MySQL Developer News (2005)

Registration Opens for 2006 MySQL Users Conference

26 December 2005 — The virtual doors have opened for registration for the 2006 MySQL Users Conference. This annual event is an unmatched opportunity for database developers, DBAs, users, and vendors to gather together and share the latest information on MySQL and open source technology. The theme for the 2006 conference is Discover. Connect. Succeed. Scale Your Business with MySQL. The conference brings over 1,000 MySQL and open source enthusiasts to Santa Clara, California during April 24-27.

Essential PHP Security: Chapter 2, Forms and URLs

21 December 2005 — Security is a hot topic, particularly for web applications. Essential PHP Security is a book by PHP security expert Chris Shiflett (O'Reilly Media, Inc, October 2005, ISBN 059600656X). Since we already covered SQL injection recently, we chose to publish chapter 2 from this book, "Forms and URLs".

Guaranteeing Data Integrity with MySQL 5.0

1 December 2005 — The IT crown jewels of any organization lies in their database infrastructure. Obviously, well-designed front end applications play a leading role when it comes to ensuring that critical information is captured or reviewed, but the buck stops at the database when it comes to data retention and protection.

MaxDB for SAP Hosting - Technical Whitepaper

24 November 2005 — MaxDB has a unique, top position in the list of open source database. The SAP-certified database management system combines ease of use, high availability and exceptional performance with low costs. This whitepaper presents a technical analysis of how MaxDB is designed to meet the requirements of hosting business critical SAP applications.

Stored Procedures in MySQL 5.0

17 November 2005 — MySQL's stored procedures do not provide for direct support of passing and using object names in the procedure. But it's pretty easy to work around this limitation.

Using BIRT To Report On Bugzilla in MySQL

16 November 2005 — BIRT is rich reporting technology powered by the Eclipse BIRT project. Actuate BIRT inlcudes support and subscription sevcies, is MySQL Network Certified and is a recommended reporting and analytics component of a MySQL Data Warehouse Scale-Out Solution Set.

Here is some how-to information on using BIRT with MySQL.

Flash demo on building a complex report with BIRT on MySQL »
Example of building a report against Bugzilla on MySQL »

MySQL 5.0 Downloaded One Million Times in First Three Weeks

14 November 2005 — MySQL AB today reported record interest in the newest version of its popular open source database. MySQL 5.0 has already been downloaded over one million times since its introduction on October 24.

Installing MySQL MaxDB Synchronization Manager

9 November 2005 — This series of articles describes how to install and configure the MySQL MaxDB Synchronization Manager. In a step by step approach the author guides you through the process of obtaining, installing, testing, configuring and running MaxDB and the Synchronization Manager.

MySQL 5.0's Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture, Part 2: A Quick Test Drive

26 October 2005 — Let's take a quick test drive to show how simple it is to use MySQL's pluggable storage engine architecture and see the impact different storage engines can have on performance.

MaxDB Synchronization Manager (beta) Released!

24 October 2005 — For the MaxDB release 7.6.00.12 we now offer the new MaxDB Synchronization Manager (beta).

MySQL 5.0 Now Available for Production Use

24 October 2005 — MySQL AB today announced the general availability of MySQL 5.0, the most significant product upgrade in the company's ten-year history. The major new version delivers advanced SQL standard-compliant features such as stored procedures, triggers, views & new pluggable storage engines. Over 30 enterprise platform and tool vendors have also expressed enthusiastic support for the new release of the world's most popular open source database.

MySQL 5.0's Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture, Part 1: An Overview

19 October 2005 — The reasons for the huge popularity and increasing adoption of MySQL as a serious database platform can many times be boiled down to two, but surprisingly contrasting, considerations:
1. How much MySQL is like other database platforms.
2. How much MySQL is different than other database platforms.

php|architect's Guide to PHP Security

10 October 2005 — php|architect's Guide to PHP Security, a book by PHP developer Ilia Alshanetsky (Marco Tabini & Associates, September 2005, ISBN 0973862106), discusses the important topic of how to make PHP applications secure. Chapter 3, for which the MySQL Developer Zone received permission to reprint, covers "SQL Injection".

