You must have heard about Falcon, the new transactional engine being developed in MySQL 6.0. And for all the buzz, you may want to have a look at that.
If you haven’t had time to download and install it, now you can give it a try, thanks to db4free, a free MySQL hosting service, created by Markus Popp.

So, if you want to test Falcon today, get a (free) account on db4free and start hacking!
Be careful:

• MySQL 6.0 is still alpha software!
• The default storage engine in this db4free server is Falcon. When you create a new table, if you don’t specify an engine, you will create a Falcon table.

A sample session:

$ mysql -h db4free.net -u USER_NAME -pPASSWORD -P 3307 DB_NAME
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 125
Server version: 6.0.4-alpha-log MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql > create table t1 (id  int not null primary key, c char(20));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.15 sec)

mysql > show create table t1\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: t1
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `t1` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `c` char(20) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=Falcon DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8
1 row in set (0.12 sec)

With the Sun acquisition, MySQL becomes part of a bigger company. Some beneficial effects will be felt at the MySQL Users Conference. There will be a passport giveaway program, which is basically a prize drawing with minimal effort from attendees.

MySQL Conference & Expo attendees will have the opportunity to enter a drawing for cool prizes by having an expo hall passport brochure stamped at each participating sponsor and exhibitor booth.
Once attendees have obtained all “stamps” they will be entered into the drawing and eligible to win one of several prizes.

And the prizes will be really juicy.

• Grand Prize Free enrollment in the O’Reilly School of Technology’s ENTIRE four- course PHP/MySQL Certificate series plus 1 year free lab. (Value over $1,700)
• First Prize Sun 24.1-inch LCD Flat Panel Monitor (Value $795)
• Second Prize $500 in O’Reilly books
• Third Prize Make Magazine Special Prize Pack (Value $130)

Information leaked about giveaways at a Sun party, where a Play Station 3 and a Sun Server will be given to the happy audience. How? I honestly don’t know, but if you register to the conference, you will soon find out.
Blogging in these days may lead to disbelief. So I’d better be explicit about it. This is not an April’s fool joke. The prizes are for real!

The last leg of the IRC world tour meetup was initially scheduled for last week, but it had to be changed for technical reasons. The rescheduled time was announced last week, but nobody took into account the Daylight Saving Time, which starts on March 9 in the USA, and on March 30 in Europe. Consequently, the announced Pacific time is right, but the European time is not. So, let’s remind what it is:
The IRC meeting with Bob Brewin will take place on Wednesday, March 12, at 9am PDT, 5pm CET.
For those of you who still live in a single time zone, this timetable can be helpful.

As Kaj announced a few days ago, there is a IRC session with Simon Phipps scheduled for March 6, at 14:00 UTC, 15:00 CET.
Don’t miss it. It’s a great occasion to ask questions, and to chat to a bunch of gurus in the same room, all at once in true URC tradition.
The IRC meeting with Bob Brewin has been rescheduled to Wednesday, March 12, at 17:00 UTC, 18:00 CET.

The MySQL Lifecycle Policy determines which versions are actively supported, and for which platforms such support applies.
The basic principle is that old versions are supported for a quite long, but definitely limited period, once they have been replaced by a newer GA version. For example, since the introduction of this policy, MySQL 3.23 and 4.0 have been retired.
The policy contains also provisions for a different kind of End of Life dismissal. When support for certain platforms has been discontinued by their vendors, of the platform is not widely used, MySQL reserves the right to stop building binaries and testing code on such obsolete platforms.
The reason is simple. While hardware can be bought and stored, time is a commodity in short supply, and there is only a given amount of time that our engineers can devote to testing and supporting multiple platforms.
Therefore, it makes sense to discontinue those platforms that have few users, and dedicate some valuable time to new, emerging platforms that are more popular and widely used.

For the above reasons, at the end of 2008, MySQL will discontinue some old platforms:

• MAC OSX 10.3
• HP-UX 11.00
• SCO OpenServer (all versions)
• QNX (all versions)

MySQL will continue to offer support to specific customers in these platforms, but the public builds will be abandoned as of December 31, 2008.

The above decision is based on some vendor end-of-life support, and on our surveys on platform usage.
The intention is to provide a better service to users and customers, by allowing our engineers to spend time on the more widely used systems.

