The second public alpha version (1.0.14-alpha) of HoneyMonitor Audit Pro - the Edition of the HoneySoftware’s GUI for MySQL™ mainly oriented to Server Administration, Monitoring and Tuning - will be released soon.

In this article I’ll try to describe the new features implemented and the most important bugs fix of this version.

You will find the complete list of bugs fix and improvements in a next post - when we will release v.1.0.14-alpha - and in the Release Notes File included in the build.

Your questions, enhancement requests and comments are welcome.

Contents:

A. New Features

1. Audit System
1.0. Introduction
1.1. Replication
1.1.1. STMT - New connection Option
1.2. Support for the Maria Engine
1.3. Other bugs fix

2. Performance Reports
2.0. Introduction
2.1. Custom Reports
2.2. Report Templates

3. Other …

Introduction
MySQL® 6.0.5-alpha, the latest version of the 6.x branch of the Database Server, is available for download from the SUN|MySQL Web Site.

Metadata (data about the data) are very important, especially for software developers. In this article we will see what’s new in FALCON metadata handling doing some comparison with the old 6.0.4-alpha version.

New tables in the `information_schema` database
As you know, the source for metadata is the database `information_schema`. To start, let’s see which tables related with FALCON metadata are included in that database:

mysql> SELECT VERSION();
+—————————+
| VERSION()                             |
…

Contrary to what I said earlier, Falcon has decided to deliberately disable statement-based replication using the same capabilities mechanism that InnoDB uses.

The reason is that isolation between concurrent transactions cannot be guaranteed, meaning that two concurrent transactions are not guaranteed to be serializable (the result of a concurrent transaction that has committed can "leak" into an ongoing transaction). Since they are not serializable, it means they cannot be written to the binary log in an order that produce the same result on the slave as on the master.

However, when using row-based replication they are serializable, because whatever values are written to the tables are also written to the binary log, so if data "leaks" into an ongoing transaction, this is what is written to the binary log as …

Yesterday, during the talk of Ivan Zoratti, at the meeting with Marten Mickos and the Italian Team of SUN | MySQL in Rome, there was a question about Falcon performance: a guy pointed out that InnoDB is better than Falcon.

Well, this is not really the truth.

How many processors are you using for Falcon benchmarking?

Falcon is designed to make optimal use of modern large-memory multi-CPU/multi-core hardware. So when comparing performance of Falcon and InnoDB, you can’t leave this out of consideration!

Please, see the shoots below:

From May 28th-31st, the annual LinuxTag will take place in Berlin, Germany. I followed the growth and evolution of LinuxTag from the very early days and I have fond memories of the event back when it still took place at the University of Kaiserslautern and our SuSE "booth" was just a regular table taken from the lecture rooms...

Things have evolved a lot since then. Today, LinuxTag is one of the largest Linux/Open Source Events in Europe and my new employer Sun is a major sponsor this year. In addition to several talks and keynotes, there will be a large Sun booth in the exhibition area (Booth #205) and we will have a dedicated MySQL demo pod! Some of the things we plan to demo there are the upcoming MySQL Server releases (5.1, …

This article describes how to install the Drupal 6.2 CMS on MySQL 6.0, using the Falcon Storage Engine. The operating system is a default Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" (x86) installation.

I will make a few assumptions here, in order to keep the instructions simple: a fresh OS install, no other MySQL databases or web services are running or have already been installed. Both MySQL and the web server are installed on the same host. You should be able to become root to install packages and to have access to the local file system and the system configuration.

This article will explain how to install and configure Apache/PHP, MySQL 6.0 and …

Hakan Küçükyilmaz has just posted a new article  about the Falcon Engine.

There he explains that the Falcon Team at MySQL AB has added this week six new tests to the Falcon test suite and he reports (as usual) a time-trend chart of failed and passed Falcon tests.

I have calculated the ratio failed/passed tests and we can see that it is improving:

9%    |  (17:190)  |  207 tests in total  |  the last week
10%  |  (19:182)  |  201 tests in total  |  two weeks ago

Of course the ideal ratio is 0% i.e. 0 test failed.

In that post Hakan was wondering where and how Users use the Falcon Engine, what features they like/not like or want to see in it. Also he solicited Users for testing Falcon and reporting Bugs …

Day two of the conference was a little disappointing, as far as sessions went. There were several time blocks where I simply wasn’t interested in any of the sessions. Instead, I went to the expo hall and tried to pry straight answers out of sly salespeople. Here’s what I attended.

Paying It Forward: Harnessing the MySQL Contributory Resources

This was a talk focused on how MySQL has made it possible for community members to contribute to MySQL. There was quite a bit of talk about IRC channels, mailing lists, and the like. However, the talk gave short shrift to how MySQL plans to become truly open source (in terms of its development model, not its license). I think there was basically nothing to talk about there. I had a good conversation about some of my concerns with the speaker and some others from MySQL right afterwards.

There was basically nobody there — I didn’t count, but I’d say maybe 10 or 12 people. I …

Here is the quick notes from the session Falcon from the beginning by Jim Starkey and Ann Harrison

• Why Falcon
  • Hardware is evolving rapidly, world is changing, so taking advantage
  • Customers need ACID transactions
• Where hardware is going
  • CPUS breed like rabbits (more sockets, cores, threads/core)
  • Memory is bigger, faster and cheaper
  • Disks are bigger and cheaper but not much faster
  • In general boxes are getting cheaper
• Where applications are going
  • batch - dead
  • timesharing - dead
  • departmental computing - dead
  • client server - fading fast
  • application servers for most …