MySQL AB Welcomes Oracle's Endorsement of Open Source Database Technology

8 October 2005 — Uppsala, Sweden & Cupertino, Calif. -- MySQL AB, the developer of the world's most popular open source database, today welcomes Oracle's endorsement of open source database technology with its announced acquisition of Innobase Oy, the developers of the open source InnoDB Storage Engine.

Interview with MySQL Workbench Developer Mike Zinner

7 October 2005 — Mike Zinner leads the MySQL GUI development team, who are currently focusing on MySQL Workbench, a tool to visually design and view database schemas - the successor to Mike's own very successful DBDesigner4.

Dispelling the Myths

5 October 2005 — As anyone will tell you, competition is a good thing because it gives you a choice. Acquiring current and accurate information about your options enables you to spend your time and money in the most efficient way and is certainly time well spent.

MySQL 5.0 Release Candidate Available. Win an iPod nano!

26 September 2005 — Read about the most significant new product in MySQL's history -- in a letter to the community from Kaj Arnö, the company's vice president of Community Relations.

MySQL Users Conference 2006 - Call for Participation

21 September 2005 — Discover. Connect. Succeed. Scale Your Business with MySQL. April 24-27, 2006 — Santa Clara, California The Call for Participation is now open, and you're invited to submit a proposal to speak at the Conference. Share your knowledge and experience employing MySQL in the real world. Proposal Deadline: November 7, 2005

An Atlas for Ireland's Artists (using MySQL GIS)

18 September 2005 — Portraits of Ireland Ltd is a web based Irish company aiming to help connect the diaspora to people and places in Ireland through Art. This startup company required an online interactive atlas to assist both artists and those commissioning their work to find not only the island's more well known locations but also its remote and smaller place locations. To this end an Artist Atlas was created. Some of the primary requirements were a cartographically rich, atheistically pleasing vector based system, fully searchable, and with as extensive a database as possible.

The MySQL 5.0 Archive Storage Engine

6 September 2005 — More than at any other time, database professionals are being aggressively challenged by mushrooming volumes of data in corporate business systems. While some industry analysts project data growth at an average rate of 42% a year, that figure is conservative in some installations where growth rates are several hundred percent, with no end in sight.

Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL

17 August 2005 — Most users at one time or another have dealt with hierarchical data in a SQL database and no doubt learned that the management of hierarchical data is not what a relational database is intended for. The tables of a relational database are not hierarchical (like XML), but are simply a flat list. Hierarchical data has a parent-child relationship that is not naturally represented in a relational database table.

Interview with Marc Delisle

15 August 2005 — Marc Delisle is one of the lead developers of the very popular phpMyAdmin project, a web/browser-based tool for MySQL Administration. I talked with him about MySQL, phpMyAdmin (of course), and being a developer in general.

Creating a DBA Dashboard for MySQL

5 August 2005 — The open source DBA Dashboard for MySQL automates the statistical data collection, reporting and monitoring of the internals of your MySQL Servers. Information such as server health, schema information, database size, and usage statistics are aggregated on a periodic basis to give you insight into your MySQL databases. This JasperReports application answers questions such as: How many queries per day? Which user has the most resource usage? What tables are growing the fastest?

