The solidDB for MySQL database engine for MySQL may have lost its sponsor following IBM’s acquisition of Solid Info Tech but events at this week’s MySQL Conference and Expo prove the certified engines program is alive and well.

Not only has Oracle announced that its Innobase subsidiary has updated InnoDB transactional storage engine, but there is also a new member of the certified engines program.

Kickfire has recently …

As followers of Free / Open Source Software know, there are several ways of being free.

As for free as in speech, look for Wednesday’s keynote at the MySQL Users Conference here in Santa Clara on the US West Coast. It’s by Rick Falkvinge, party leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. Or download MySQL Community Server, it’s free as in speech.

As for free as in beer, sure, again, just download MySQL Community Server, install it, and use it. Old news.

But what if you’re lazy enough not to want to download and install MySQL Server? What if you just want to use an instance of MySQL Serer, installed and provided by someone else, with a simple command like

mysql -h db4free.net -P 3307 -u [username] -p[password] ?

Well, in that case, register for a …

I’ll be following closely the progression of Storage Engines available in the MySQL Database server, well soon to be available when 5.1 gets to GA (hopefully by end of Q2 which is what we have been told). Tick, Tick, time is running out.

PrimeBase XT (PBXT) and Blob Streaming is obviously my clear focus, actually now working for PrimeBase Technologies, the company which I want to note for people is an Open Source company, committed at providing an open source alternative to the other commercial players. You also have at the MySQL Conference talks on the the existing InnoDB from Innobase (a subsidiary of market RDBMS leader Oracle). There is a …

A year ago, I criticized the under-development Falcon storage engine in MySQL 6.0 of failing to meet the demand of large-scale deployments. Falcon has now reached a beta phase and is included in the MySQL 6.0 alpha versions, most recent release of which is 6.0.4 this February. We're thinking of making an early test of Falcon in place of MyISAM/InnoDB for Habbo to see what to expect later on, so I reviewed the documentation again, and thought to look at my concerns from a year ago.

Falcon now supports multiple tablespaces per database, although the corresponding manual page still begins with the unfortunately misleading sentence of "all data ... is stored within a single file", and goes on to correct itself in the second …

Today Robin Schumacher, MySQL's Director of Product Management, announced that the mysql Falcon storage engine has moved into a beta release stage. Falcon, a new transactional storage engine introduced in mysql 6 (aka 5.2), has been in alpha for years. Other popular storage engines include MyISAM, InnoDB, which Falcon is supposed to challenge (successfully? :-/), and the upcoming Maria.

Falcon …

With 130 entries in the “MySQL” category and no MySQL-related subcategories, my blog had become impossible to search and navigate easily.

And thus I created a number of new categories for the MySQL entries within my blog. They’re listed in the left navigation bar, below the months, as well as below:

• MySQL Server, MySQL Cluster, Falcon
• Connectors: PHP, Ruby on Rails
…

MySQL has introduced Previews as a new way of delivering features for early testing by our community.

Previews are for testing of features, not of versions. The two previews we offer today are the Falcon Feature Preview based on 6.0, and the GIS Feature Preview based on 5.1. However, the version number as such is not intended by us to set any expectations on when the feature will be in a production version. For instance, Falcon is going into the 6.0 code base, but the GIS geographical data won’t be in before 6.1 (although the preview is based on 5.1).

Previews are by definition a bit “rough around the edges”. …

The Thanksgiving break was a welcome change of pace... and on the idle driving up and down the Californian coastline, I had a few moments to work on the MySQL External Stored Procedures project. I think I pretty much have Perl functioning fully and a couple of minor problems were resolved.Yesterday, I completed the first draft of the all-revised-from-scratch WL#3771, now titled as the Plugable

If you are not familiar with tablespaces you may be wondering what the big deal about them is. Tablespaces are a logical addition to a database that helps maintenance, and potentially, can improve performance.

In Oracle and MySQL, a tablespace is a logical unit meant to store segments (i.e. tables and indexes). In Postgres, a tablespace is a physical unit. It is a symbolic link to a directory. Postgres does not allow tablespaces on operating systems that do not support symbolic links (such as windows).

The data file is the actual physical storage mechanism in Oracle and MySQL. Postgres stores tables in individual files. Postgres support of tablespaces is minimal. In MySQL and Oracle, performance can be improved by a more granular spread of data across disks. Ease of maintenance is maintained due to the logical grouping of tablespaces.

Oracle syntax for creating a tablespace is much the same as MySQL …