It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything new. In the meantime I’ve been pretty busy. Working on production systems often means that you are not running bleading edge. That’s fine but sometimes you need to look at doing the upgrade and to do that you have to do quite a few checks to see how well newer versions of the software you use will work.

I’ve been in that situation with MySQL. I have quite a few boxes most of which are 5.0 and have been working fine. MySQL-5.1 has been GA now for some time, and I have started to look at it as support for 5.0 is about to end.  I’ve already found quite a few 5.1 bugs, good enough to crash the server, but again that’s to be expected. Heavy loads and odd usage of the server means that MySQL can never be able to test all things.  Replication problems caused a few issues with the first versions of 5.1 but they all seem to have been ironed out now.  The other …

So, MySQL 6.0 was ditched, and a few weeks ago 5.4 was also – its features to be added in other (earlier) versions (I’m told 5.2 but not sure). I reckon that’s good news, regardless of the version number. There was also an announcement about a change in the release mechanism at Sun/MySQL.

Now for practicals. If I look on Launchpad, the 5.1 branch is the only active one (next to 5.0 fixes, of course). 5.4 was last updated 15 weeks ago. There is no 5.2 on there that I can find. Wasn’t looking for it really, just happened to notice its absence while I was trying to find 5.5. And the reason for that was that Miguel closed a bug I was following, noting it was no longer reproducible in 5.5. He pastes some code that reports mysql as 5.5, so it’s not a typo.

So, in addition to the above list of …

Some notes from my recent installation of MySQL 5.4.2-beta on a PPC G5 box running OSX 10.5.8. Hopefully these notes will save someone a bit of time when they begin the “I want to make my mac a development box” process. I’m not going to cover installing/configuring Apache and PHP since the web is full of those articles already.  So, first things first,  I downloaded the pkg file  – not the tarball – from the MySQL downloads site and installed the following files in the following order:

1. mysql-5.4.2-beta-osx10.5-powerpc-64bit.pkg
2. MySQLStartupItem.pkg
3. MySQL.prefPane

CNF File Settings

Here are some interesting settings that you may want to be aware of with 5.4 and OSX

• Do not set innodb_flush_method=fdatasync – it’s not a valid option, and the default after install is actually blank.
• Do not set “nice = …

While preparing the slides, I realized that, for the first time, we have a product that allows a painless performance gain. Unlike all the tuning and technological improvements that you can use to improve …

In order to really check what currently has made it into 5.4(there has been rumors...) I wanted to branch the code and see for myself.

Couldn't find it at first in our internal code repository since it's actually not named 5.4 there yet. Fortunately it's also pushed out to launchpad, that means you can easily get a copy of the code using bazaar

$> bzr branch lp:mysql-server/5.4

There is of course also tar balls available from our download page
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.4.html#source

Anyone curious about what our internal name is? :)

For some reason my presentation slides have not been posted to on MySQL Users Conference site. Here it is, a pdf format of "Introduction to Using DTrace with MySQL".

For some reason my presentation slides have not been posted to on MySQL Users Conference site. Here it is, a pdf format of "Introduction to Using DTrace with MySQL".