on Oct 19 2007, Damien cannot reproduce that bug with the latest versions 5.1.23-rc and 5.2.6-alpha, but unfortunately I was still able to reproduce it with version 5.1.23-rc, as I posted on Feb 16 2008.

Now it seem that I can’t reproduce it with the new 5.1.24-rc. Maybe it has been fixed by fixing other bugs. The problem is that I am still able to reproduce it with version 6.0.4-alpha.

Just to summarize:
5.1.23-rc - VERIFIED
5.1.24-rc - CAN’T REPEAT
6.0.4-alpha - VERIFIED

What do you think? What about version 6.0.5-alpha?
Here’s the exact Script for reproducing it with old …

Creating table symlinks in MySQL is very easy and it is probably one of the features a lot of MySQL users overlook or never think about. You may ask, why would I want to use symlinks? Some of the reasons you would want symlinks is if you are running low on disk space on the partition where your data generally is and/or you want to move one (or more) table(s) on to a different disk/partition for performance reasons.

One of the things worth mentioning is that MySQL documentation states: “Symlinks are fully supported only for MyISAM tables. For files used by tables for other storage engines, you may get strange problems if you try to use symbolic links.” Keeping that in mind, if you have a innodb table and would like to create symlinks for, you should change the engine type to myisam before symlinking. Although, I have heard and personally used symlinks for innodb databases with no side affects.

First let us find out if your MySQL …