The latest from the MySQL community

Keith Murphy wrote about the open/closed source debacle and the first comment on that post was:

Monty makes all this money from the Sun acquisition, and pretends to be a free software advocate. How much did he make? How much is he giving back to the MySQL community?

Now, Keith rightfully met this with “grow up”. However, I want to point out that many people in the MySQL employee pool benefited from the sale, not just Monty. I also want to point out that Monty devoted years of his life to developing MySQL long before it was ever profitable.

According to Sun’s press release, “Sun will pay approximately $800 million in cash in exchange for all MySQL stock and …

So, I mentioned before that I found out about index_merge at the MySQL Conference. I was wondering why I had not heard more about it since it came out in 5.0.3. When talking with some MySQL people about it, I received mixed results. So, I decided to kind of run my own tests on some data and see what I could figure out.

I apologize for Wordpress' bad output. =(

The Data

I created a table with 5 million rows. Early tests with MySQL's Harrison Fisk (HarrisonF) over my shoulder with small data sets showed MySQL would optimize out the indexes in favor of table scans. I wanted to avoid that. This is my table schema:


CREATE TABLE `test2` (
`id1` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
`id2` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
`id3` int(10) unsigned …

Wow... I had a great time at the annual MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara.Highlights:Received my CMDBA designation. Woohoo!Sun announced the possibility of an open source mobile phone;All day mysql proxy tutorial with Jan Kneschke and Giuseppe Maxia;Amazon's Power of Infrastructure as a Service - great premise; glitches remain;Great food and a nifty side trip to Santa Cruz;MySQL Workbench -

There was a lot of confusion at the recent MySQL Users Conference about the Associate exam. One recovering Oracle DBA took the test after a little persuasion (and two months of MySQL use) and was surprised how much they knew. The Associate or CMA is designed for those new to MySQL and have some hands-on experience.

The best way to prepare for the Certified MySQL Associate exams is to take part in the MySQL for Beginners training course offered by MySQL AB. It is also possible to prepare for the certified MySQL Associate exam through self-study. Candidates that choose to prepare themselves through self-study should consider purchasing the MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide.

The material on the exam is an overview of the basics. 25% of the exam is on basic data manipulation using SQL -- adding, updating and deleting data. Another 25% is …

Apache has a neat module called mod_dbd that allows your Apache modules to connect to a database. mod_dbd interfaces with apr_dbd, an Apache Portable Runtime (APR) abstraction layer around database specific drivers.

Back when Ubuntu 7.04 (fiesty) was released, a MySQL driver was not bundled with Apache for licensing concerns. So, in order to use mod_dbd to connect to a MySQL database, you need to get the MySQL driver source code from WebThing (apr_dbd_mysql.c) and manually re-compile apr-utils.

You also need the source code for Apache 2.2.3 (which includes apr-utils 1.2.7) from the Ubuntu 7.04 repositories, then copy the apr_dbd_mysql.c file into the Apache source …

The best storage engine for MySQL is by far InnoDB (and yes some applications can live with MyISAM only, but that's not the point). InnoDB (now part of Oracle) is also dual-licensed and has had an agreement with MySQL for several years now.

On the surface everything is looking  smooth:

• MySQL distributes proprietary MySQL+InnoDB to those who wants to embed them in their proprietary applications
• The open source community can work with  GPL MySQL and GPL InnoDB.

In practice it doesn't work quite that way:

Firstly because InnoDB hot-backup feature for instance has never been open source released. So contrary to the …

So, I mentioned before that I found out about index_merge at the MySQL Conference. I was wondering why I had not heard more about it since it came out in 5.0.3. When talking with some MySQL people about it, I received mixed results. So, I decided to kind of run my own tests on some data and see what I could figure out.

I apologize for WordPress’ bad output. =(

The Data

I created a table with 5 million rows. Early tests with MySQL’s Harrison Fisk (HarrisonF) over my shoulder with small data sets showed MySQL would optimize out the indexes in favor of table scans. I wanted to avoid that. This is my table schema:


CREATE TABLE `test2` (
`id1` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default ‘0′,
`id2` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default ‘0′,
`id3` int(10) …

All of my sites run a piece of software called Everything. Mine is a fork from the original Everydevel Corp's release. It shares some common traits with Slash but it has a more rapid development cycle that I like.

One of the things it shares with Slash, is that the "site" is the database. AKA everything that makes a site, a site, is the database. This means that a backup of the site can be tossed into an everything container and be up and running in seconds (I use this with virtual machines so that I can move stuff around on a whim).

I hate backups. I don't want to take snapshots with LVM, since I know I just need the content, and typically with dumps I end up with a huge set of these files just sitting around.

I cannot search them. …

Last week saw MySQL User Conference 2008 in Santa Clara, but I was not able to make time for it this year either. However, in the wake of Sun's acquisition of MySQL, it was very interesting to follow what was going on. A few things that caught my attention:

MySQL 5.1 is nearing General Availability and an interesting storage engine plugin ecosystem starts to emerge. It's this latter, but related event that I see as the first real sign of validation for MySQL's long-ago chosen path of pluggable storage systems instead of focused effort on making one good general-use engine.

Oracle/Innobase announced InnoDB Plugin for MySQL 5.1, which much-awaited features which promise a great deal of help for daily management headaches. More than that, InnoDB Plugin's release under …

Apache has a neat module called mod_dbd that allows your Apache modules to connect to a database. mod_dbd interfaces with apr_dbd, an Apache Portable Runtime (APR) abstraction layer around database specific drivers.

Back when Ubuntu 7.04 (fiesty) was released, a MySQL driver was not bundled with Apache for licensing concerns. So, in order to use mod_dbd to connect to a MySQL database, you need to get the MySQL driver source code from WebThing (apr_dbd_mysql.c) and manually re-compile apr-utils.

You also need the source code for Apache 2.2.3 (which includes apr-utils 1.2.7) from the Ubuntu 7.04 repositories, then copy the apr_dbd_mysql.c file into the Apache source …