The latest from the MySQL community

MySQL will be in Beijing, China, this week. Well, not MySQL per se, but I will be there. As will Kaj Arno. I arrive on 21 April 2008 and depart on 24 April 2008. I expect to be busy during the days, but my nights should be free. Drop me email at colinATmysqlDOTcom if you’d like to catch up.

There’s an event, on the 23rd of April as well. Its part of the Sun-MySQL World Tour. You definitely should be there, I’m sure there will be some nice schwag involved as well :)

Sitting in San Francisco, getting a little bored before my flight to Beijing. And Twitter is down, for 1.5 hours, for what they seem to call database maintenance. Wonder why. At least there’s IRC…

Technorati Tags: beijing, …

What made Marie Digby? I’ve heard about her on the radio from time to time, while I do the unnatural act of driving somewhere. Now, I’ve been invited to an event, where the tagline says that she’s “a star born from YouTube”. I had to dig further.

Decided to watch the famous video. Its just her, sitting with her guitar, performing an acoustic version of Rihana’s Umbrella. Nothing fancy. I’m told she sat in front of her MacBook to make the “hit”.

Grassroots marketing? Bands try much harder, and still feel the pain of becoming somewhat famous. What makes her different? Beauty (she’s of Japanese-American heritage)? Sultry look?

I wonder what her tipping point was. …

Standish Group says open source costs vendors $60 billion. OpenLogic launches Open Source Census. Novell annnounces SUSE Appliance program. (and more)

“Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion,” New Standish Group International Study Finds, The Standish Group International (Press Release)

Global Open Source Census Launches to Count Enterprise Use of Open Source Software, OpenLogic (Press Release)

Novell Announces SUSE Appliance Program, Novell (Press Release)

Sun Microsystems Introduces MySQL Workbench, Sun Microsystems (Press Release) …

At least with any luck it will be.

For those of you unaware, I recently left AdBrite, so I had some fears that the open source release of my tools might not happen. I was reassured today, however, that things are moving forward so that raises my hopes considerably.

Also, if you are looking for someone to help your organization with all areas involving scale (and not just MySQL), visit my LinkedIn public profile for detailed information about me and what I've done in the past.

MySQL has a storage engine slash table type of "memory" or "heap". The memory engine keeps the table in memory instead of on a disk. It can be very fast. It has a couple of problems. One problem is that it handles varchar types poorly and wastefully.

This was a problem for eBay. So they paid one of their own smart employees to fix that problem.

Other people have heard about that patch, and asked for it. I couldn't give it to them, and it all started bogging down in pointless legal discussions. At least by the lawyer people and people who are into lawyer people.

So the author of the patch took a sword to the knot, and released the patch to the public.

Here it is: http://code.google.com/p/mysql-heap-dynamic-rows/



This project provides support for variable size records (aka …

Here’s a rundown of Thursday (day 3) of the MySQL Conference and Expo. This day’s sessions were much more interesting to me than Wednesday’s, and in fact I wanted to go to several of them in a single time slot a couple of times. Inside the PBXT Storage Engine This session was, as it sounds, a look at the internals of PBXT, a transactional storage engine for MySQL that has some interesting design techniques.

Keith Murphy and his hard-working crew have released the spring 2008 issue of MySQL Magazine. Go take a look – it includes quite a few articles on various topics, even a mention of our upcoming book (High Performance MySQL, Second Edition).

MySQL has a lot of string data types - CHAR, VARCHAR, BLOB, TEXT, ENUM and bunch of variants such as VARBINARY but I think it is not enough

I would also like to see type HEXCHAR which would be able to store hex strings, such as those returned as MD5() and SHA1() efficiently. With little modification it could work for UUID() as well (it adds some dashes). Currently it is quite inconvenient to deal with strings like that in MySQL. Either you store them as strings and waste space or you spend them as binary and deal with inconvenience of having not readable strings in the table OR adding UNHEX() everywhere - which also adds overhead.

Another one I would like to see is zBLOB or zTEXT (or call them BLOB COMPRESSED/ …

I’ve hacked around a bit to get PBXT to compile in tree, and pulled in the Maria engine. Both are latest source.

So, want to try out Maria?

Want to try out PBXT?

Just want to do ./configure and go with it, just like building a normal MySQL Server?

Grab the -stew tree. Source tarball here:

mysql-5.1.24-stew1.tar.gz

(it’s based on something close to 5.1.24… and I’m going to switch some of my systems over to it rather soon… already done some good benchmarks on one of my apps).

feedback much appreciated.

UPDATE: Got x86-64 Linux. Try my binary tarball (built from above src tarball). Built on Ubuntu Gutsy (my laptop). So it may (or may not) work. …