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Lifecycle Reminder

MySQL Lifecycle Policy Calendar


The official MySQL Lifecycle Policy calendar terminates the end of the Active Support Lifecycle for MySQL 4.1 at the end of this year. The product is then entering the Extended Support Lifecycle. Please click on the image and read "What is the difference between Active Lifecycle and Extended Lifecycle support?" to understand the implications of this.

MySQL on Windows for DBAs

(by Gerardo Narvaja)

We do run on all platforms supported by Microsoft, embedded platforms not tested. We do support all communication protocols supported by Windows. Minimum disk space: 200MB, basically enough to unpack, install and create a few test DBs. We do run on all filesystems supported by Windows, for tables larger than 4GB NTFS is necessary. We do support a lot of DB access frameworks: ODBC, .NET (1.1 or newer), JDBC (1.4.2 or larger to develop, 1.3.0 or newer to run).

Packages are named a bit differently than on Unix. Continue reading "MySQL on Windows for DBAs"

Kill them all!

Less lemons!
Right now all of your MySQL Developers are busy at MySQL Devcon 2006 in Sorrento. Each day is bracketed in the early morning and evening by the ritual of "Showstopper Bugs review", wherein the remaining showstopper, P1 and P2 bugs are reviewed, verified, assigned and the progress on their elimination is being tracked.

So far we are seeing a lot of progress - long standing and neglected bugs are suddenly going very easily, because people here can see each other and just talk about the problems they are seeing.

So more Sorrento means less lemons for all of you!

INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PROCESSLIST

I requested this urgently for 5.1 and Brian made it happen: An information_schema table called processlist. This is the table version of the "SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST" output, and it is very cool. Using this table, you can create SQL to dig the processlist, and write stored procedures that spot, log and handle long running queries.

Even better: With the new log formats in 5.1, you can access the logs as CSV engine based SQL tables as well, and join the processlist table against the general query log or other logs. This allows you plenty of easy session tracing and easy profiling.

Even better: With the processlist table and 5.1 new feature "events" you can create new threads, monitor their execution, and in case of problems forcibly terminate them using other events or procedures. Or you can write a stored procedure using DROP USER to delete a user, and KILL this users connections afterwards to make sure that guy has been kicked.

The possibilities are endless.

Debian 64 bit trouble

I had a customer using Debian 64 Bit binaries downloaded from MySQL, experiencing hangs. Symptoms have been:
  • INSERT hangs
  • Replication hangs (SQL_Thread shown as running, but Exec counter not moving)
  • Server cannot be shutdown, except with kill -9


This is Bug #8555, Debian Bug 314408, a problem with NPTL in libc6, version 2.3.2.ds1-22. Upgrading to a newer, UNSTABLE version of libc6 resolved the problem. The system is now running without problems at 1200 qps (4000 qps peak) in 64 Bit mode, using the MySQL AMD 64 bit download for 5.0.18.

A day in the docs

The most recent MySQL server I used in a production environment was a 3.23, so in conjunction with reading the 5.0 sources, I saw fit to reread large parts of the documentation to see where updates had happened, fixes were applied, extensions added. Here are some random clippings from the docs that illustrate quirks, changes from MySQL 3.23 (other than those noted in 3.23->4.0, 4.0->4.1, 4.1->5.0 which we'll give a brief tour of at the end) and differences from the standard. If you recently read the docs, kindly walk on, there's nothing to see here. If being a MySQL admin is #96 on the list of who you are, stand by for some trivia. Continue reading "A day in the docs"