Some unsettling things happened in MySQL in the past week or so.

New storage engine not mentioned in the changelog

There’s a bit of a storm brewing over at the MySQL Performance Blog, where Vadim reports discovering a new storage engine added without mention in the 5.1.33 changelog. This is in defiance of the policy of not making changes in a production release. And it certainly belongs in the changelog — but there is no sign that anyone will remedy this problem.

Arjen Lentz, who is ex-MySQL and was Employee #25, reported a bug on the licensing of this storage engine. To my eyes, the engine’s license does not look right to include in a GPL database. Arjen agrees.

But the …

Everybody attending the MySQL Users Conference this year please mark your calenders! This is your chance to become a MySQL schema design expert as well as learn how to use Workbench from the experts.

We are going to do a free Workshop called “Introduction to Data Modeling with MySQL Workbench” on Tuesday - Thursday 3 - 4:30 PM in the Santa Clara Ballroom.

Some of the topics that will be covered:

• Database Schema Design
  • Get familiar with common concepts of database schema design
  • Learn to avoid typical mistakes (do-s & don’t-s)
  • Tricks how to resolve typical problems
  • Performance-tune your schemata

• MySQL Workbench
  • Get introduced to MySQL Workbench
  • Learn how to use …

If you are a Mac developer, interested in a new professional challenge and like what we have done with MySQL Workbench so far, please consider applying for our open position in the Workbench team.We are looking for an Objective-C / UI coding wunderkind who is also not easily scared by C++.

You can be located anywhere around the world, only hard requirements are that you are comfortable with working from home, have a decent internet connection and are not too far from an airport.We would be happy to have you on the team.

More details about the job below. To speed up the hire process please send your CV to workbench@sun.com. We are preferring people with open source background so please do not forget to include links to your open source work.

Job Summary:

Sun Microsystems is looking for a strong Mac UI developer with in-depth knowledge of Objective-C, C++, X-Code and the …

On early Tuesday morning, I made a quick trip to Paris, France, to attend and speak at the Solutions Linux / Open Source 2009 Conference. I've never been to this conference before and was quite surprised about its size - it's actually the largest Open Source event in France and it reminded me a lot of LinuxTag in Germany. Many well-known vendors (e.g. Sun, Novell, Canonical, Bull, etc.) were exhibiting. The also was a large "DotOrg" section for various Open Source projects and I was very happy to see that LeMUG.fr, the official MySQL User Group of France, had a table there, too! A big Thank You goes to Pascal Borghino, who manned that table on his own most of the time and answered questions about MySQL. I …

A forum for each topic is tiresome. Someone made an improvement, and then you have forums where you can ask pretty much anything.
But also that is not as general purpose as the concept of LazyWeb. When you need help, you just want to stand up and ask.
…

My travel schedule is getting quite crowded for the next months - I just received confirmation that I will be speaking at the phpDay in Verona, Italy on May 15-16th. I'll be talking about bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system as well as MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices in the developer track of the conference. I've never been to Verona, but it seems like it's a beautiful city. I look forward to being there!

The schedule for the 2009 Percona Performance Conference has been released. Take a look, see what interests you, and (optionally) register to come. We look forward to seeing you all there!

Entry posted by Ryan Lowe | One comment

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A couple of weeks ago Sphinx Technologies, a company behind Sphinx Full Text Search Engine launched Sphinx Support Packages which I think is a great value for everyone using Sphinx in Production. This is also a great way to support the project and get something in return - even if you're not actively using support it looks better than donation for accounting people.

The Support approach was closely modeled from MySQL Support of the early days - simple service lever differentiation with no per server pricing or different editions. This is exactly how I think Support for Open Source project should be structured. Of course such service offering may be lacking the "leverage" but how much leverage do you really need if you do not have sales and marketing teams or venture capitalists to feed? If money you pay go …

At this year's CeBit 2009 trade fair, there was a dedicated exhibition area called the Open Source Forum. In addition to providing booths for various Open Source projects, they also had a stage for presentations about different topics. Every talk was recorded and available as a live stream during the show.

My dear colleague Simon Phipps spoke about "Adoption-Led: The Third Wave of Open Source" on Wednesday, I gave a presentation about "MySQL Backup and Security Best Practices" on Friday. The recording of these and all other talks as well as the Linux New Media Award ceremony are now available from the archives. Enjoy!

The web is going the way of utf8.  Drizzle has chosen it as the default character set, most back-ends to websites use it to store text data, and those who are still using latin1 have begun to migrate their databases to utf8.  Googling for "mysql convert charset to utf8" results in a plethora of sites, each with a slightly different approach, and each broken in some respect.  I'll outline those approaches here and show why they don't work, and then present a script that can generically be used to convert a database (or set of tables) to a target character set and collation.

Approach #1:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. ALTER TABLE `t1` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Take the following table as an example why this approach will not work:

…