451 Research’s 2013 Database survey is now live at http://bit.ly/451db13 investigating the current use of database technologies, including MySQL, NoSQL and NewSQL, as well as traditional relation and non-relational databases.

The aim of this survey is to identify trends in database usage, as well as changing attitudes to MySQL following its acquisition by Oracle, and the competitive dynamic between MySQL and other databases, including NoSQL and NewSQL technologies.

There are just 15 questions to answer, spread over five pages, and the entire survey should take less than ten minutes to complete.

All individual responses are of course confidential. The results will be published as part of a major research report due during Q2.

The full …

I discovered a feature (or bug) of MySQL timestamp fields. Maybe is documented in some place what I not read yet:

When I add a new timestamp field to a table, MySQL magically adds some features to new timestamp field like a “trigger” and a default value to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP.

There is test-case script:

-- CREATING TABLE AND INSERT SOME DUMMY DATA
mysql> CREATE TABLE t(
    -> id INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
    -> val VARCHAR(50)
    -> );
Query OK, 0 ROWS affected (0.15 sec)
 
mysql> INSERT INTO t (val) VALUES ("foo") ,("var");
Query OK, 2 ROWS affected (0.08 sec)
Records: 2  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0
 
mysql> SELECT * FROM t;
+----+------+
| id | val  |
+----+------+
|  1 | foo  |
|  2 | var  |
+----+------+
2 ROWS IN SET (0.00 sec)
 
 
-- ADDING NEW TIMESTAMP FIELD AND ADD MORE DUMMY DATA
mysql> ALTER TABLE t ADD ts_field TIMESTAMP;
Query OK, 2 ROWS affected (0.35 sec)
Records: 2  Duplicates: 0 …

Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs) are one of the key replication enhancements in MySQL 5.6. GTIDs make it simple to track and compare replication across a master - slave topology. This enables:

- Much simpler recovery from failures of the master,

- Introduces great flexibility in the provisioning and on-going management of multi-tier or ring (circular) replication topologies.

A new on-demand MySQL 5.6 GTID webinar delivered by the replication engineering team is now available, providing deep insight into the design and implementation of GTIDs, and how they enable users to simplify MySQL scaling and HA. The webinar covers:

- Concepts: What is a GTID? How does the …

I got some very good comments/questions on my previous post on MariaDB global transaction ID, from Giuseppe and Robert (of Tungsten fame). I thought a follow-up post would be appropriate to answer and further elaborate on the comments, as the points they raise are very important and interesting.

(It also gives me the opportunity to explain more deeply a lot of interesting design decisions that I left out in the first post for the sake of brevity and clarity.)

On crash-safe slave

One of the things I really wanted to improve with global transaction ID is to make the replication slaves more crash safe with respect to their current replication state. This state is mostly persistently stored information about which event(s) were last executed on the slave, so that after a server restart the slave will know from which point in the master binlog(s) …

The main goal of global transaction ID is to make it easy to promote a new master and switch all slaves over to continue replication from the new master. This is currently harder than it could be, since the current replication position for a slave is specified in coordinates that are specific to the current master, and it is not trivial to translate them into the corresponding coordinates on the new master. Global transaction ID solves this by annotating each event with the global transaction id which is unique and universal across the whole replication hierarchy.

In addition, there are at least two other main goals for MariaDB global transaction ID:

1. Make it easy to setup global transaction ID, and easy to provision a new slave into an existing replication hierarchy.
2. Fully support …

It's the end of the year and, before the world ends ;-) , I feel the pressure to follow up on last year's article "2011, a great year for MySQL in Review". I'll adopt a similar format and mention things in context, covering products, marketing, momentum, etc. at a high level. I may have missed something and I hope my colleagues will contribute to the list.

I really do think it's been the best year for MySQL so far... well, at least since when I signed my contract with MySQL AB at the end of 2007. We're just at the beginning of our journey and I wish to the MySQL family, to our community and ecosystem an even better 2013!

Summary
…

I recently worked on a Rails 3.2 project that used the sweet PLupload JavaScript/Flash upload tool to upload files to the web app. To make it easier for users to upload large and/or remote files to the app, we also wanted to let them upload via SFTP. The catch was, our users didn't have SFTP accounts on our server and we didn't want to get into the business of creating and managing SFTP accounts. Enter: ProFTPD and virtual users.

ProFTPD's virtual users concept allows you to point ProFTPD at a SQL database for your user and group authentication. This means SFTP logins don't need actual system logins (although you can mix and match if you want). Naturally, this is perfect for dynamically creating and destroying SFTP accounts. …

She hired the 400+ original MySQLers … and sets out to hire the SkySQLers of tomorrow! Boel Larsen blogs about open positions & life at SkySQL - and wants you to join the fun!

Those of you who know me also know that I spent over six years working for MySQL HR (for another couple of years I stayed on with Sun).  I joined as employee thirty-something, so running HR meant that I was more or less involved with hiring all of the 400 or so employees who joined after me. I knew pretty much everyone by name.

read more

In my ongoing efforts to migrate my fun side projects and coding experiments from SVN to Git I’ve come across some of my favorite Python based apps – which are all available in their respective repos on BitBucket, as follows:

IRC Bot Commander

• What it does: it’s an IRC bot that takes commands and does your bidding on whichever remote server the bot is installed on.
• How it does it: the bot runs on whatever server you install it on, then it connects to the IRC server and channel you configured it to connect to and it waits for you to give it commands, then it execs the commands and returns the output to your IRC chat window.

MacroBase – MySQL Analytics

…

As this topic came up a few times this week for discussion at various places, I thought of composing a post on “Data Scientist vs. Data Analytics Engineer”; even though[...]