Enough negativity sometimes gets slung around that it’s easy to forget how much good is going on. I want to give a public thumbs-up to the great job the MySQL community team, especially Morgan Tocker, is doing. I don’t remember ever having so much good interaction with this team, not even in the “good old days”:

• Advance notice of things they’re thinking about doing (deprecating, changing, adding, etc)
• Heads-up via private emails about news and upcoming things of interest (new features, upcoming announcements that aren’t public yet, etc)
• Solicitation of opinion on proposals that are being floated internally (do you use this feature, would it hurt you if we removed this option, do you care about this legacy behavior we’re thinking about sanitizing)

I don’t know who or what has made this change happen, but it’s really welcome. I know Oracle is a giant company with all …

Here’s a trip down memory lane. I was just cleaning out some stuff and I found some notes I took from a hilarious MySQL seminar a few years back. I won’t say when or where, to protect the guilty.[1]

I found it so absurd that I had to write down what I was witnessing. Enough time has passed that we can probably all laugh about this now. Times and people have changed.

The seminar was a sales pitch in disguise, of course. The speakers were singing Powerpoint Karaoke to slides real tech people had written. Every now and then, when they advanced a slide, they must have had a panicked moment. “I don’t remember this slide at all!” they must have been thinking. So they’d mumble something really funny and trying-too-hard-to-be-casual about “oh, yeah, [insert topic here] but you all already know this, I won’t bore you with the details [advance slide hastily].” It’s strange how transparent that is to the audience.

…

I just tried out EXPLAIN UPDATE in MySQL 5.6 and found unexpected results. This query has no usable index:

EXPLAIN UPDATE ... WHERE col1 = 9 AND col2 = 'something'\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           id: 1
  select_type: SIMPLE
        table: foo
         type: index
possible_keys: NULL
          key: PRIMARY
      key_len: 55
          ref: NULL
         rows: 51
        Extra: Using where

The EXPLAIN output makes it seem like a perfectly fine query, but it’s a full table scan. If I do the old trick of rewriting it to a SELECT I see that:

*************************** 1. row ***************************
           id: 1
  select_type: SIMPLE
        table: foo
         type: ALL
possible_keys: NULL
          key: NULL
      key_len: NULL
          ref: NULL
         rows: 51
        Extra: Using where

Should I file this as a bug? It seems like one to me.

Somebody asked how to create a SYNONYM in MySQL, which is interesting because MySQL doesn’t support synonyms. I thought the prior entry explained how to do it, but here’s a new post. However, you can create a view in one database that relies on a table in another database.

The following SQL statements create two databases and grant appropriate privileges to the student as the root superuser:

/* Create two databases. */
CREATE DATABASE seussdb;
CREATE DATABASE appdb;
 
/* Grant privileges to a student user. */
GRANT ALL ON seussdb.* TO student;
GRANT ALL ON appdb.* TO student;

Log out from the root superuser and reconnect as the student user. Then, the following code connects to the seuss …

There is a new release of the Connector/Arduino on Launchpad! See https://launchpad.net/mysql-arduino. The new version supports a number of refinements and a few new features. These include:

• Improved support for processing result sets
• Conditional compilation to omit result set handling features to save program space
• Support for the Arduino WiFi shield
• New version() method to check version of the connector
• Simplified download (no more patching SHA1!)

So What is It?
If you have never heard of Connector/Arduino, it is simply a library designed to allow the Arduino platform to connect to and issue queries to a MySQL Database server.

Simply add an Ethernet shield to your Arduino and use the library to connect your Arduino to a MySQL database server. Yes, no more web-based hand waving or third party systems! Cool.

New …

Due to the growing popularity of Connector/Arduino, the moderator of MySQL Forums has created a forum for us to meet up and discuss the connector. Yippie!

http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?175

While the forum has been started very recently, I expect it will grow quickly as people discover the connector for the first time and experienced users find new and interesting ways to use it. I hope to moderate the new forum periodically to answer questions and respond to posts. See you there!

Note: you need an account to write to the forum. Click on "register" in the upper right hand corner of the forum page to create an account if you do not already have one.

The SQL language is a bit like a toolkit for data. It consists of lots of little fiddly bits of syntax that, taken together, allow you to build complex edifices and return powerful results. For the uninitiated, the many tools can be quite confusing, and it's sometimes difficult to decide how to go about the process of building non-trivial queries, that is, queries that are more than a simple SELECT a, b FROM c;

A System for Building Queries

When you're building queries, you could use a system like the following: 

1. Decide which fields contain the values you want to use in our output, and how you wish to alias those fields
   1. Values you want to see in your output
   2. Values you want to use in calculations . For example, to calculate margin on a product, you could calculate price - cost and give it the alias margin.
   3. Values you want …

I have followed the “Use the Index, Luke!” blog for a while. Today Marcus wrote that (I’ll paraphrase) MongoDB disgraces NoSQL the same way that MySQL disgraces SQL. I agree with a lot of this, actually, although I’m not sure I’d put it so strongly. People often like products for good reasons, and to think that legions of developers are stupid or ill-educated is suspect, in my opinion.

But that wasn’t what I meant to write about. I wanted to point out something about the blog post that’s a little outdated. He wrote, and this time I’ll quote, “MySQL is rather poor at joining because is only supports nested loops joins. Most other SQL database implement the hash join and sort/merge join algorithms too.”

It’s no longer true that MySQL doesn’t support these, and hasn’t been for a while, depending …

Oracle released a bunch of MySQL stuff they’ve been working on since the last huge release, and my blog reader filled up with a few dozen posts I’m gonna have to read through so I don’t feel ignorant. Dear MySQL Engineering Team, could you take pity on me and release these gradually over the course of a month or so next time? Especially since Google discontinued Reader, and I’m using Feedly now, and it has a bug that I can’t figure …

It’s common wisdom that large-scale database systems require distributing the data across machines. But what seems to be missing in a lot of discussions is distributing the query processing too. By this I mean the actual computation that’s performed on the data.

I just had a conversation with Peter Zaitsev yesterday that helped make concrete some thoughts I’ve been having about Cassandra for a while. Because Cassandra doesn’t allow you to really do any computation in the data (aggregating, evaluating expressions, and so on), if you’re going to use it for truly Big data, you’re going to fetch enormous amounts of data across the network. Sure, you’re distributing the storage and retrieval across many machines — but you’re locating your data far from your processing. You have a distant low-level key-value store, in essence, and you have to write a database wrapper on top of it if you’re going to use it for anything …