MySQL Newsletter August 2008

Articles in this newsletter:

Events

Live Webinar: Web 2.0 User-Based Tagging and Folksonomies (September 4)
Live Webinar: Best Practices For Developing Commercial ISV Applications Using MySQL Embedded Server (September 9)
Live Webinar: What's New in MySQL 5.1 (French, Italian, German)
Live Webinar: Introducing MySQL Workbench: model-based visual database design for MySQL DBAs and Developers (September 16)
Live Webinar: Deploying Scalable SaaS Applications with Memcached (September 25)
Conference: AstriCon (September 23-25)

Training, Consulting & Certification

Highlights

MySQL European Customer Conferences 2008, London, Munich, Paris - Early Registration Discounts End Soon

A day packed with technical sessions, customer experiences and all round MySQL goodness! You will be able to learn, improve your skills and network with other MySQL users.

Whatever your experience with MySQL, the MySQL European conferences help you can get the most out of MySQL technology, and from the company now behind it, Sun Microsystems.

Don't miss this once a year opportunity!

Munich, October 21
London, October 23
Paris, November 19

Learn more and Register now » (http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/european-conferences/2008/)

Live Webinar: MySQL Query Analyzer: Finding and Fixing Problem Queries

Thursday, September 04, 2008 - 10:00am PST

The MySQL Query Analyzer is designed to alleviate pain points around diagnosing and fixing performance problems related to poorly performing SQL code. Join us for this presentation to see how the new Query Analyzer help keep your key MySQL systems up and running at the highest levels of scalability and performance by identifying problems and tuning opportunities around application and user queries before they lead to costly outages.

Live Webinar: Performance Tuning - Ask the MySQL Experts

September 10, 2008 - 10:00am PST

Are you experiencing current performance bottlenecks?
Designing a new application and want to know how best to structure your schema and index strategy for optimal performance?
Interested in how to transform your SQL into faster, more efficient queries?

You will get expert insight and learn best practices to help you identify those areas of database and application design that will give you the greatest benefits for performance. Plus, learn how to leverage the MySQL Enterprise Monitor and Advisors to improve your productivity in a small, customer-only group setting.

Case Study: CONCEIVIUM Performs Real-Time Analytics for BlackBerry Enterprise Server

CONCEIVIUM Business Solutions ensures that BlackBerry Enterprise Servers are up and performing optimally 24X7 for three of the world's top five banks, The Coca Cola Company, IBM Global Services and many other primarily Fortune 500 organizations. With MySQL Embedded Server, CONCEIVIUM's Mobile Monitor/Analyzer Agents have achieved a 70% performance gain and are now able to analyze over two gigabytes of data per day and perform thousands of transactions per second.

Learn More » (http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/case-studies/mysql_cs_conceivium.php)

Test Drive MySQL Enterprise Monitor for 48 Hours

You can now Test Drive the MySQL Enterprise Monitor with no download or installation required. MySQL will provide you access to demo servers to test MySQL Enterprise Monitor for 48hrs.

Learn More » (http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/monitor-test-drive.html)

MySQL Jobs

MySQL is the world's most popular open source database software. As part of Sun Microsystems' software group, MySQL is a global organization with over 400 workers in 25 countries. We are looking for talented professionals in engineering, sales, marketing, professional services, and support that will contribute to our product's strong momentum and share in our success! We have openings for the following positions:

MySQL Tools Web Application Developer
Software Systems Engineers
MySQL Cluster Support Engineer
Support Engineers
QA Engineers
MySQL Business Development Manager, Telecom
MySQL Senior Consultant
MySQL Sales Engineer
And Many More ...

Apply Now » (http://www.mysql.com/jobs/)

New Product Releases

New Release of MySQL Community Server 5.0.67

MySQL Community Server 5.0.67 has been released. Important functionality added or changed includes:

Security Enhancement: To enable stricter control over the location from which user-defined functions can be loaded, the plugin_dir system variable has been backported from MySQL 5.1. (Bug#37428)
The FEDERATED storage engine is now disabled by default in the .cnf files shipped with MySQL distributions (my-huge.cnf, my-medium.cnf, and so forth). (Bug#37069)
Important Change: Because NDB_LE_MemoryUsage.page_size_kb shows memory page sizes in bytes rather than kilobytes, it has been renamed to page_size_bytes. (Bug#30271)

View the complete list of changes »

Download Now »

New Release of MySQL 6.0.6 (Alpha)

MySQL 6.0.6-alpha, a new version of the MySQL database system has been released. MySQL 6.0 includes two new storage engines: the transactional Falcon engine, and the crash-safe Maria engine.

