The PHP UnConference is taking place on May 17-18, 2014 on the Island of Majorka. MySQL team is going to be presented by Ulf Wendel at this event. As usual for all UnConferences there is no sessions/talks schedule announced prior the conference, attendees might vote for the most interesting topics at the event. So, do not miss to come to PHP UnConference at lovely Island of Majorka!! (in the case you still do not know whether come or not, maybe the price of tickets, weather forecast and/or flight ticket from several locations might convince you...). 

The Solutions Linux & OpenSource …

The German Unix User Group (GUUG) will hold their annual conference "Frühjahrsfachgespräch" on September 23-26 this year (I know, not really "Frühjahr" anymore, but this is how it is).

The Call for Presentations is still open until May 31st. Talks can be proposed in German and English, and there are slots for longer tutorials as well.

The range of possible topics is broad, so if you think you have anything interesting to share with a very passionate and technical audience of sysadmins and developers, here are some suggestions:

• Operating Systems/Applications: architectures, privilege concepts, new developments, administration, mobile systems
• Relevant new OS Kernel features: new developments in Linux-, BSD- or other Spen …

mysql_install_db is the program that is responsible for bootstrapping a fresh copy of MySQL and making sure all of the system tables are setup correctly. This program is usually invoked by other programs as part of installation, but in the case of .tar.gz downloads will need to be executed manually.

As part of our ongoing efforts to refactor and improve MySQL, we are looking at converting mysql_install_db from its current Perl script to a program written in C++. The aim of this change is to reduce external dependencies (Perl + a set of modules) and improve our cross-platform experience.

We plan for this transition to be mostly function neutral, but are open to feature requests for additional improvements as well.

Have you worked in packaging MySQL?
Do you have any suggestions on how mysql_install_db can be improved?
Please leave a comment, or get in …

This month another MySQL User Group meeting is scheduled, this time in Seoul, Korea on May 20, 2014 @ 6:30pm. Please mark your calendar for this day if you are local... It's a great opportunity to hear news about delivering MySQL 5.7.4 as well as we saved some time for a MySQL User Group discussion. Please see details below:

Name: MySQL User Group Meeting

Date: May 20th, 2014

Time: 6:30pm

Place: 15fl. ASEM Tower, (Oracle Korea office), Samsung-dong, Seoul, Korea

For more details see the MySQL Korea User Group Facebook page

MySQL, the original brand, the one developed by the MySQL team at Oracle, is steadily evolving. You can feel it if you try every new release that comes out of the milestone release cycle. Or even if you don’t try all of them, just testing a release once in a while gives you something to think about.

The engineers at Oracle are trying hard to improve the defaults. If you are the out-of-the-box type, and just install the new version on top of the previous one, leaving the same setup in place, you may be up for a for a few surprises. It’s the marketing, see? They tell you that just by replacing your old MySQL (5.1 or 5.5) with MySQL 5.6 you get 30% to 70% performance improvement. Which happens to be true, not only because the server is better, but also because they have changed the defaults. However, this change in defaults may come with some serious consequences for the ones who …

We are looking for community feedback on how improve the Signal-to-Noise ratio of PlanetMySQL, and reduce the amount of irrelevant and off-topic posts.

To give you a sense of where we are at today, we currently approve most [all?] blogs for aggregation, provided they have some existing technical content. We then apply a naive regular expression to make sure that all posts are on topic (MySQL).

The sorts of ideas we are looking for are:

• What content are you interested in seeing more or less of?
• What posts do you deem as acceptable or unacceptable?
• Do we need to change the balance between technical, marketing, event, or business-related posts?
• Are there any tools or features we could introduce to better serve readers and authors?

If you have any suggestions - please send them my way!

Want to know more about recent MySQL ads? If so, and if you are closed to Paris, join us for the MySQL Tech Day scheduled for May 22nd, 2014. 

You will have an opportunity to hear the latest MySQL news, InnoDB new features and MySQL Performance Schema given by the key MySQL experts. Also this event is constructed as the interactive one, so you will have a chance to discuss and ask questions at this free event. Please review the detailed agenda below and here (in French).

Event Details:

Date: May 22, 2014

Time: 10:00 - 17:30 

Place: Oracle France, 15 Boulevard Charles de Gaulle, 92715 Colombes Cedex, Paris, France

Entrance fee: Free of charge

Registration: Please register …

The OpenSUSE Conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia started today and will continue till Monday April 28, 2014. MySQL team is going to be part of this event. Do not miss to visit our booth, which will be located on the ground floor as well as come to listen 2 MySQL talks (see OpenSUSE schedule):

• Georgi Kodinov is going to have a talk about "Protect your MySQL server". His talk is scheduled for Friday, April 25, 2014 @ 13:00 in Ragusa mtg.room 
• Norvald Ryeng will talk about "The upstream view" - Package maintenance as seen from MySQL Engineering. His talk is scheduled for Sunday, April 27, 2014 @ 13:00 in Ragusa mtg.room

For the whole conference plan you can check the …

In the MySQL team, we are considering deprecating the mysqlhotcopy utility. To provide some background, here is an excerpt from the MySQL manual:

mysqlhotcopy is a Perl script that was originally written and contributed by Tim Bunce. It uses FLUSH TABLES, LOCK TABLES, and cp or scp to make a database backup. It is a fast way to make a backup of the database or single tables, but it can be run only on the same machine where the database directories are located. mysqlhotcopy works only for backing up MyISAM and ARCHIVE tables. It runs on Unix.

And now let me explain the motivations leading to our proposal:

• The name implies that this utility will work for 'MySQL' and is hot, but actually neither are true:
  1. Only MyISAM and ARCHIVE engines are supported.
  2. Tables are read-locked before …

Thank you to the MySQL Community, on behalf of the MySQL team @ Oracle. Your bug reports, testcases and patches have helped create a better MySQL 5.6.17.

In particular:

• Thanks to Anthony Pong for reporting a confusing error message when mysql_install_db could not locate the required Perl modules. Bug #69844.
• Thanks to Jervin Real for reporting a recently introduced performance regression with compressed InnoDB tables. Bug #71436.
• Thanks to Laurynas Biveinis for reporting a race condition in InnoDB on shutdown. Bug #70430.
• Thanks to Jervin Real for reporting that innodb_data_file_path could …