If you wonder why there hasn't been an update from me for quite a while — I just returned from two months of paternal leave, in which I actually managed to stay away from the PC most of the time. In the meanwhile, I've officially become an Oracle employee and there is a lot of administrative things to take care of... But it feels good to be back!

During my absence, Giuseppe and Felix kicked off the Call for Papers for this year's European OpenSQL Camp, which will again take place in parallel to FrOSCon in St. Augustin (Germany) on August 21st/22nd. We've received a number of …

In this post two weeks ago, I explained why the semantics of normal ad-hoc insertions with a primary key are expensive because they require disk seeks on large data sets. Towards the end of the post, I claimed that it would be better to use “replace into” or “insert ignore” over normal inserts, because the semantics of these statements do NOT require disk seeks. In this post, I explain how the command “replace into” can be fast with fractal trees.

The semantics of “replace into” are as follows:

• 
  
• if the primary (or unique) key does not exist, insert the new row
  
• if the primary (or unique) key does exist, overwrite the existing row with the new row
  

The slow, expensive way B-trees use to implement these semantics are:

The analysis that shows how to make deletions really fast by using clustering keys and TokuDB’s fractal tree based engine also applies to make updates really fast. (I left it out of the last post to keep the story simple). As a quick example, let’s look at the following statement:

update foo set price=price+1 where product=toy;

Executing this statement has two steps:

• 
  
• a query to find where product=toy
  
• a combination of insertions and deletions to change old rows to new rows
  

The analysis is identical to that for deletions. Just like for …

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Is MariaDB really a drop in replacement for MySQL?   I’m running CentOS 5.4.  What happens if…

1. Use “mysqldump –all-databases > FullBackup.sql” to make a full backup. (Better safe then sorry)
2. Go to http://askmonty.org/wiki/MariaDB:Download and download the CentOS 5 packages.
3. Stop msql “service mysqld stop”
4. Pull MySQL out by the roots with “rpm -e mysql-server mysql –nodeps”
5. Install Maria with “rpm -i Maria-*”

And the install start mysql up again.  Wow.  That’s “Drop in”.

If your reading this, you’re seeing it works.

Shortly after I posted my last summary of MySQL releases, our son Mats was born and I went on a 2.5-week vacation. Our developers did not rest in the meanwhile and I'd like to give you a quick update of what's new since then:

MySQL Connector/Net 6.3.0

• Visual Studio 2010 RC support
• Nested transaction scope support

MySQL Workbench 5.2.16 Beta 6

• Fixed 67 bugs
• Saving your profile/connection passwords in OSX keychain, gnome-keyring or in an encrypted password-vault-file.
• New rapid development features for generating complete SQL …

Following our new Milestone-based release model, we've now published MySQL 5.5.0-M2. Please see the "What's New in MySQL 5.5" section of the reference manual for a summary of the most notable changes. The MySQL 5.5.0 Changelog provides a much more detailed list of changes, bug fixes and improvements.

Highlights in this release include:

The InnoDB plugin (currently at version 1.0.5) replaces the built-in InnoDB storage engine. This version includes a number of important performance …

I am happy to announce that mylvmbackup version 0.13 has now been released. This release includes a fix for a nasty bug in on of the recently added Perl hooks (precleanup.pm) and some added functionality (better support for remote rsync backups).

From the ChangeLog: 

• Deleted sample precleanup.pm hook as it has potential to cause harm and is too specialized on a particular use case (BUG#394668)
• Added support for rsync via SSH (BUG#392462)
• Fixed InnoDB recovery in case a relative path to the MySQL data directory is defined (BUG#38337), improved the documentation of relpath in the man page.

Some time ago I posted a compilation of applications and programming languages that provide an API to connect to the MySQL Server. As it turned out, I forgot a few that I would like to mention here:

• Apache DBD API: a MySQL driver for mod_apr_dbd is not included in the official distribution, but can be obtained seperately from here. Some distributions (e.g. openSUSE) actually provide installable packages of this driver module.
• GRASS MySQL driver …

We've now published a new set of binary packages including the extended GIS functionality from the mysql-5.1-wl1326 source tree.

This release is based on the MySQL 5.1.35 code base and fixes the bugs mentioned below. It includes some improvements to the GIS functionality as well, so please use these packages for future testing of the MySQL GIS functionality.

The following GIS-related bugs were fixed in this version:

• Bug#31753: Buffer/area functions only return first row of set
• Bug#32032: Contains() does not work on MultiPolygons, may force a disconnect and/or result in extremely long query times.
• Bug#32100: contains, …

Shortly after I created the initial packages of embedded InnoDB on the OpenSUSE Build Service, Oracle/Innobase released an updated version (1.0.3.5325). In addition to many improvements and bug fixes, they slightly changed the versioning scheme to better indicate what version of the InnodDB plugin their code is based on (see Vasil's posting on the InnoDB Forums for more information).

I've now updated my InnoDB packages on the Build Service to this version as well - please note that the naming scheme of the shared library package has …