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Welcome to the 160th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

MySQL

Blame it on MyISAM, says Mark Callaghan of High Availability MySQL, on considering sql_mode and type coercion. “I think that MyISAM has its place,” writes Mark. “It does fast table scans, but InnoDB is much faster on just about everything else. I am just not thrilled with the impact it has had on MySQL.”

Not that those other engines are without flaw. Peter Zaitsev reports on an InnoDB performance gotcha with larger queries.

Here on the …

Baron Schwartz started a good discussion about MMM use cases that quickly veered into an argument about clustering in general. As Florian Haas put it on his blog, this is not just an issue of DRBD vs. MySQL Replication. Is a database cluster something you cobble together through bits and pieces like MMM? Or is it something integrated that we can really call a cluster? This is the core question that will determine the future of clustering for open source databases.

I have a strong personal interest in this question, because Tungsten clustering, which I designed, is betting …

<rant>

Oh dear. I was hoping that by now this would be a non-issue. It seems that many of us (including the majority of my clients) are late to the party.

People…it’s now September of  2009. Next month starts the last quarter of 2009.  If you have a 64-bit chip in your server for the LOVE OF GOD please run a 64-bit operating system. And easily 90% of the servers shipping have 64-bit procs. I don’t know of any shipping dedicated servers that are running 32-bit procs but I suppose there are some left somewhere in the universe.

Do you know how difficult and costly it can be to upgrade your server to a 64-bit OS? Costly in terms of money and downtime (which may as well be money). All because you didn’t realize when you bought the server that you would ever use more than four gigs of RAM. Or you thought you might have some trouble getting your application to work with the 64-bit libraries or whatever. …

MySQL Full Text Search Limitations

Suppose you have a MyISAM table containing a column with a full text index. This table starts to grow to a significant size (millions of rows) and gets updated fairly frequently. Chances are that you’ll start to see some bottlenecks when accessing this table, since without row level locking, the reading and writing operations will be blocking each other.

A solution that many people would suggest right away is to use the master for writes and a slave for reads, but this only masks the problem, and it won’t take long before enough read traffic on the slave starts causing slave lags.

Why Sphinx?

The main difference between the Sphinx search engine and other alternatives is its close integration with MySQL. For example, it can be used as a storage engine.  In this way, Sphinx’s impact on existing application code …

This is the 159th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome.

MySQL

Sun’s Trent Lloyd cautions Watch out for hostname changes when using replication!, for there is a gotcha there.

Justin Swanhart was also in the cautioning business this week, saying Be careful with BETWEEN clauses, because the MySQL optimizer is not smarter than a fifth grader!. The readers say, that’s SQL.

Anyway, it’s probably unwise to underestimate the intelligence of a child. …

In record time, less than a week after the conference (thanks to the free Pinnacle Video Spin and YouTube), all 11 videos that were taken at OpenSQLCamp Europe are online.

For those who missed the sessions, or just want to relive the fun!

Almost all the sessions were filmed; regrettably Darren Cassar’s Securich – MySQL user administration and security made easy! and Stephane Combaudon’s Minimizing data access with covering indexes were not.

The YouTube videos have the descriptions and resources from the official conference pages, and links to pages. If there is more information to add (for example, the slides from a talk are now online), or if …

Beginning Database Design: From Novice to Professional

Beginning Database Design: From Novice to Professional. By Clare Churcher, Apress, 2007. Page count: 230 pages. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site.)

My wife bought a copy of this book, and recently I took it off her bookshelf to give it a read myself.

I found the book very lucid and readable. The author does not drag us through a bunch of formalisms, nor does she attempt to force the book to be readable through the use of comics, pop-culture references, or other artificial devices. Instead, she draws on her real-life experience helping people design databases, and presents several examples that …

Tungsten clustering and replication has been accessible as open source for almost a year, but it has taken us an amazingly long time to get our contribution policy set up. The dithering ended promptly after Monty Widenius wrote an excellent blog article on dual-licensed software from his experiences at AskMonty.org and previously at MySQL AB. One of the things I especially like is Monty's emphasis on contributor rights. Contributor rights create the sense of reciprocity that makes open source function effectively as a development model. Tungsten is henceforth adopting the AskMonty.org contribution model.

So, if you want to contribute code to Tungsten (I'll describe shortly why you might …

This is the 158th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

SQL Server

Simon Sabin has a TSQL Challenge – counting non zero columns. He says, “I’m working on a project where I need to cycle a flag amongst a set of columns. To achieve this I am storing a position value in each column which allows me to cycle them . . .  So the challenge is to find out the how many non zero columns there are, the twist is to use as little code as possible.”

On a cue from Simon, Aaron Bertrand shares …