The Maria storage engine is a crash safe version of MyISAM. Maria supports all of the main functionality of the MyISAM engine, but includes recovery support (in the event of a system crash), full logging (including CREATE, DROP, RENAME and TRUNCATE operations), all MyISAM row formats and a new Maria specific row format. Changes include:

The FEDERATED storage engine is now disabled by default in binary distributions. The engine is still available and can be enabled by starting the server with the --federated option. (Bug#37069)
The engines column in the mysql.online_backup table has been renamed to drivers to better reflect its contents. (Bug#34965)
A change has been made to the way that the server handles prepared statements. This affects prepared statements processed at the SQL level (using the PREPARE statement) and those processed using the binary client-server protocol (using the mysql_stmt_prepare() C API function). (Bug#27420, Bug#27430, Bug#27690)

Maria Documentation »

View the complete list of changes »

Download Now »

New Release of MySQL Workbench 5.0.24 (GA)

The MySQL Developer Tools team is working on version 5.1 in parallel while we keep constantly improving version 5.0 and fixing remaining bugs. We managed to close 24 bugs since the last release 06/25/2008. Unfortunately due to a bug in our auto-update feature, we had to disable it for previous versions - so please download and install the release manually this time, sorry for the inconvenience.

View the complete list of changes »

Download Now »

First preview of MySQL Connector/C++

A new connector has been made available: MySQL Connector/C++. The MySQL Connector/C++ provides a C++ API for connecting client applications to the MySQL Server. The MySQL Connector/C++ mimics the JDBC 3.0 API. Using MySQL Connector/C++ instead of the MySQL C API (MySQL Client Library) offers the following advantages for C++ users:

Convenience of pure C++ - no C function calls
Support of a well designed API - JDBC 3.0
Support of a commonly known and well documented API - JDBC 3.0
Support of the object oriented programming paradigm
Shorter development times

Documentation »

Download Now »

Hints & Tips

Article: A Quick Look at MySQL 6.0's New Backup

I still remember the day. I was working for a large systems integrator on a very major account, and had responsibility for some DB2 databases, but also had the unfortunate duty of also taking care of some legacy IMS databases (hierarchical IBM databases used quite a lot 'back in the day'), which I knew next to nothing about. One morning I was asked to make a small change to a very large and prominent IMS database - just remove one record - what could go wrong?

Read the Article »

Documentation: PHP Documentation in the MySQL Manual

MySQL can be used with multiple programming languages, but PHP is probably the most popular choice. MC Brown of the MySQL Docs team has synced the MySQL-related parts of the PHP documentation with the MySQL Reference Manual.

Read the Documentation »

PlanetMySQL Blog Posts

The following blog posts are from PlanetMySQL. PlanetMySQL is an aggregation of blogs and news from MySQL developers, users and employees. It is an excellent source of all things MySQL, including technical tips and best practices.

Visit PlanetMySQL »

Submit Your Blog Feed »

PlanetMySQL Blog: Consistent MySQL backups using ZFS snapshots

Niclas Södergård

It should come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I really like ZFS. Personally I think it is one of the biggest developments in file system design in many, many years. One place where I've started to use it recently on my own home server is to make instant and consistent backups of my MySQL databases.

Read the PlanetMySQL Blogpost »

PlanetMySQL Blog: Cluster Monitoring - CMON

Johan Andersson

A system is not a system unless it can be monitored and controlled...I recall something like that from a university course in Control Theory. However, in a couple of blogs on I am going to give some ideas on how to monitor and control MySQL Cluster.

Read the PlanetMySQL Blogpost »

PlanetMySQL Blog: Typical Automated MySQL Maintenance Jobs

Oli Sennhauser

The following maintenance jobs are typically run against a MySQL database:

"Backup"
Clean-up binary logs
Optimize tables
Purge query cache
Rotate binary logs

A backup is not a typical maintenance job. But it behaves more or less like one. The backup should be done regularly depending on the restore/PITR (Point in Time Recovery) requirements.

Read the PlanetMySQL Blogpost »

PlanetMySQL Blog: MySQL, Memcache, Replication and Delay at Facebook

Ruturaj Vartak

My first project at Facebook was a tad more involved then I was expecting, but I think that is one reason why we have such a great engineering organization; we have a lot of hard problems to solve and everyone here is excited to jump in and tackle them. I set out to really understand why we were building a new datacenter and what problems we had to overcome to make it work.

Read the PlanetMySQL Blogpost »

PlanetMySQL Blog: The Key to Accessing your Data - MySQL Connectors and Bindings for Various Languages

Lenz Grimmer

Being able to use an Open Source DBMS to manage your data is nice, but what good would it be if you can't easily access it from your applications? One key factor to the popularity of MySQL is probably its wide range of available language bindings, which started with support for C, PHP and Perl from early on. I've tried to gather a list of languages and their respective MySQL drivers/modules below.

Read the PlanetMySQL Blogpost »

PlanetMySQL Blog: mysqlbinlog Tips and Tricks

Nicklas Westerlund

So, you have a binlog. You want to find out something specific that happened inside of it. What to do? mysqlbinlog has some neat features, which I thought we would look at here.

Read the PlanetMySQL Blogpost »

PlanetMySQL Blog: Why You Want to Switch to MySQL 5.1

Sheeri Cabral

The big reasons most people are going to salivate over 5.1, and probably start plans to upgrade now, are the online operations.

