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MySQL dropping BDB support

2006-08-24T13:21:00+01:00

According to the changelog for the 5.1.12 beta release :

Incompatible change: Support for the BerkeleyDB (BDB) engine has been dropped from this release. Any existing tables that are in BDB format will not be readable from within MySQL from 5.1.12 or newer. You should convert your tables to another storage engine before upgrading to 5.1.12.

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More on Oracle's InnoDB purchase

2006-04-26T16:58:00+01:00

An interesting perspective from Lisa Vaas of eWeek.com on Oracle's purchase of InnoDB: The Truth Comes Out: Oracle Bought InnoDB Without a Clue

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Gotcha: "user" is not a reserved word

2006-04-21T22:57:00+01:00

In MySQL, user is not a reserved word and can be used as-is as a table name. As web applications in particular often have their own user table, it is in common use, which is perfectly understandable.

However, according to the various ANSI SQL standards, user is a reserved word (see e.g. here or here ), and this leads to problems when converting MySQL schema definitions to other databases, such as that described here .

Note that as of MySQL 5.0.19, even when selecting MySQL's ANSI Mode , " user " does not appear to treated as a reserved word, and no warnings are given when it is used to create a table.

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MySQL's new "Solid" engine: roadmap available

2006-04-18T19:58:00+01:00

This news.com article names some dates for the introduction of the new database engine from Solid™ Inc.: a prototype will be demonstrated on April 24, a beta with sourcecode will be available in July, and the release version will come "in the fourth quarter" (presumably of 2006).

The new engine will be dual-licensed (GPL / commercial) along the same lines as InnoDB.

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MySQL to obtain new database engine?

2006-04-17T07:38:00+01:00

The MySQL database engine merry-go-round is continuing to spin. Having "lost" two of its transactional backends to the 800lb gorilla of the database world, Oracle, MySQL has been stepping up efforts to acquire and develop independent technologies. Following onto its acquisition of Netfrastructure , ZDNet reports that Solid™ Information Technology will be making its solidDB Storage Engine for MySQL available as open source under the GPL from June.

What this entails precisely is not clear. Solid seems to specialize in high-performance database solutions for the telecommunications industry with an emphasis on in-memory operations. There appears to be no mention of MySQL on its site, and nor does MySQL have - as of the time of writing - any announcement in its News section .

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TRUNCATE: not transaction safe

2006-04-13T14:43:00+01:00

Beginning with version 5.0.3, MySQL now includes a "real" TRUNCATE command for InnoDB tables, similar to that provided by Oracle and PostgreSQL.

George-Cristian Bîrzan ( gcbirzan {at} constanta dot rdsnet dot ro ) wrote to point out that it is affected by the following interesting gotcha:

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MySQL renews Oracle InnoDB contract

2006-04-13T14:14:00+01:00

As a follow-up to this article , MySQL has - according to this CNET report - renewed the InnoDB contract inherited by Oracle when it purchased the Finnish company.

MySQL CEO Marten Mickos is quoted as saying "Oracle told us that it's business as usual--they don't want to slow us down, and they will fix bugs" - which on the face of it is good news for anyone with a long term investment in InnoDB technologies.

The article does not say whether Oracle will fix some of the more fundamental issues with InnoDB's MySQL engine.

In related news , MySQL is pushing ahead with development of its own transactional storage engine following its acquisition of Netfrastructure, one of the original InterBase developers and a member of the Firebird project.

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DDL and Transactions: No Warnings Gotcha

2006-04-13T07:41:00+01:00

Many of the gotchas in pre 5.0 MySQL versions stem from the fact that operations silently failed without any type of error message or warning. That situation has improved with 5.0, with explicit warnings being emmitted on some operations, such as when data is truncated, making it easier to catch potential problems.

However, with DDL operations (e.g. DROP TABLE ) in a transactional context, there are still no warnings which would alert the user to potential problems. Of course, in MySQL DDL operations are by nature not transactional, but sometimes it is easy to forget this.

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INSERT INTO ... VALUE (sic)

2006-04-04T06:57:00+01:00

This is the first gotcha I've found for the current 5.0 series.

" INSERT INTO " seems to accept the phrase " VALUE " as equivalent to the more usual " VALUES ". While I'm not sure whether this is standard SQL, I've never encountered it before and can find no reference to this syntax on the documentation page at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/insert.html .

For example:

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MySQL 5.0 production release

2005-10-25T07:46:00+01:00

MySQL 5.0 is finally ready for the big time with the release of the first general availabilty version 5.0.15 following a long period of testing.

Release announcement

The addition of many new features such as stored procedures, triggers, views and cursors has finally brought MySQL onto the same playing field as other RDBMS products, both proprietary and open source, and puts it in a position to expand into the "enterprise" database market.

It is also a good reason to finally get around to updating (and hopefully reducing) the MySQL Gotchas - watch that space.

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