What a surprisingly busy week.

Spent quite a lot of time tracking down a linking problem on Itanium. It appears that GNU ld 2.14 has some serious deficiencies. GNU ld 2.17 (the current stable release) does fix the problem. Unfortunately, the last supported version of GNU ld on RedHat AS 3 for Itaniam is version 2.14.90.0.4.20030529 - which clearly cannot contain the fix which was written in November of 2003. I suppose what to do is now a decision to be made by someone else.

Also spent some time with Federated - Bulk insert support within the storage engine and also how to make Federated play better with transactions and network overhead. Have to put together a new WorkLog entry if I cannot find a relevant one. I need to work on writing better changeset comments. Ingo says, and I have to admit that I agree a bit, that my comments assume that the reader is familiar with the code and bug in question. I need to make them a …

I have been very busy this past months, with both personal crisis and mega-patches. This is my MySQL blog so lets keep it to topic.
A couple of weeks ago, the plugins mega-patch was finally pushed and was released to the world in version 5.1.18. Thanks to Ingo and Sergei for keeping up the effort while I was occupied. As part of the code push, InnoDB code was stripped out of the main mysqld code and stored where it belongs, within Innobase's code. This is an exciting development as it now makes it easier than ever for plugin developers to create plugins without having to modify any existing code within mysqld. It has taken many months to get to this point but we are finally there. Anyone remember our CEO announcing the plugin initutive back when Innobase was acquired by Oracle? October 2005, I believe.

Since that push, I am back on bug-fixing... I have an annoying bug on Itanic with Intel's Itanic Compiler. (Yeah, I know the …