I have released MySQL-Sandbox 3.1.01, which is the first release after the move to GitHub. While the changes are not so spectacular (it's a minor release, with mostly bug fixes), I am pleased to see that the move has started producing collaboration. Two of the changes were provided by Daniël van Eeden and Mark Leith, who have scratched some of their own itches by providing useful patches.

All in all, this period of working with GitHub has been liberating. Although Bazaar plays with the same principles of git, it lacks most of the tools and the know-how which characterizes git. Add to this that also my team has moved Tungsten Replicator …

By my count MySQL 5.7 added over 150 new features, and some of my favourite ones are based on community ideas and contributions:

1. Statement Timeout (contributed by Davi Arnaut)
2. Disabled Storage Engines (suggested by the community)
3. MySQL Command Line client Ctrl+C support fixed (bug reported by the community)
4. Barracuda + Dynamic row format enabled by default (change made to better support WordPress and …

The Sakila sample database was created almost 10 years ago, as a sample set of data for MySQL courses and examples.

The database was developed by MySQL employees, with substantial contributions form the community.

Recently, the database was updated to use some of the features in MySQL 5.7. As a result, we had two sets of samples, one to use with MySQL 5.0+, and one that only loads with MySQL 5.7.

I filed a feature request, offering a patch to use conditional schema and data changes, which was incorporated very quickly into the official release.

The current release, available within the …

It's migration time. There was another project that I use often and was still in Launchpad. The Sample Employees Database is now on GitHub, under the same license it had before (CC A-SA 3).

Figure 1 - Employees database
This database is interesting because it is not too small (like Sakila) and not too big. It has enough data to allow you to test in a non trivial way.
Installation and testInstalling the database is easy:

$ git clone https://github.com/datacharmer/test_db.git
$ cd test_db
$ mysql < employees.sql
INFO
CREATING DATABASE STRUCTURE
INFO
storage engine: InnoDB
INFO
LOADING departments
INFO
LOADING employees
INFO
LOADING dept_emp
INFO
LOADING dept_manager
INFO
LOADING titles
INFO …

I have three pieces of information to share about MySQL::Sandbox:

• Version 3.1.0 has migrated from Launchpad to GitHub
• This version is released under the Apache license. Both these changes are meant to improve and promote cooperation on the project.
• There is an important change related to usability. When using replication with MySQL::Sandbox and MySQL 5.6+, the server UUIDs become more readable (see below).

First, some words on the location changes. About two years ago, I started plans for a rewrite of MySQL::Sandbox. Then, I had some unexpected changes, which involved moving home to a different continent twice within twelve months. The project …

Giuseppe and Shlomi both blogged on one of the recent changes introduced to MySQL 5.7.8-rc, where the setting show_compatibility_56 is now set OFF by default.

Both raise very good points. Here is how we plan to address them:

1. The permissions issue reported by Giuseppe will be fixed.
2. When selecting from information_schema tables in show_compatibility_56=OFF mode, an error …

In order to make it easier to work with data stored as binary strings (BINARY/VARBINARY) we are considering extending the &,|,^,~,> operators, to accept any-size binary strings and return binary string data as response. This can be useful for several complex data types not covered by the basic SQL data types (e.g. working with IPV6 addresses, manipulating UUID, etc).

Motivation

Let’s say we’re interested in getting all the networks that contain the given IP address. With ipv4 the common practice is to store the IP addresses as INT and execute:

SELECT inet_ntoa(network) AS network, inet_ntoa(netmask) AS netmask FROM network_table WHERE (inet_aton('192.168.0.30') & netmask) = network;

At the moment you are not able to do the same with ipv6 because inet6_aton('2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334') & netmask converts both operands from VARBINARY to BIGINT resulting in data …

UPDATE: Almost solved! See at the end.

A clean installation of a database server is one where everything goes according to the expectations. It used to be easy: you only had to do what the manual says, and, presto! you would see your database server installed and ready to use. If something went wrong, you got one or more error messages that informed you of what needs to be fixed.

Sometimes, rarely, it happened that you got also a warning message, telling you that while the installation was successful, you could improve it by fine tuning this and that. No big deal.

Gone are those times. A clean installation nowadays is a much harder exercise, if not impossible. Let’s give it a try using MySQL 5.7.7.



Attempt #1 using mysql_install_db
The first error you could do when using a new version of MySQL is assuming that basic operations are …

MySQL 5.7.8-rc2 was released today, and features a new server utility called mysqlpump. This utility contains a number of major improvements over mysqldump including:

• Parallel processing of databases, and of objects within databases, to speed up the dump process
• For dump file reloading, faster secondary index creation for InnoDB tables by adding indexes after rows are inserted
• Better control over which databases and database objects (tables, views, stored programs, user accounts) to dump
• Dumping of user accounts as account-management statements (CREATE USER, GRANT) rather than as inserts into the mysql system database
• Capability of creating compressed output
• Progress indicator

What I wanted to caution however, is that mysqlpump is not currently consistent. …

I’ve had a look at a preview release of MySQL 5.7.8, some time before it became available to the general public (perks and duties of an Oracle ACE) and I found a few interesting things among the release notes and the tarball itself:

• There is a new tool named mysqlpump, which is intended as a replacement for mysqldump, with parallel processing, compression, progress watch, the long awaited ability of excluding databases or tables, and more.
• The json functionality has been fished out from the labs and added to the main distribution.