Pro MySQL, Chapter 6: Benchmarking and Profiling

3 August 2005 — Pro MySQL, a brand new book by Mike Kruckenberg and Jay Pipes (Apress, July 2005, ISBN 1-59059-505-X), provides intermediate and advanced MySQL users with a comprehensive guide to the array of features available in MySQL upto and including MySQL 5.0
Since the MySQL Developer Zone has had quite a few articles related to the new MySQL 5.0 features, we chose to publish chapter 6 covering another hot topic, "Benchmarking and Profiling".
This is one of the first books to cover MySQL 5 in depth. It foregoes the usual reiteration of basics that you'll find in other books, instead concentrating on MySQL's advanced applications in enterprise environments. Further, this book doubles as a quick reference guide for configuration directives, commands, and features.
The book's own companion web site is at http://www.promysql.com/

An Open Letter to the Community from MySQL Founders David Axmark & Michael "Monty" Widenius

2 August 2005 — To our fellow developers & users of Free & Open Source Software: This year, we are celebrating ten years of MySQL: the database, the company and the community. It's been hard (and interesting!) work for us -- but looking back, we should celebrate how far we've come. We created the best software we could for you, and you turned it into the most popular database of its kind. We want to thank you for this.

A Practical Look at the MySQL Query Cache

19 July 2005 — All robust relational database management systems utilize memory caching to help improve the overall responsiveness of their underlying engine. While certainly not free, accessing application data, query plans, or database metadata in RAM is normally much quicker than repetitively retrieving that same information from disk or building it from scratch.

Book Review: High Performance MySQL

18 July 2005 — O'Reilly has published a fabulous book on MySQL. The authors, Jeremy Zawodny and Derek Balling, have drawn on their extensive experience as MySQL administrators at Yahoo to write High Performance MySQL for fellow administrators. Instead of getting bogged down with the basics of MySQL, the book focuses on understanding performance factors in MySQL and how the different ways of creating databases or of modifying existing databases will affect speed and efficiency. While this is an advanced topic, the text and concepts are easy to follow. It's written on the assumption, however, that the reader already knows MySQL but is unaware of how databases can perform better and how tables can be constructed, joined, and indexed optimally.

Book Review: MySQL Tutorial

18 July 2005 — MySQL Press is a relatively new imprint for the book publisher Pearson Education. They are billed as "the exclusive publisher of technology books and materials that have been authorized by MySQL AB, the company that develops and markets the MySQL database." As part of their initial set of MySQL books, they have published an excellent book on learning the basics of MySQL called MySQL Tutorial. It's written by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson, the authors of PHP and MySQL Web Development (Sams 2003). Their tutorial has a simple style and a relaxed pace that's ideal for MySQL beginners.

Book Review: Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization

18 July 2005 — Apress is fairly new to the open source book publishing business. However, in a short amount of time they've put together a nice collection of books. They've done this by buying many titles from Wrox Press, but more importantly by seeking out some good writers with expertise in their field to write new books. So, if you're not familiar with Apress books, you might want to take a look at them. As part of their expansion into the open source arena, they've been publishing some new books on MySQL. One book that I found to be very interesting is Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization by Jon Stephens and Chad Russell.

MySQL Database Design and Tuning, Chapter 18: Case Study - Solving a broad Collection of Performance Problems

15 July 2005 — The MySQL Developer Zone received permission to publish excerpts from the book "MySQL Database Design and Tuning" by Robert Schneider, published in 2005 by Sams (ISBN 0672327651). Chapter 18 is a case study that reviews a broad-based collection of performance problems, along with their solutions.

MySQL AB Celebrates European Parliament's Decision Against Software Patents

7 July 2005 — As Europe's largest open source software company, MySQL AB today acknowledged a major victory for the software development community after the EU Parliament overwhelmingly rejected legislation that would have allowed patents on software. The final vote was 648-32. Founded in Sweden ten years ago, MySQL AB and its founders, Michael "Monty" Widenius and David Axmark, took an early leadership position among European technology vendors in the high-profile debate against software patents. The company also helped sponsor the successful nosoftwarepatents.com campaign."

Embedding the MySQL Server Library

7 July 2005 — By embedding the MySQL server library in MySQL applications, MySQL doesn't have to be installed on the end user's computer. It's particularly useful with small devices and public kiosks. The embedded MySQL server also has the advantage of running faster with MySQL applications since there isn't a network connection or any passing of data between the application and MySQL. It's able to avoid these factors because the server library is embedded in the compiled program. Best of all, the embedded server library is part of the MySQL distribution.

