I was asked this question recently “I am wanting to create a simple MySQL database consisting of 5 tables”?

While it’s easy to tell people to RTFM, the question does warrant an answer for the MySQL beginner to provide a more specific guidance as to where to start, and what to do. As a expert in MySQL it’s easy to forget how you would describe what to do. Here are my tips to getting started.

Step 1. Download the MySQL 5.1 software for your platform (e.g. Linux, Windows, Mac etc) from MySQL 5.1 Downloads. There are many different versions of MySQL, MySQL 5.1 is the current production version.

Step 2. You will need to install the MySQL software. The MySQL reference manual is the place to go, Chapter 2 describes installing MySQL. You can also download a copy of the manual in …

There are seven new INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables (plugins) available with the InnoDB plugin.  They need to be loaded to be used.

New InnoDB Plugins contain information on: Compressed InnoDB tables Compressed InnoDB buffer pool Current InnoDB transactions Transaction Locks Blocking transactions

These INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugins are available by setting the plugin-load parmeter:

plugin-load=

The InnoDB Plugin (1.0.4) is  pretty straight forward configuration. These instructions are for MySQL 5.1.38.  There is a new release of InnoDB Plugin with the 5.1.41 release. With MySQL you can use the default version of InnoDB or the new Plugin but not both.  If using a non-default configuration make sure and set the plugin_dir variable to point to the ha_innodb_plugin library for your system.

The MySQL 5.1.38 release is available today with the InnoDB Plugin (1.0.4) included in the software distribution.  The InnoDB Plugin offers some key features: Improved performance and scalability.

Important management features that will be very helpful to MySQL DBAs.     I recommend you look into the new features available with the InnoDB Plugin. The InnoDB Plugin (1.0.4) is at end of beta

Cloudera lands funding. SourceForge acquires Ohloh. Novell reports Linux growth. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

Cloudera shows signs of progress
GigaOM reported that Cloudera raised $6m Series B funding from Accel and Greylock and is now looking beyond web applications to wider enterprise adoption of Hadoop. Cloudera also announced its first certification program for Hadoop.

Open source goes mainstream in the UK
There have been signs of change recently with regards to open source adoption in the UK, which has traditionally lagged behind the rest of Europe and the US. CBR Magazine provided an analysis of …

There are a number of new and enhanced storage engines that promise increased scalability, performance and important new online features. All this competition with storage engines is going to create a win for the MySQL community. This competition is what open source is all about. If you do not continue to innovate and improve you cannot expect to be a leader in the open source world. The nice

Reducing Administration Costs and Down TimeDBAs are always going to be challenged with growth, scalability and performance as long as databases get bigger and more users access them. Reducing administration and down time are always key issues in our 24 x 7 environments. The new InnoDB Plugin has some very important features that DBAs are going to want to take a serious look at. So I thought I

The MySQL marketplace today is far more complex then simply choosing between a particular version of MySQL that Sun/MySQL produces.
The MySQL server product in general is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2, however you should carefully review the MySQL Legal Policies as a number of exceptions and different license agreements operate for companion tools such as MySQL Cluster, MySQL client libraries and documentation for example.

Looking into the MySQL ecosystem for products, I’ve produced the following categories:

• Sun/MySQL Official Products
  • MySQL Versions
• MySQL Variants
  • Community
  • Enterprise
  …

I’ve just started using the CSV engine for a practical application and I’ve come across a few subtle and unexpected issues/limitations.

First, you can’t create any columns in your CSV table nullable.

mysql> create table t1(i INT) ENGINE=CSV;
ERROR 1178 (42000): The storage engine for the table doesn't support nullable columns

RTFM shows this was introduced in 5.1.23. See CSV Limitations

The second and more annoying was creating a CSV table, inserting a sample row (just to check the syntax), then replacing the file ([datadir]/[schema]/[table].CSV) with the same format, but with additional generated rows. This was to no avail when attempting to SELECT from the table.

The solution was to do a REPAIR TABLE [table] in order to see the newly refreshed data.
Futhermore, some more RTFM shows in …

The March NY MySQL Meetup featured a presentation from Infobright, a data warehousing solution built on the MySQL Product.

With a pitch of “Simplicity, Scalability and low TCO” I became more impressed with the capability to delivery on these as the presentation proceeded. Here are some highlights.

• The company and product has been around for a few years. Infobright started as a compression engine to sit beside Teradata, providing a significant cost saving to clients, and allowing a two way data transfer between Teradata.
• In September 2008, a open source community edition was released, called ICE. (Which I didn’t know)
• The technology is based on a Rough Set theory, a mathematical approach
• Using a …