We’re proud to announce the next release of MySQL Workbench, version 5.2.29. This maintenance release focuses on general product improvement and usability.

As always, we want to thank everyone for the great feedback we have received. This helps us to continuously improve and extend the functionality and stability of MySQL Workbench – please keep up on approaching us with any ideas to develop our product even further.

New Workbench 5.2.29 Preference/Feature

Say you have been working on a model for hours in Workbench, and you haven’t saved in the last 90 minutes, suddenly the power goes out (or some other force majeure). Now with 5.2.29, if Workbench unexpectedly quits during modeling, the model you were working on will be restored to the last auto-saved version the next time you open that model.
As always, please remember to save and version your models regularly.
Also – you can change the value of …

Patents! Patents! Patents! Canonical’s perfect 10. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Google responded to Oracle’s claims that its Android OS infringes copyrights and patents related to Java.

# Matt Asay evaluated the various patent claims against Android and its related devices.

# Microsoft licensed smartphone patents from ACCESS Co and a subsidiary of Acacia Research.

# Glyn Moody …

Microsoft sues Motorola. Oracle says no to LibreOffice. Time to fork Java? And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Microsoft is suing Motorola over alleged Android patent infringements.

# Oracle confirmed to SJVN that it will not be working with the Document Foundation on LibreOffice.

# Sean Michael Kerner reported that Red Hat has settled an alleged patent infringement case with IP firm Acacia Research.

# Greg Luck …

A common story: You’ve got some connection, either it’s busy running something it shouldn’t be, it’s in Sleep but holding some important lock, or you just don’t know why it’s connected to your database server in the first place. You see it in your SHOW PROCESSLIST like so:

mysql> show processlist G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
     Id: 5979887
   User: root
   Host: localhost:55997
     db: NULL
Command: Sleep
   Time: 475
  State: 
   Info: NULL

How do you find that client, especially if it’s on another host? MySQL is providing you all the information you need above: localhost:55997. Of course localhost is the host or IP address, and 55997 is the source port of the socket; the port number (usually randomly assigned) on the far end of the socket, from the MySQL server’s perspective. You can turn that number into something useful—the PID and user—, by running the following …

There is much excitement this week (understandably) about the formation of the Document Foundation and the LibreOffice fork of Openoffice.org.

Alan Bell sees correlation with the previous fork of Joomla from Mambo and has illustrated the potential impact that forking a project can have with a Google Trends chart, where Mambo is the blue line, and Joomla is the red line:

A similar chart for Debian (blue) and Ubuntu (red) is also instructive:

Or what about Nagios (blue) and Icinga (red):

Hmm. Maybe not the best example. …

Update: Also read A brief update on NUMA and MySQL.

The “swap insanity” problem, in brief

When running MySQL on a large system (e.g., 64GB RAM and dual quad core CPUs) with a large InnoDB buffer pool (e.g., 48GB), over time, Linux decides to swap out potentially large amounts of memory, despite appearing1 to be under no real memory pressure. Monitoring reveals that at no time is the system in actual need of more memory than it has available; and memory isn’t leaking, mysqld‘s RSS is normal and stable.

Normally a tiny bit of swap usage could be OK (we’re really concerned about activity—swaps in and out), but in many cases, “real” useful memory is being swapped: primarily parts of InnoDB’s buffer pool. When it’s needed …

Oracle launches Unbreakable Kernel, updates MySQL and Java plans. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Oracle launched its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.

# Oracle announced the release candidate of MySQL 5.5.

# Oracle outlined its plans for Java platform. JavaWorld has the details.

# Novell and SAP have collaborated on SUSE …

To benchmark IO on Linux and MySQL transaction processing, SysBench is a popular choice that can do both. After poking around at the source code, it seems PostgreSQL and Oracle are also included for transaction processing testing if you have the proper header files, but I didn’t test those.

To benchmark IO on Windows and SQL Server transaction processing, Microsoft provides two tools, SQLIO and SQLIOSim. SQLIO is a misnomer in that it really doesn’t have much to do with SQL Server. It is a general purpose disk IO benchmark tool.

So today I was playing with SysBench and noticed that I can compile and build it on Windows as well. I decided I should run IO benchmark on a single machine with both tools (SQLIO and SysBench), and see if I could reconcile the results.

To make things simple, I thought I would just benchmark random read of 3G (orders of magnitude bigger than disk controller cache) files for 5 minutes (300 …

We’re proud to announce the next release of MySQL Workbench, version 5.2.28. This maintenance release features improvements to the Workbench scripting Shell as well as various fixes.

Enhancements to the Workbench 5.2.28 Scripting Shell makes development and usage of Workbench Scripts and Plug-ins easier by

• Providing a new workbench shell scripting file browser
• Allowing users to more easily create/edit/save/execute Workbench python and lua scripts
• Including Handy Workbench “Scripting” snippets that can easily be executed or copied.
• Adding a new script results output panel

For more on Workbench Scripting and Plug-in development see

http://wb.mysql.com/?page_id=664

As always, we want to thank everyone for the great feedback we have received. This helps us to continuously improve and extend …

Since 5.5 is announced as Release Candidate now, I'll not compare it with 5.1 anymore - I think there was written enough about the performance gain even since introduction of 5.4 :-)

From the other side, we want to be sure that the final 5.5 will be at least as good as 5.5.4 release, and here the feedback from real users with real workloads will be very precious! So, please, don't keep quiet! :-))

After that, few notes while testing MySQL 5.5 on dbSTRESS and points for discussions..

Buffer Pool and Purge

Last month I've got some time to focus on the Buffer Pool pages management I've observed many months before with older MySQL/InnoDB versions, and now was curious if I'll reproduce the same issue with MySQL 5.5.4 too...

Few words about the tested workload:

• still dbSTRESS ;-)
• but "light" scenario which may be very common for many web servers: there are only SELECT and …