The latest from the MySQL community

When I was on the MySQL Documentation team one thing started to become apparent to me: the MySQL Reference Manual was exactly what it claimed to be: a document better suited to referencing than teaching new users. I make very good use of it because I know MySQL, I know what it can do, and all I want is the right syntax for what I am trying to use it for.

I saw a need for a User Guide, something well suited to new users who were not experienced with MySQL and potentially with DBMSes in general. As a side project I started working on a chapter of what could eventually be a MySQL produced user guide, lacking the depth of the reference manual but more suitable for newer users. This first chapter was on Indexing and while I think it showed promise, I left MySQL AB shortly after completing it.

Fast forward to today, where I see a blog post by Colin Charles …

Who’s Barton George?

Barton is a colleague from Sun, who “looks after Sun’s relationships with the various GNU/Linux communities as well as our relationship with the FSF” according to his blog. I spent time with him at the MySQL Users Conference last week. He is a fun guy to be around, and isn’t as US-centric as his remark “Last year, my family and I emigrated from Silicon Valley to Austin, TX.” would lead one to believe.

Barton is also an avid blogger. And, on top, a diligent podcaster.

As for blogging, he has recent MySQL relevant entries on partying …

Friday after MySQL Users Conference we had a smaller meeting at Google campus to talk about MySQL architecture mainly focusing on storage engine vendors and other extension areas.
It was very interesting to see all these storage engine interface extensions which are planned for MySQL 6.0 and beyond - abilities to intercept query execution or offloading query fragments and operations (sorting limit etc) in the storage engines. This is great news as this would allow to build really innovative storage engines with MySQL which was previously hard because of defined row by row retrieval interface and nested loops used for joins.

However what stroke me is a thought - This thing is really getting complicated. Few years ago Marten would frequently mention Oracle (and other commercial databases) as complicated beasts being overkill for most of their users.

Is MySQL becoming such a beast as well ? Will MySQL be able to …

I originally posted this as a follow-up to an (off topic) post on a discussion group about forming a community driven MySQL conference system. This is a more appropriate forum for the discussion.

What I'd love to see is something like a centralized repository and web site that could accept patches from various users. Other users could then select the patches individually and receive a custom patched source tarball (and perhaps binaries but probably not at first) for testing. These users could then select a more stable (ie production ready) build including only patches that have been well vetted.

By voting for particular patches, the community itself could decide what features are included in an 'official' community supported build, while still providing flexibility for those who don't want to have to manually merge multiple patches for custom builds.

Named builds would be another feature where a user …

That week at the conference was a busy week for me - as busy as any developer meeting I have had with MySQL in recent years. I had a great time seeing old faces again and it was much like old times talking, chatting and coding with them. In particular, I spent much of my time with Patrick Galbraith, Eric Herman and Arjen Lentz.Great progress was made: I worked with Patrick getting my ancient

MySQL Version 6.x is alpha. This blog is about its new features.

Expect a new article every week or two.

The first article,
MySQL 6.0 Feature #1: Supplementary Characters
is out now.
http://blogs.mysql.com/peterg/2008/04/

Last time I interviewed Zack it was the day that MySQL officially became a part of Sun Microsystems and it was over the phone.  Last week however we were both at the MySQL conference and got meet face to face.  Here is the resulting interview, enjoy!

My interview with Zack (9:24)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)

 
Zack's …

As promised we are continuing our strong efforts after reaching GA and our announcement at the MySQL Users Conference (find a nice press article here).

Alfredo managed to fix a serious bug that almost seemed to be of random nature and happened on certain OnMouseDown and OnMouseUp events on the canvas.

Another thing that got improved is the drawing order of connections between table figures on the canvas. Previously the connections would be drawn on top of tables, resulting in a messy image. Now connections are always drawn behind tables. To make that work we had to remove the nesting of layers - a feature that does not really make sense for a database tool anyway.

The team will meet in the week of May 12th in Kiev where we are going to define the detailed plans for Workbench 5.1 and 5.5. Until …

So found some recently discovered buffer overflow and security bypass vulnerabilities when running MySQL on Solaris 10. According to FrSIRT, these vulnerabilities "could be exploited by attackers or malicious users to bypass security restrictions, gain knowledge of sensitive information, cause a denial of service, or execute arbitrary code." A final resolution for these vulnerabilities is pending completion according to their website.

Unfortunately, I do not have a FrSIRT account currently (need to get one ASAP) so I couldn't dig this vulnerability further. However, I am dying to learn more about this.

After having to the UC and seen some of the talks with people using MySQL Cluster it seems that it is time to hand out a good configuration template.

Unfortunately, configuring cluster is too difficult and a lot of things could be done to ease the pain. One of the problematic things customers and users always forget is to dimension the redo log properly.

However, the template below allows you to:

• Load any mysqldump i have seen to date (if you have enough DataMemory/IndexMemory to support the data set).
• ndb_restore on any data (I strongly recommend you run ndb_restore with a less degree of parallelism than what is defaut). This is regulated with the -p option. Run ndb_restore with ndb_restore -p 32 .... You may in some rare cases need to lower the degree of parallelism somewhat.
• Recover in case of node failure/cluster failure. Often the things preventing you from …