The latest from the MySQL community

It's kind of funny. Whenever I go to conferences, almost invariably I get asked by people, "So, you guys compete a lot with PostgreSQL, right?" My answer is typically, "No, not really", much to the surprise of the inquirer. What's more, I enjoy a pretty friendly relationship with a few folks in the PostgreSQL community. I remember at OSCON last year hanging out drinking beers with the PostgreSQL team members, and I even had Robert Treat take a photo of me at Ohio LinuxFest this past year wearing a little PostgreSQL elephant pin on my bag.

When it comes down to the perceived animosity between the MySQL and PostgreSQL communities, I am sure that in the past there were bitter debates and disagreement. But, from the MySQL AB and my own personal perspective, we welcome the achievements of the PostgreSQL community and developers. Sure, there are licensing and philosophical differences, and certainly there are many areas where each database server …

The latest Version of our beta-candidate 5.0.13 is finally available on our servers. About 70 bugs have been addressed since 5.0.12.Workbench now features a nifty update module (can be found via the help item in the main menu) and additionally the Standard Edition has a new Catalog Diff Report Module that allows you to compare two database-catalogs and creating a text-report. This Diff-Report Module lets you select two catalogs which can be taken from the actual document, a file or a live connection to a database-server. The interface of the new module is likely to go through some changes during the next stages to GA but we decided to introduce the feature in this beta version.Have a look at the Releases Page for detailed Information on the progress of the project.

Royal Pingdom has compiled a list of the seven largest acquisitions in open source's history. Sun's acquisition of MySQL is the biggest ($1 billion), but it's not nearly the outsized acquisition that it originally appeared to be considering that Red Hat paid $674 million for Cygnus Solutions back in 1999.

Indeed, that acquisition offers an interesting commentary on the value derived from open-source acquisitions. Here's why Red Hat bought Cygnus:

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Luckily, I don’t have personal experience with them. But, based on the 2 to 3 users per week that come to the Phorum support forums and IRC, they have the worst support of any host on the internet.

Example 1

A user comes to the forums having trouble with his Phorum install. In the user’s words, GoDaddy tells him “they couldnt help me costumize my scripts because it wasnt their job”. In this case “customize” meant filling in the MySQL permissions into the Phorum config files. In the end, GoDaddy had to move him to a Linux hosting account. They claimed that the Windows hosting accounts do not support PHP. However, they are clearly wrong about their own hosting as this all started because the user received a PHP error about not connecting to MySQL.

Example 2

This user found that …

It’s good to see MySQL’s CEO, Marten Mickos, explaining his reasons for abandoning the company’s IPO in favor of being acquired by Sun. What made him and the open source database company’s top brass change their minds (apart from $1bn)? Mickos lists ten factors that convinced him that Sun was the better option:

“1. Jonathan Schwartz is a brilliant CEO and he has a great team. Who wouldn’t want to work for him?

2. Sun has always had the same focus as MySQL on the networked world. Focus and alignment!

3. Sun has become the world’s strongest proponent of free and open source software. We are happy to be part of that!

4. Sun has changed its strategy to include partnerships with former competitors. Hey, coopetition is …

You might find yourself running into trouble when following the otherwise very well-written instructions on how to install a binary distribution of MySQL 5.1 on (K)Ubuntu.

If you get loads of errors while attempting to run

Code:

scripts/mysql_install_db

, you should instead run

scripts/mysql_install_db --user=mysql --no-defaults

Rant mode on…

While searching the bugs system before reporting this as a new bug, I came across this entry, and noticed that the severity of the bug is set to “S3 (non-critical)”.

How in the world can instructions that specifically guide the user into creating an admin account with no …

Preparing to move I'm selling stuff on GumTree which is UK based clone of Craigslist offering similar functionality but with Ads

Similarly to Craigslist GumTree is powered by MySQL but unlike craigslist it looks like they are shy in tuning their MySQL Full Text Search index configuration and setting proper ft_min_word_len value. Searching for Audi A6 will give you a lot of Audi with different model numbers. Searching just for A6 gives no results at …

I just read the post from Mark regarding some questions he had about the Falcon engine. One of the points that made me jump is the following:

Row-level replication (instead of statement-based replication) is required when replicating Falcon objects.

This might be enough to keep me from upgrading, but I am not sure if this is limited to Falcon. Will future MySQL releases require the use of row based replication? Having SQL statements in the binlog is invaluable to me and I am not willing to give that up.

Now, seriously, it is not trivial to disable statement-based replication for any engine so it is basically always on; whether it works as expected is a different story. So, in short: there is nothing specifically done to disable statement-based replication for the Falcon engine. It is just not …

From time to time it is necessary to get a bigger picture of your project in terms of size, test coverage, code vs. comments ratio and others (aka metrics). While it is quite difficult to find a good (and free) code coverage tool for C++ there is already a very nice tool package called DPack, which is not only freely available but also gives us some very useful additions in our IDE. One of those features is code statistics.

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This is the english translation of another article in my german language blog.

How are transactions organized physically

When InnoDB creates a new transaction it is not yet committed. The database has not yet made any promises to the application and so we do not really have to make anything persistent so far.

To be fast InnoDB tries to assemble the transaction in a memory buffer, the innodb_log_buffer. It should be sufficiently large that you actually can assemble such a transaction in memory without needing to write it out in part into the redo log. A size of 1M to 8M is normal.

Once a transaction is to be committed InnoDB has to read the page from disk which contains the image of the row that is being changed. It then has to actually make that change in memory. The changed page is …