Well, it’s that time of the year once more. The time when someone starts planning for the Users Conference, having received an acceptance notice of a session proposal. This year it came earlier than usual, because the CfP was started one month earlier, and thus we have a list of tutorials ready before Christmas.

So, let me do some advertising.
I am going to co-present a full day tutorial with Jan Kneschke. MySQL Proxy, the complete tutorial which will cover all about MySQL Proxy, and it will guide users to the creation of Lua scripts. When I proposed it, Jay asked me and Jan if we have enough material to cover 6 hours. After having been in three presentations on this subject, I’d rather ask myself if I can manage to cover all we know (and all that Jan’s volcanic production is adding) in just 6 hours. We will manage, I guess. I have a large collection of Proxy applications, and Jan has quite a few in his drawers. This tutorial will not leave people dissatisfied, I am sure.
Then I am going to have my fun session on the Proxy. The Tutorial will be serious business, and I and Jan will work hard to deliver educational content. Then, toward the end of the conference, I will have this MySQL Proxy Wizardry where I will show how you can do wildly unexpected things with a database server + proxy combination.
Need more reasons? REGISTER!, so you can save quite a few bucks and make sure to get a seat for this tutorial.

On December 13 (it means today for most of the readers) at 15:00 CET (14:00 UTC), the MySQL University lecture on Lua will start.
The topic is quite extensive. Even though the lecture is limited to using Lua with MySQL Proxy, yet there is a lot of ground to cover. During a rehearsal session last week, I realized that the whole matter would need much more than one hour if I describe in detail all the introductory material that I originally planned.
So I will reduce the time dedicated to MySQL Proxy architecture, which you can look on your own by reading Getting started with MySQL Proxy. I will cover this matter only briefly during the lecture, so if you know some background, you’ll enjoy the lecture even more.

If you are new to MySQL University lessons, please read the Instructions for attendees and get ready a few minutes before the allotted time.
The slides and the examples are available on the lecture wiki page.

While researching partitioning performance (expect an article about this topic soon) I come across the news that the Falcon team has released a Falcon Feature Preview with the latest implementation.
The test I was running was based on 9 server instances , using different combinations of MyISAM, InnoDB, and Archive, with and without partitions.
Since I was at it, I quickly added three instances of MySQL 6.0.4 with Falcon (MySQL Sandbox is really handy in these cases) and added Falcon to the test bench.
As I expected, partitioned Falcon is not particularly impressive, but there was a serendipitous result. In addition to large data warehouse oriented queries, the test fires also 180 OLTP queries, with warm indexes, i.e. after the indexes have been cached in memory thanks to previous queries. The warm queries look like the following:

  SELECT * FROM flightstats
  WHERE AirlineID = '19386'
  AND UniqueCarrier = 'NW' AND Carrier = 'NW'
  AND FlightDate = '2002-10-01' AND FlightNum = '1017'
  AND DepTime = '2002-10-01 06:03:00'
  AND Origin = 'EWR' AND Dest = 'DTW'
  -- (all WHERE conditions belong to the PK)

Well, in these queries, Falcon outshines both MyISAM and InnoDB, as shown by the average times.

+----------+----------+----------+----------+
| count(*) | falcon   | myisam   | innodb   |
+----------+----------+----------+----------+
|      180 | 0.000254 | 0.002847 | 0.000302 |
+----------+----------+----------+----------+

Out of 180 OLTP queries, falcon was faster than MyISAM 143 times, and faster than InnoDB 176 times. The table holds 17 million recs (2 GB)

This is not a complete test. Just a result that I got by chance, but it’s nice to see that Falcon is advancing towards its maturity.

Yesterday I wrote about SHOW PROFILES in 5.1, and announced that the source code is available for you to try.
Since I have a few servers at home, I decided to publish some binaries that I compiled while testing. In the meantime, the backport patch for MySQL 5.0 was available, so I started testing that one as well.
Now, at the experimental downloads page you can find some goodies:

• source code for 5.1.23
• source code for 5.0.53
• binary tarball for Linux i686 5.1.23
• binary tarball for Linux i686 5.0.53
• binary tarball for Mac OS X 10.4 i386 5.1.23

Once more, let me remind you that this code is experimental, so don’t use it in production. But have fun with it!