Observations by Kaj Arnö @Sun
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First MySQL 5.1 Use Case Article

Monday, September 8th, 2008

We’re getting some high quality Use Cases from our user base, related to the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

The first one is by Greg Haase of Lotame, based in Elkridge, Maryland (USA), a company dedicated to providing solutions within social media. His article is about an innovative use of MySQL 5.1 partitioning and Event Scheduler to prune ARCHIVE tables.

There are more articles in the pipeline. And there is still time for you to submit your story by 30 September 2008. We’re all excited to read them, and with your permission, we’ll share them with our user base.

Links:

Posted in MySQL, MySQL Server, Use cases | No Comments »

MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition — until end of September!

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

We timed our Use Case Competition to coincide with summer holidays, and are now prolonging the duration of the Use Case Competition with one month, until 30 September 2008.

To recap, here’s the original posting (with an updated deadline):

With 5.1 having officially been in Release Candidate status since September 2007 and soon approaching GA status, the MySQL Community Team launches a competition for the users of new features of MySQL 5.1:

Submit your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report to community(at)mysql.com by 30 September 2008 and have a chance of winning one of our prizes:

You may phrase your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report freely, but the more colour you give it, the better your chances of winning.

By submitting the report, you also volunteer for appearing in our upcoming Use Case articles. We will consider any data you submit in your Use Case Report as public and quotable in our reports. However, you may ask us to anonymise certain aspects of your use case, should you otherwise not be able to participate in our competition.

This is the desired format of your submissions:

From: <you>
To: Community(at)mysql.com
Cc: <any of your colleagues you wish to inform>
Subject: MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report: <Feature> / <App Name>

MySQL Community Team,

At <company/organisation> we've used <new 5.1 feature> since <date>.

We're now on MySQL 5.1.<n> and we started development using
<new 5.1 feature> with MySQL.5.1.<m>.

Purpose of our appication:

Reason we need <new 5.1 feature>:

Development environment, OS, language:

Deployment environment, OS, hardware:

Relevant metrics on size/type of application:

Our comment on how <new 5.1 feature> meets our needs:
- comments on usability of feature
- comments on clarity of documentation
- comments on performance
- comments on bugs encountered [1]

Our greetings to the MySQL Engineering Team:

Name and email of submitter / developer:

Name of organisation:

Geographic location (city, country):

MySQL Enterprise customer: (YES/NO)

[1] If you’ve found bugs, then please follow our bug reporting instructions and share bug numbers from bugs.mysql.com in your use case report.

We’re looking for Use Cases on all new MySQL 5.1 features, but especially on

Links:

Posted in Architecture of Participation, Events, MySQL, MySQL Server, MySQL Users Conferences, Use cases | 1 Comment »

Federated Storage Engine: Disabled by default in MySQL 5.1.26, use with care

Monday, July 21st, 2008

This blog entry is about a specific storage engine in MySQL. The Federated storage engine enables data to be accessed from a remote MySQL database on a local server without using replication or cluster technology. When using a Federated table, queries on the local server are automatically executed on the remote (federated) tables. No data is stored on the local tables.

When we released MySQL 5.1.24, the Federated engine was not compiled in, pending decisions on our future steps. The reason for the removal was that we realised (albeit quite late in the game) that Federated has some bugs that expose the server to unnecessary risks. Fixing these bugs is a time consuming process, because the root cause lies in the design of the Federated engine.

The removal was a safety precaution, which made the server more secure. However, it also deprived some users of an engine that they had been using for some time (Federated was introduced in MySQL 5.0.3).

Thus, we were left with the dilemma of more security versus more features. After much internal discussion, we reached a compromise. In 5.1.25, we reintroduced Federated as it was, but in the meantime we prepared a change for 5.1.26 which was just released. Federated is now compiled in, but disabled by default. This means that normal users won’t be exposed to the possible side effects of using Federated tables. Users who require the Federated engine will be able to use it, by adding an option (–federated) to the mysqld command line or to the configuration file. Existing users of the Federated engine must be warned that using Federated can be risky, and it is not recommended for production.

We have a list of outstanding bugs affecting the Federated engine in our Bugs database.

Notice that the 5.0.x server is not affected by this decision. However, to allow security conscious users to disable Federated, we plan to introduce a similar configuration option in 5.0.66 and later releases.

We realise that the situation with Federated is undesirable. Therefore, we plan to replace Federated with a better designed, more robust engine, and we will welcome feedback about this task from the community and from our customers.

And as followers of MySQL Forge know (thanks Brian Aker for reminding me), there is already an initiative from the community, called FederatedX:

FederatedX Pluggable Storage Engine for MySQL is based off of the Federated Storage Engine, and is an attempt to moved the Federated Storage Engine forward to fix bugs, add new features and develop new concepts that are easier to achieve as a pluggable storage engine.

Thanks, Patrick Galbraith and Antony Curtis!

As for our general Federated plans: Please address your suggestions to community-contributions(at)mysql.com

Links:

Posted in Architecture of Participation, MySQL, Release Policy | No Comments »

MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition

Friday, July 18th, 2008

With 5.1 having officially been in Release Candidate status since September 2007 and soon approaching GA status, the MySQL Community Team launches a competition for the users of new features of MySQL 5.1:

Submit your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report to community(at)mysql.com by 31 August 2008 and have a chance of winning one of our prizes:

You may phrase your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report freely, but the more colour you give it, the better your chances of winning.

By submitting the report, you also volunteer for appearing in our upcoming Use Case articles. We will consider any data you submit in your Use Case Report as public and quotable in our reports. However, you may ask us to anonymise certain aspects of your use case, should you otherwise not be able to participate in our competition.

This is the desired format of your submissions:

From: <you>
To: Community(at)mysql.com
Cc: <any of your colleagues you wish to inform>
Subject: MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report: <Feature> / <App Name>

MySQL Community Team,

At <company/organisation> we've used <new 5.1 feature> since <date>.

We're now on MySQL 5.1.<n> and we started development using
<new 5.1 feature> with MySQL.5.1.<m>.

Purpose of our appication:

Reason we need <new 5.1 feature>:

Development environment, OS, language:

Deployment environment, OS, hardware:

Relevant metrics on size/type of application:

Our comment on how <new 5.1 feature> meets our needs:
- comments on usability of feature
- comments on clarity of documentation
- comments on performance
- comments on bugs encountered [1]

Our greetings to the MySQL Engineering Team:

Name and email of submitter / developer:

Name of organisation:

Geographic location (city, country):

MySQL Enterprise customer: (YES/NO)

[1] If you’ve found bugs, then please follow our bug reporting instructions and share bug numbers from bugs.mysql.com in your use case report.

We’re looking for Use Cases on all new MySQL 5.1 features, but especially on

Links:

Posted in Architecture of Participation, Events, MySQL | 5 Comments »

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