This is the 113^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Sheeri Cabral gets things going this week with her coverage of this rumour: Monty Widenius Leaves Sun/MySQL. If it turns out to be true, that seems like bad–or at least sad–news for MySQL, but Sheeri’s take is mostly an optimistic one.

MySQL’s Kaj Arno responds to the rumours on Monty resigning: “First, it’s a rumour.  . . .  Second, Monty’s resignation has been a possible outcome already since years before the Sun acquisition.  . . .  I can neither confirm nor deny the rumour.”

On CNET’s The Open Road, Matt Asay says. “Monty has done the right thing with his dissent. He has taken it outside the company, as Arjen Lentz, MySQL’s twenty-fifth employee, did before him. Arjen continues to be both a promoter and critic of MySQL, but is able to do so publicly without the constraints of an employee agreement. I assume Monty will do the same, and rightly so.” That’s not all the response out there, and there will certainly be still more as this develops.

In non-Monty blogs, Brook Johnson of Database Science asks, can a timestamp be slower than a datetime? (more…)

ValleyWag reports that MySQL’s Monty Widenius is no longer “MySQL’s”. Some folks have known that Monty has not been happy in his current position; this leads me to believe the rumor is true (though of course an official announcement is the only confirmation).

So what does this mean for MySQL? Well, honestly, if a product falls apart because one out of 300 employees leaves, it was probably doomed anyway. There are plenty of capable employees left, and being owned by Sun means that there are many more resources they can tap as well.

What will the official company announcement be? My prediction is (more…)

I confess — I have not always been an exclusive MySQL user. I have fooled around with other DBMSs. I was young, inexperienced, and I needed the money, I swear!

This comes about because I was doing some electronic de-crufting….From a file last modified on 10:50 am on 2005-06-30:

> more addcatalog.sh
#!/bin/sh

 db2 catalog tcpip node $1 remote $2 server 50000
 db2 terminate
 db2 catalog database sample as $2 at node $1
 db2 terminate

# [db2inst1@midgard db2inst1]$ db2sql92 -a db2inst3/password -d coworkername

And from the same time-frame there’s also:

(more…)

Hey everyone — it’s time to send in your article proposals for the next issue of MySQL Magazine, which is scheduled for release on October 15^th. The deadline is end-of-September, so don’t delay. You too can become rich and famous by writing for MySQL Magazine! Just send me your idea for an article to bmurphy AT paragon-cs.com.

For those who don’t know, MySQL Magazine is a quarterly publication, “by the community - for the community”, free and available for download from http://www.mysqlzine.net.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Though the event is still happening in Charlottesville, VA Nov. 14-16th (Fri night through Sunday), the new web page for OpenSQL Camp is http://www.opensqlcamp.org. The content has been ported over to MediaWiki, and a captcha has been put in place that is activated on any page change that adds an external URL.

Whether you are into MySQL, PostgreSQL, Drizzle, or some other open source SQL database, go forth and register for OpenSQL Camp, without having to login! (Disclosure: if you do not create a login, your IP is tracked.)

The Malta MySQL User Group (MMUG) met for the second time this Thursday, and compared to last time, we had a much better venue: Ixaris Systems let us use their board room, so we had all the tools we needed to have a good meeting.

We managed to get a group picture before everyone has arrived, so I guess we can call the people in this picture “early birds”.

Once we all arrived, however, Sandro Gauci from EnableSecurity gave us a very interesting talk on SQL Injection security, and general security flaws from a developer point a view. You can find the slides here: sql-injection.pdf.

Here’s a picture of Mr. Gauci while presenting. (Sorry for the obvious problem with the over-white picture — seems like I forgot to turn down the flash, and this was the only non-blurry shot I got.)

(more…)

Welcome to the 112^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

First, thanks to last issue’s contributors–Joe Izenman, Dan Norris, and Jason Massie–for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat and making LB#111 a worthwhile read. That’s what it’s all about!

Oracle’s up first, starting with our old friend Doug Burns and his Time Matters series, in which he holds up to the light the concept of DB Time: “. . . [the] total time spent by user processes either actively working or actively waiting in a database call.” He continues, “There’s a lot more I could say about DB Time. Like all of the best performance concepts or methods (e.g. YAPP, Method-R) it can seem so obvious as to not be worth saying, but contains an enormous amount of common sense and technical rigour.”

Arup Nanda writes about the time he spent Diagnosing Library Cache Latch Contention. About half an hour, as it happened, but he’s a real pro, and his analysis just goes to show. To quote, Nuno Souto–who makes the best blog endorsements– “Damn useful stuff . . .  bookmarked.”

Tanel Poder has another script for you to fall in love with, which makes its debut in flexible sampling of any V$ or X$ view with sample.sql. It is, writes Tanel, “ . . . a simple but powerful sqlplus script for ad-hoc sampling of any V$ view.”

Kenneth Downs, the Database Programmer, offers Advanced Algorithm: Sequencing Dependencies, a smart look at satisfying dependencies in databases. What does that mean? Well for example, Kenneth writes, “All popular Linux distributions have a package installation system in which each package lists its required dependencies. If you want to install a large number of packages in one shot, producing a tangled bunch of related dependencies, today’s algorithm can be used to work them all out.”

That’s the kind of task for which we humans use tools like mind maps. Jason Arneil shares his ASM Mind Map.

Laurent Schneider went off-road and came back something not on the map at all: the difference between rollbac and rollback.

(more…)

Or, “Missing information in the MySQL Manual”.

Just earlier today, I was using POW(), which I’ve grown quite fond of, simply because it makes life easier. I prefer using it like SELECT 512*POW(1024,2) to find out the number of bytes to put in a variable, for example.

First, let’s take a look at the POW function:

Name: 'POW'
Description:
Syntax:
POW(X,Y)

Returns the value of X raised to the power of Y.

Okay, so it gives us a value; but what about the data type? Let’s take 512*POW(1024,2) as an example.

5067 (blogs) > SELECT 512*POW(1024,2) AS example;
+-----------+
| example   |
+-----------+
| 536870912 |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

What is that? Well, it sure does look like an INT at this point, doesn’t it?

(more…)

As part of a project of Technocation, Inc I took a whole bunch of videos at OSCon 2008. The conference was about a month ago, and about 2 weeks ago I’d finished processing and uploading all the videos, but it was only today where I had the 5-6 hours I needed to finish posting all the video, and making this matrix of video.

The video may not be the quality that the O’Reilly folks took and put up on blip tv’s OSCon site, but all the videos here are freely downloadable or playable in your browser.

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I have not said much about Drizzle here; that is because there is not much to say. It is premature, really, to say anything about it at this point. Some have said they will support Drizzle; as Pythian supports several database systems, it is very likely that we will support Drizzle as well. Particularly since there is in-house Drizzle expertise already. But I digress; my point is that it is premature to really say much about Drizzle.

My involvement in Drizzle goes back to around the end of April/beginning of May 2008. Given my early involvement, (more…)