Currently, if you want to search a key using JSON UDFs you have to specify each its part as a separate argument to the function: JSON_CONTAINS_KEY(doc, 'root', 'child', 'child of child', 'child of child of child', etc.....). This way of working with parameters is easy for developer, less error-prone, but can be not very beautiful.

I was suggested by some of users to change it to '/parent/child/child-of-child/...' or to 'parent:child:child-of-child:...' There are, probably, can be other suggestions. What do you like the best? How do you feel about current style with separate argument for each key element? Should we change or extend this syntax?

Two weeks ago I announced new maintenance release of JSON UDFs: 0.2.1. It not only contains bug fixes, how you can expect from a maintenance release, but also contains improvements in build and test scripts.

First improvement is the easier way to build JSON UDFs on Windows. In the first version building on Windows was a pane: you had to build PCRE library, copy four files to directories where Visual Studio can find them and only then build JSON functions themselves. Now you can build this way too, but only if you really wish.

By default cmake will create appropriate makefiles for bundled PCRE sources and for JSON functions. Only command you need to prepare sources is:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\CMake 2.8\bin\cmake.exe" -G "Visual Studio 11 Win64" . -DMYSQL_DIR="/path/to/mysql/installation"   

And then you can build functions:

devenv my_json_udf.sln …

After I released maintenance release of JSON UDFs last week it is time to think about which features I should implement in upcoming major version.

Many users asked me about the possibility to explicitly specify if they want to append last element to a JSON array. This feature can be made for two functions: json_append and json_set.

I have four ideas of how to implement this. All have pros and contras.

1. 
   
2. Create new function called json_append_last which will work exactly like json_append, but it will add the element to the end of array. I.e., for JSON document {"colors": ["red", "green", "blue"]} json_append_last(doc, 'colors', 'orange') returns {"colors": ["red", "green", "blue", "orange"]}
   
   …

Today new version of JSON UDF functions: 0.2.1 was released. This is maintenance release which added no new functionality and only contains bug fixes. However, it also includes improvements for build ans test procedures. As usual, you can download source and binary packages at MySQL Labs. Binary packages were build for MySQL server 5.6.14. If you want to use other version of the server, you need to recompile functions.

What was changed? Let me quote the ChangeLog.

Functionality added or changed:

Added cmake option WITH_PCRE which alolows to specify if existent or bundled version of PCRE  should be used. Bundled is default on Windows. To compile with bundled version, run: "cmake . -DMYSQL_DIR=/path/to/mysql/dir -DWITH_PCRE=bundled", to turn bundled version off on Windows, run: "cmake . …

When I designed first version of JSON UDFs which was reviewed only internally, I let all functions to validate input and output JSON. But my colleagues told me to remove this functionality, because it makes such functions, as json_search, json_replace or json_contains_key deadly slow if they find the occurrence in the beginning of the long document. And first published version of JSON UDFs: 0.2.0 has not this functionality. What we expected is that users would call json_valid if they want to be 100% sure the document is valid.

But I was not surprised that some users expect JSON functions to work as it was in the first version: validate first, then process. For example, Ammon Sutherland writes: "json_set - according to the documentation a sort of 'INSERT... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE' function which …

JSON UDFs got own category at MySQL Bugs Database: "Server: JSON UDF"

Use this category to post new bug reports and vote for existent.

Some time ago I wrote a blog post describing a way I use to verify MySQL Server bugs. But my job consists not only of bugs which can be verified just by passing SQL queries to the server.

One of such examples is UDF bugs.

MySQL User Reference Manual is good source of information for those who want to write UDF functions, as well as book "MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development" by  Sergei Golubchik and Andrew Hutchings. But while the book describes in details how to write UDFs it was created in time when current MySQL version was 5.1 and does not contain information about how to build UDF nowadays. User Reference Manual has this information, …

Even in times of a growing market of specialized NoSQL databases, the relevance of traditional RDBMS doesn't decline. Especially when it comes to the calculation of aggregates based on complex data sets that can not be processed as a batch like Map&Reduce. MySQL is already bringing in a handful of aggregate functions that can be useful for a statistical analysis. The best known of this type are certainly:

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Even in times of a growing market of specialized NoSQL databases, the relevance of traditional RDBMS doesn't decline. Especially when it comes to the calculation of aggregates based on complex data sets that can not be processed as a batch like Map&Reduce. MySQL is already bringing in a handful of aggregate functions that can be useful for a statistical analysis. The best known of this type are certainly:

Read More »

Since I use MySQL for the statistical analysis on a project, I wanted to optimize the database queries and learned a lot about stuff like number theory, set theory and partial sums. I took my MySQL UDF, I've published two years ago, for this purpose and added new functions for a deeper statistical analysis. The project is around for a while, so it's time to share things with the public to start a discussion of how things could be further optimized. The source and a small documentation can be found on Github:

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