MySQL & Others Renew Push Against Euro SW Patents

27 June 2005 — Brussels (27 June 2005) -- Last week, the European Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee narrowly voted in favor of software patents, but for some, the fight has only just begun. Today a group of mid-sized European IT companies announced a joint effort directed at the parliament's second reading plenary vote, which is scheduled for Wednesday of next week (6 July).

The MySQL 5.0 Beta Challenge

16 June 2005 — To assist the MySQL 5.0 Quality Assurance process, we are looking for as many users as possible to test 5.0 in general, and specifically key features such as stored procedures, views, triggers. There will be cool MySQL goodies (T-shirts, mugs, books) for users who are the most helpful either directly with 5.0 testing, or indirectly by informing other users about 5.0.

MySQL: The Complete Reference, chapter 14: Security, Access Control, and Privileges

15 June 2005 — The MySQL Developer Zone received permission to publish excerpts from the book "MySQL: The Complete Reference" by Vikram Vaswani, published in 2004 by McGraw-Hill/Osborne (ISBN 0-07-222477-0). Our first selection is chapter 14 about Security, Access Control, and Privileges. The book's own companion web site is at http://www.mysql-tcr.com/

Evaluating MySQL 5.0 Key Features

14 June 2005 — MySQL 5.0 is currently in its beta phase. It may appear obvious, but software does not magically become stable (production quality) just by waiting a while! Our chief QA engineer Omer BarNir would like to ask you to assist by testing key features in 5.0: stored procedures, views, and triggers.
Includes The MySQL 5.0 Beta Challenge!
Also available in Russian »

Dell Benchmark and Sizing Guide for MySQL Network

8 June 2005 — This technical white paper provides performance results, best practices and tuning techniques from Dell and MySQL experts Dave Jaffe, Todd Muirhead and Peter Zaitsev. Using the Dell PowerEdge 2800 and MySQL Certified Binaries, the DVD Store application achieved over 1900 transactions per minute, i.e. over one billion orders per year.
Download the Dell Sizing Guide for MySQL Network »
Download the DVD Store benchmark application from Dell »

Interview with Joao Prado Maia

3 June 2005 — João Prado Maia is a Senior Software Engineer for the Internal IT department of MySQL AB. We were lucky to catch him in the wild a few years ago with his project Eventum, which we will talk about more also.

Chapter 5: Joins, Temporary Tables, and Transactions

11 May 2005 — The MySQL Developer Zone received permission to publish excerpts from the book "Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization: From Novice to Professional" by Jon Stephens and Chad Russell, published in 2004 by Apress (ISBN 1-59059-332-4). Our first selection is chapter 5 about Joins, Temporary Tables, and Transactions.

Point-in-Time Data Recovery

26 April 2005 — A utility like mysqldump is very useful for backing up MySQL data and table schema. However, backups are usually made only once a day or at some other regular interval. If data is lost on your system several hours after the last backup is completed, you may not be able to recover it. There are a few methods by which you can continuously protect data, some of which are explored in this article.

MaxDB performance tuning primer

18 April 2005 — A history of more than three decades has made MaxDB by MySQL a very mature database with a rich tool set for performance monitoring and analysis. Aside from an activity overview screen and the EXPLAIN SQL statement a SQL logger sophisticated monitoring tools are shipped with MaxDB for free. In a small series of articles we'll try to put light on the miracle of performance tuning.

Choosing the Right MySQL Version and Reporting Bugs

11 April 2005 — People often ask me about which MySQL version they should use, whether they should consider upgrading, what to do when they find a bug, and so on. Though these things are covered in the MySQL Reference Manual and other places, this article aims to cover all the essentials in the one place.

MySQL 5.0 Triggers

24 March 2005 — This is the second part in the "MySQL 5.0 New Features" series. Peter Gulutzan covers MySQL 5.0 support for Triggers using detailed examples, source code, and hands-on exercises.

