Lenz Grimmer's blog

I've been going through our bugs database to compile a list of some noteworthy patch contributions that have been included in the MySQL 5.5 release. Of course any contribution is appreciated, no matter how small! And the list is probably not complete — please let me know if I'm missing any. I omitted a number of smaller patches that fixed compile issues and I only considered contributions that were tracked in our bug database and were tagged as "Contribution".

Note that these are new patches that have not been part of any other MySQL release — of course, all contributions from previous releases are included in 5.5 as well. We also received a few patches for InnoDB (particularly by Mark Callaghan and his team mates at Google/Facebook), which were incorporated in the InnoDB plugin in MySQL 5.1 (and hence got included in the InnoDB version of MySQL 5.5, too).

Here they are, in no particular order:

• BUG#13175: SHA2 function (Patch contributed by Bill Karwin)
• BUG#14104: FLUSH LOGS now takes an optional log_type value so that FLUSH log_type LOGS can be used to flush only a specified log type. (Patch contributed by Eric Bergen)
• BUG#27249: Aliases for wildcards (as in SELECT t.* AS 'alias' FROM t) are no longer accepted and result in an error. Previously, such aliases were ignored silently. (Patch contributed by Martin Friebe)
• BUG#40368: mysqld_safe did not honor underscores in the same way as dashes for server options (Patch contributed by Erik Ljungstrom)
• BUG#45767: Removal of Field::pack_key, Field::unpack_key, Field::pack_cmp storage engine functions (Patch contributed by Zardosht Kasheff)
• BUG#50057: SHOW PROFILE CPU port for Windows (Patch contributed by Alex Budkovski)
• BUG#5724: "mysqladmin password" prompts for a password when none is provided on the command line (Patch contributed by Harrison Fisk)
• BUG#26780: A new mysql client option "--auto-vertical-output", which causes the client to test whether a result table is too wide for the current window (where available) and emit vertical results in that case. (Patch contributed by Eric Bergen)

A big "Thank you" to all the contributors!

Hello from Birmingham, UK! I'm here to attend and speak at the UKOUG Technology & E-Business Suite 2010 conference (what a name!) We actually have two packed tracks of MySQL Sessions this Wednesday, including a keynote by Richard Mason (Vice President of MySQL Sales and Consulting at Oracle) about Oracle's strategy and plans for MySQL as well as highly technical sessions about MySQL High Availability, Scalability and Performance tuning from experts in the field. Ronald Bradford, Oracle Ace Director and long-time MySQL community advocate will also be there, speaking about Common MySQL Scalability Mistakes and MySQL idiosyncrasies that BITE. The latter talk is actually going against my own talk about "Making MySQL Administration a Breeze - A Look Into a MySQL DBA's Toolchest". This is going to be interesting!

If you happen to be nearby, don't hesitate to come over! Admission to the MySQL session stream and the exhibition area is free! The online registration has been closed in the meanwhile, but I just learned that you can just turn up on site and the conference team will accommodate you. See you on wednesday!

It's finally official — please join me in welcoming my new/old colleague Dave Stokes, who just joined the MySQL Community Relations Team at Oracle as the new MySQL community manager for North America. Some of you may remember him from a previous stint at MySQL, where he was in charge of the MySQL certification program. Back then, he was already running the North Texas MySQL Users Group and a regular blogger on Planet MySQL. I am sure we will be seeing much more of these kind of activities from now on. So welcome aboard, Dave! I look forward to working with you.

Yesterday afternoon I returned from the SAPO CodeBits 2010 conference, which took place in Lisbon, Portugal. Just like the previous year, CodeBits has been a great conference to be at and I am grateful for having been selected for participation. Thursday, the first conference day was quite a busy one for me — I gave two presentations in a row:

• What's new in MySQL 5.5? (Slides)
• How to build you own Quadrocopter (Slides)

Afterwards, I also participated in a panel discussion about "To SQL or not to SQL", together with representatives from other open source databases (@fdmanana from CouchDB, @antirez from Redis and @bpedro for PostgreSQL). It was an interesting but somewhat slow discussion and the overall conclusion is still the same: there's more than one tool for a given job, choose carefully what your requirements are and don't just blindly believe the hype.

On Friday, I had some more time to attend other people's presentations. In the evening I took part in another panel discussion about Physical Computing. I also had the "opportunity" to try one of the Nuclear Tacos (Video) they served — I have never had something that hot before. Ouch! Fortunately my tastebuds recovered in time for the speaker's dinner, which took place later that evening. We went to a Rodizio restaurant nearby, the food was plenty and delicious!

Saturday was a pretty low activity day for me. I spent some time in the DIY corner, doing some Arduino hacking. Later that day I attended the project presentations and the closing keynote. Unfortunately a majority of the content was in Portuguese, so I only got parts of the content. But it was still fun! I've published my pictures of CodeBits on Flickr, I hope you enjoy them

Later today, I will be travelling to the DOAG Conference 2010 in Nuremberg, Germany. I'll be giving two talks (in German) there on Wednesday, 17th:

• MySQL Replikationstechnologien - eine Übersicht
• Blick in die Werkzeug-Kiste eines MySQL-DBAs

I already received my speaker badge for this conference (see the picture below). Cool idea: you can use the public transport facilities (Buses, Trams) for free, by presenting this card!

There will also be a MySQL Community Meetup on Tuesday, 19:00 at the Press Center of the Congress Center East. If you're around, you're more than welcome to join us there!

Next up in the conference schedule for this year is the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham, UK (Nov. 29th - Dec. 1st). We helped them with setting up a MySQL session stream, and they've created an interesting lineup of talks. I'll be speaking about Making MySQL Administration a Breeze - A Look Into a MySQL DBA's Toolchest. See you there!

I've been informed about two upcoming events/conferences that are organized by the independent Oracle user groups of the respective countries. If you're nearby, how about submitting a talk about a MySQL-related topic?

On March 29, 2011 the the Oracle Benelux User Group will have their yearly OBUG Benelux Connect 2011 conference, which will take place in Brussels, Belgium. You can submit your proposal until December 3rd, 2010 via this link.

On May 19th and 20th, 2011, the Oracle User Group Finland together with the Oracle User Groups of Estonia, Latvia and Russia will organize the EMEA Harmony 2011 Spring conference, which will take place in Helsinki, Finland. The Call for Papers has been opened — you can submit your speaking proposals until February 1st, 2011 via this submission form.

And while we're at it: the MySQL Developer room at FOSDEM 2011 in Brussels is still seeking for more talk proposals, too! Please consider submitting your suggested talk until Sunday, 26th of December, 2010