The 5.7.5 DMR is now available, and we’ve made some changes to our build system in this one, so I wanted to spend some time discussing how you would now build MySQL.

When we released our April labs release, I wrote about building MySQL with Boost. Now that the first GIS work using Boost.Geometry has passed all the hurdles and landed in a development milestone release (DMR), it’s time to revisit the topic. From now on (5.7.5 and newer), MySQL needs Boost headers to compile. It’s not optional.

We got a few bug …

As you've probably heard already MySQL needs boost to build.

However, in the good ol' MySQL tradition, the above link does give you only the instructions on how to build it on linux. And completely ignores the fact that there're other OSes too that people develop on.

To fill in that gap, I've compiled a small step by step guide on how to do it on windows. Note that I always, as a principle, build out-of-source.

The typical setup I have is :

bzr clone lp:~mysql/mysql-server/5.7 mysql-trunk
cd mysql-trunk
mkdir bld
cd bld
cmake -DWITH_DEBUG=1 -DMYSQL_PROJECT_NAME=mysql-trunk ..
devenv /build debug mysql-trunk.sln

This has been tested to work on a 32 bit compile using VS2013 on a Windows7 64 bit build. Note that you'll need …

This post talks about how we make use of Boost.Geometry in MySQL to implement reliable and efficient GIS functionality, as well as changes to the GIS features in the lab release. Now that InnoDB is the default storage engine for MySQL, our user base is rapidly transitioning to InnoDB. One capability that they have been demanding is a performant and scalable GIS implementation. Along with adding R-tree index support to InnoDB, we also decided to replace the original GIS algorithms with a more powerful, reliable, effective and efficient geometric engine.

In the newly released MySQL 5.7 labs release, users will find refactored GIS functions, as well as R-tree indexes in InnoDB. One notable change is that we have replaced a lot of the native code for geometry computation with an external library, namely Boost.Geometry. In fact, 5.7 will be the first MySQL release that depends on Boost. So why did we make such a move?

In recent years, we have seen a tremendous growth in location based services, and consequently GIS has become a strategically important area for MySQL. Our existing customers require more GIS features, and we believe this is a growing market opportunity.

Up to MySQL 5.6, GIS support in MySQL has been very limited, and the geometry algorithms implemented in MySQL were overly simple and couldn’t handle many corner cases. …

We have a new April labs release that you can download from labs.mysql.com. There are more labs releases. Please try them all, but for now let’s focus on the one called “MySQL GIS, InnoDB R-tree, Parser Refactoring”.

The release contains InnoDB R-trees, the first step of our new GIS implementation, a refactored and faster parser and improved condition filtering cost calculations. You can download and run the binaries just like before, but if you want to build it from source, there are some details you should know. Otherwise you may fail to build MySQL (bug #72172).

This labs release requires Boost to build. Specifically, it requires Boost 1.55. But don’t go running off to boost.org looking for the latest tarball just yet — there’s no need for that. The MySQL build system will do everything …

Drizzle 7 GA has been released, so I wanted to compile and test it on my Mac running OS X 10.6.7.  Since Drizzle 7 is new, Mac binaries are not available yet.  I’ve compiled MySQL from source more times than I can remember, and Drizzle was forked from MySQL, so I expected the build process to be similar and pain-free, and for the most part it was.  I did not use MacPorts or Homebrew for various reasons, mainly because I know that I will compile, tweak and recompile Drizzle often while hacking on it.  Also, the blog post  Drizzle in the Snow is about building Drizzle on Mac OS X, but it’s out of date …

I wonder if this comes under “Code Style” or not…

Anyway, Monty and I finished getting Drizzle ready for adding “-Wframe-larger-than=32768″ as a standard compiler flag. This means that no function within the Drizzle source tree can use greater than 32kb stack – it’s a compiler warning – and with -Werror, it means that it’s a build error.

GCC is not perfect at detecting stack usage, but it’s pretty good.

Why have we done this?

Well, there is a little bit of recursion in the server… and we can craft queries to blow a small stack (not so good). On MacOS X, the default thread stack size is only 512kb. This gives not many frames if 32kb stack is a even remotely common.

I found some interesting places to throw a lot of things on the stack too – that would be rather far down on a …

4 min 20 sec

So next time somebody complains about NDB taking a long time in CREATE TABLE, you’re welcome to point them to this :)

• A single CREATE TABLE statement
• It had ONE column
• It was an ENUM column.
• With 70,000 possible values.
• It was 605kb of SQL.
• It ran on Drizzle

This was to test if you could create an ENUM column with greater than 216 possible values (you’re not supposed to be able to) – bug 589031 has been filed.

How does it compare to MySQL? Well… there are other problems (Bug 54194 – ENUM limit of 65535 elements isn’t true filed). Since we don’t have any limitations in Drizzle due to the FRM file …