MySQL 5.0 Data Dictionary

23 March 2005 — This is the fourth part in the "MySQL 5.0 New Features" series. Trudy Pelzer covers the MySQL 5.0 Data Dictionary using detailed examples, source code, and hands-on exercises.

MySQL 5.0 Views

23 March 2005 — This is the third part in the "MySQL 5.0 New Features" series. Trudy Pelzer covers MySQL 5.0 support for Views using detailed examples, source code, and hands-on exercises.

MySQL 5.0 Stored Procedures

16 March 2005 — This is the first part in the "MySQL 5.0 New Features" series. Using detailed examples, source code, and hands-on exercises, Peter Gulutzan shows you how to write stored procedures and shares the implementation details of Stored Procedures in MySQL 5.0. Check back for white papers on Triggers, Views, and Information Schema.

Choosing the Right MySQL Version and Reporting Bugs

16 March 2005 — People often ask me about which MySQL version they should use, whether they should consider upgrading, what to do when they find a bug, and so on. Though these things are covered in the MySQL Reference Manual and other places, this article aims to cover all the essentials in the one place.

MySQL 4.1.10a and 4.0.24 Released

12 March 2005 — MySQL 4.1.10a and MySQL 4.0.24, new versions of the popular Open Source/Free Software Database Management System, have been released. They are now available for download in source and binary form for a number of platforms from our download pages at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/ and from mirror sites worldwide.

MySQL AB announces plan to keep MaxDB C/C++Precompiler supported.

2 March 2005 — Due to customer requests, MySQL AB has decided to keep the MaxDB PreCompiler supported also for future MaxDB versions. This will be done by porting the existing C/C++ Precompiler to the native SQLDBC interface. The new C/C++ Precompiler implementation is done in co-operation with Infolytics AG, and the first version will be available in May 2005.

MySQL 4.1.10 has been released

18 February 2005 — MySQL 4.1.10, a new version of the popular Open Source/Free Software Database Management System, has been released. It is now available in source and binary form for a number of platforms from our download pages at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/ and mirror sites.

MySQL Network and You

15 February 2005 — As news about MySQL Network is presented in the press, MySQL's Community Relations Manager Arjen Lentz explains what it all means for you, the MySQL Community, including developers.

MySQL Cluster: Two webserver setup

8 February 2005 — This HOWTO was designed for a classic setup of two servers behind a loadbalancer. The aim is to have true redundancy - either server can be unplugged and yet the site will remain up.

Securing a MySQL Server on Windows

1 February 2005 — At the end of January 2005 a new worm-like malware named Forbot spread across the Internet, targeting poorly configured MySQL installations and exploiting them to gain access to the Windows host machines. MySQL takes security very seriously and we are working on a set of proactive services to help alert you to bugs, security issues and new features.

Security Alert

27 January 2005 — Please read the security alert about the UDF Worm that can infect MySQL servers running on Microsoft Windows with poor firewall and password security. MySQL takes security very seriously and we are working on a set of proactive services to help alert you to bugs, security issues and new features.

Eventum 1.4 Released

12 January 2005 — Eventum is a user-friendly and flexible issue tracking system that can be used by a support department to track incoming technical support requests, or by a software development team to quickly organize tasks and bugs. Eventum is used by the MySQL AB Technical Support team, and has allowed us to dramatically improve our response times. Eventum 1.4 is now available for download in source form from our download pages and mirror sites.

Interview: Oleksandr "Sanja" Byelkin

9 January 2005 — Behind the software of MySQL AB are of course the people. The MySQL developers, and the many other colleagues around them, are the ones who are making it all happen: new features, bug fixes, support, etc. Some of you may have met a few of them already, either at a previous MySQL Users Conference, or another occasion. As Community Relations Manager, I recently had the privilege of meeting all our developers at an internal company meeting in Malta, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to start some interviews. In this series, I aim to show you the faces of at least some of these people.