Pythian Group

Last month at the Boston MySQL User Group, I went through the meanings of INNER, LEFT/RIGHT OUTER, CROSS, NATURAL joins, how to do a FULL OUTER JOIN in MySQL, and what STRAIGHT_JOIN means. I also explained how to recognize when you want those types of joins, and best practices for the semantics of writing joins and design patterns. Subqueries were explained in this session, and some examples of how to think differently so that you end up writing JOINs instead of subqueries. The slides (slightly different from the slides in the video — due to error correction) can be found at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2010_01MySQLJoins.pdf.

Here’s the video:
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The Call for Proposals for the 2010 MySQL User Conference and Expo ended about 6 hours ago. However, birds-of-a-feather sessions (BoFs) have a separate call for proposals. From the MySQL Conference page at http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2010/, select the “Program” menu item, then “Birds of a feather sessions”, and you will be directed to the proper page. Which, for easy clicking, is http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2010/public/cfp/90.

The call for proposals for Birds of a feather sessions closes at 11:59 pm PST on Thursday, February 18th, 2010. Sessions can be added during the conference, but if you submit and your BoF is accepted it will be printed in the schedule.

Note: If you submitted a BoF proposal in the regular call for proposals, it’s much much easier if you submit the proposal again through the BoF call for proposals.

In light of the official Oracle acquisition of Sun, I dug out a presentation video I realize I never officially shared with either the MySQL or the Oracle community. It’s the presentation I did at the 2008 Oracle Open World conference called, “So, you want to be an Oracle ACE?” and is a good resource for anyone who wants to contribute to anything — not just Oracle or MySQL, though certainly it’s based on my experiences with contributing to MySQL.

Oracle has lots of resources for the community. While I have joked about Oracle calling its conference “Open World”, I have also experience it, and the Oracle community first-hand and second-hand — through professional contacts such as my colleagues at Pythian who work on Oracle databases, and also through personal contacts such as my mother who has been to a few Oracle conferences herself.

Like MySQL, Oracle has recognized community contributors. However, Oracle offers more tangible benefits than a photo opportunity and a physical award. Oracle has the Oracle ACE program, with 2 levels: Oracle ACE and Oracle ACE director.
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Ronald Bradford’s recent warning to be sure to know your my.cnf sections reminded me of a similar issue that I ran into last summer, where putting the “group” option in both the [mysqld_safe] and [mysqld] directives resulted in a mostly silent problem.

I started noticing this in MySQL 5.1 and it affected both the official MySQL binary and the Percona binary. In trying to be conscientious, I had the following set:
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On first glance, it looks like TEXT and VARCHAR can store the same information. However, there are fundamental differences between the way TEXT fields and VARCHAR fields work, which are important to take into consideration.

Standard
VARCHAR is actually part of the ISO SQL:2003 standard; The TEXT data types, including TINYTEXT, are non-standard.

Storage
TEXT data types are stored as separate objects from the tables and result sets that contain them. This storage is transparent — there is no difference in how a query involving a TEXT field is written versus one involving a VARCHAR field. Since TEXT is not stored as part of a row, retrieval of TEXT fields requires extra [edited 1/22] memory overhead.

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We’re looking for an intermediate to expert MySQL DBA who can jump right in. We have several offices in Ottawa, Boston, Sydney and Hyderabad, India.

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The O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010 Call for Participation ends in just under 3 weeks. I am on the conference committee, and thus get to see and review all the conference proposals.

This blog post will briefly explain the how each part of the proposal is used, then have a list of what not to do in your conference proposal, and end with a checklist of questions to go over your proposal before submitting. Click here if you want to skip to the checklist.

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In this article I am responding to many parts of Monty’s post at http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-keep-internet-free.html which are just plain not true, or are exaggerations.

I will give my own answers to the self-interview questions Monty provides, as I feel he is using his name and popularity to spreading fear that is not warranted.

Q: Why don’t you trust that Oracle would be a good owner of MySQL?

I cannot say whether or not Oracle would kill MySQL. However, I have already stated I believe Oracle will not kill MySQL. This is based on the fact that Oracle has had the chance to kill MySQL for several years, by making InnoDB proprietary, and has not.

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The bottom line: As both a community member of MySQL, and a service provider, I am not worried about Oracle buying Sun and acquiring MySQL in the process. There is no validity to the argument that Oracle will slow down or stop MySQL development — it is not possible, with various forks already in heavy development, and it is not probable, because Oracle has owned the InnoDB codebase for 4 years and has not slowed that development down.

My bias

I use MySQL, and want to see it continue to be developed. I work for The Pythian Group, providing DBA services to clients running MySQL. Read the rest of this entry . . .

According to the official lifecycle calendar at http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/lifecycle/#calendar, active support for MySQL 5.0 (including regular binary updates) will end on December 31st, 2009, which is about 3 weeks away.

Many folks are still using MySQL 5.0.45, as until October that was the package that came with RedHat. That was released in July 2007, over 2 years ago!

Upgrading to MySQL 5.1 is not difficult, though it requires more steps than just upgrading the packages.

There is a list with all the changes made that might affect the upgrade process at http://www.pythian.com/news/1414/new-in-mysql-51-sheeris-presentation/. This includes which variable names have been deprecated and changed, as well as how to upgrade stored procedures, functions, triggers and views so they work properly in MySQL 5.1.

I hope this helps folks out, and please feel free to ask any questions. Pythian is available to assist you in the upgrade process, just contact us if you want to engage our help.