• 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 Summer of Code 2008 is under way.

Students can submit proposals, based on the list of ideas published by candidate mentors, from March 24th to 31st.
The good thing about Summer of Code is that you can participate in the production of open source products, learn some coding discipline and method, interact with great programmers. The bad news is that Summer of Code is only for students, and therefore the non-students who would like to get involved have to find a different way.

Be a mentor!

Last year, two prominent community members (Sheeri K. Cabral and Paul McCullagh) have mentored three Summer of Code projects on behalf of MySQL.
If you have a pet project, and would like to mentor it under the Summer of Code terms, post the project on the ideas page and advertise it in a blog and in the mailing list.
We welcome community participation! ]]> http://blogs.mysql.com/gmax/2008/03/23/summer-of-code-2008-be-a-mentor/feed/ http://blogs.mysql.com/gmax/2008/03/10/mysql-meetup-with-bob-brewin-wed-march-12-9am-pdt-5pm-cet/ http://blogs.mysql.com/gmax/2008/03/10/mysql-meetup-with-bob-brewin-wed-march-12-9am-pdt-5pm-cet/#comments Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:21:16 +0000 gmax http://blogs.mysql.com/gmax/2008/03/10/mysql-meetup-with-bob-brewin-wed-march-12-9am-pdt-5pm-cet/ 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.

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.

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.

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.

  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.

• 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!