Read the PlanetMySQL Blogpost »

PlanetMySQL Blog: GlassFish and MySQL Bundle

Arun Gupta

GlassFish and MySQL bundle was released a while ago and I finally got a chance to try it out. This blog post contains simple instructions to get you started.

Read the PlanetMySQL Blogpost »

PlanetMySQL Blog: MySQL Query Analyzer: DBA Task #1: Finding Bad Queries

One of the biggest problems I faced as a field DBA was defending For MySQL DBAs the challenge to identify and isolate resource intensive SQL code is really two-fold; job #1 is to find the offending code (after that the chore becomes fixing it so it performs, but that is a topic for another post)

Read the PlanetMySQL Blogpost »

Events

Live Webinar: Web 2.0 User-Based Tagging and Folksonomies

Thursday, September 04, 2008 - 8:00 am PST

Join us for this interactive web seminar, to learn about the prototypical Web 2.0 concepts and how the database schema lies at the heart of a scalable, high performance modern web application. During this seminar, we will discuss:

How Folksonomies (also known as tagging) can enhance the existing data hierarchy, making personally important information easier to retrieve
Tag and social networking schema guidelines and design for improved scalability and performance
Example SQL solutions for common relational problems
Storage engine optimizations for key-mapping tables
Scalable replication scenarios and strategies

Live Webinar: Best Practices For Developing Commercial ISV Applications Using MySQL Embedded Server

Tuesday, September 09, 2008 - 10:00am PST

Join us for this informative technical webinar with Patrick Galbraith of Grazr Inc., were he will discuss the lessons learned in designing and implementing scalable Web 2.0 applications leveraging MySQL and memcached, the open source distributed memory caching system.

Live Webinar: What's New in MySQL 5.1 (French, Italian, German)

September

Join us for this informative webinar where we will explore how MySQL 5.1. MySQL 5.1 is the next version of the MySQL Relational Database Server. 5.1 has been enhanced for Partitioning, Row Replication, Events, Disk-based Clustering, XML-/XPATH- Support and other features for better performance and ease of use. In this web seminar, you will learn how to put these features to use.

French - Register for this Webinar »

Italian - Register for this Webinar »

German - Register for this Webinar »

Live Webinar: Introducing MySQL Workbench: model-based visual database design for MySQL DBAs and Developers

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

MySQL Workbench is a powerful model-based visual database design tool. It allows developers and DBAs to efficiently design, maintain and document MySQL database schemas. Apart from many powerful built-in functions, such as reverse and forward engineering, MySQL Workbench also features a plug-in architecture, allowing users to extend its functionality. This webinar provides an overview of MySQL workbench, demonstrating some of its key features.

Live Webinar: Deploying Scalable SaaS Applications with Memcached

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Join us for this informative technical webinar with Jeff Freund, CTO of Clickability, the global leader in on demand web content management, will discuss how memcached has helped his company massively scale their SaaS applications for hundreds of customers including Cisco and CNN Interactive.

Conference: AstriCon

September 23-25, 2008

Brian Aker, Director of Architecture at MySQL will be giving a keynote at the Astricon conference Sept 23-25 in Glendale Arizona. Astricon covers the Asterisk open source VOIP system and related technologies for developers, users and the community.

Learn More »

Training, Consulting, and Certification

Consulting: MySQL Developer (4+ Days)

A dedicated MySQL certified consultant will work closely with your team to:

Analyze your current database application
Analyze your database requirements
Identify potential issues and limitations
Benchmark, load test, and optimize critical SQL queries
Help them implement best practices and recommend tools for developing your database infrastructure.

Learn More » (http://www.mysql.com/consulting/packaged/dev.html)

Training: MySQL High Availability (3 Days)

Lyon, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, New York

This course is designed for experienced database administrators and system architects that want to analyze and form a basis of understanding different high availability options, including clustering and replication solutions within MySQL. This course will provide the tools required to make the decision of what high availability solution is appropriate and how to implement a system with the correct design.

Partners

Packet General: Live Webinar, How to Secure MySQL Data and Achieve PCI Compliance

Thursday, September 11, 2008 - 10:00am PST

Customers who have been looking to achieve regulatory compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security standard (PCI-DSS) for their MySQL installations need not look any further. PCI- GENERAL, a secure MySQL server, prevents loss or exposure of sensitive data and automates business processes for sustainable compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security mandates. Transparent data encryption, data disclosure protection against "root" and lifetime key management are some of the main features of Packet General's solutions. Join us on September 11 for a Webinar discussing some of the issues involved in achieving PCI-Compliance for your infrastructure.

Kickfire: White Paper, How Kickfire's Revolutionary Chip and MySQL are Breaking Data Warehousing Records

This paper goes under the covers of the first high-performance appliance for MySQL from Kickfire. Specifically, you will learn how Kickfire's first-of-a-kind SQL chip combined with its columnar-based storage engine overcome the I/O and von Neumann bottlenecks - the two main barriers to high performance reporting and analytics. The result is an appliance, purpose-built for MySQL, that delivers 10-1000X performance improvement over general-purpose hardware.

Download the White Paper »