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I'll give another vote for the mysql docs. I dont think I have ever had an issue with mysql that was not solved somewhere in their massive documentation archive. (ok ok until I started playing with C-JDBC ;))

Enjoy, and let me know if there's anything else we can do.

(don't forget to check out the other things we've created for you over here)

The mysqlimport command.

http://mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysqlimport.htm l

It seems that MySQL run their own Coverity scans.

Umm... MySQL? At least when used as part of an OEM/ISV/VAR solution.

Knock it off allready.
I've had enough of the eternal Dimwits constantly bashing this or that with "MySQL not scalable" "PHP not scalable", blablabla.
PHP has arrived in the enterprise market. That's a fact. Yes, I know, Java has been there for 8 years, PHP is messy and quirky (so is Perl), MySQL isn't a DB, we've heard it all before.
In case you haven't noticed: PHP 5 is out. It's a full blown, mature PL and arguably the 400 pound gorilla of SSI solutions with a long history. MySQL 5 is out aswell. It's a full blown DB and comes with tons of free x-platform admin and design tools that make building the outline of a large webapp a walk in the park and thus scares the living daylights out of Oracle and IBM. You may have noticed IBM virtually giving their DB2 away for free (beer) since just a few months ago. Guess how that happend.
Imagine someone would come along and tell you that large-scale webapps in Perl are a pipedream. Not to far-fetched in this context, no? And what about slashdot and kuro5hin?

PHP is as good a technology as any other in use when it comes to building large webapps (point in case: www.rubyonrails.org/index.php/ ). Industry strength PHP Frameworks are poping up left, right and center and other places like mushrooms after the rain. And as for MySQL "not being ready for large, scalable apps" - you're being silly.

Nice, they ship the latest upgrade to a four-year-old database engine in a tiger-incompatible format. If your OS is up-to-date (and it should be), grab them from an arguably better source instead.

I'm an open-source developer (Ultima Linux, PyWord – just to name a few. And yet I'm living on the east coast of the U.S. In fact, so's Red Hat. Not to mention Slackware, now in Minnesota, or even MySQL, who's all the way over in Sweden. I've also noticed a lot of my users tend to be from European countries – Germany, France, Sweden, England, Ireland... and that's only counting a small handful. Oh, and Linus himself is in Portland, Oregon, which is a bit closer but still not in the valley. So unless I'm missing the point entirely, I'd have to say the article must be completely wrong...

DISCLAIMER: I will admit I haven't read the article yet, so I probably am missing the point, but may as well post anyway, since this is Slashdot ;-)

Doesn't seem unlikely given that they entered into an agreement with them last year, as reported on Slashdot and elsewhere. The news release about that is on the MySQL site.

I'd need some more evidence than an unsupported post on /. that MySQL is giving any aid or comfort to the enemy before I started modifying my opinion of the company or their software.

Here you go:
http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/news/article_ 948.html

My understanding of MySQL licensing is that unless you're non-commercial (or non-profit?), MySQL is in fact _not_ free.

The reason magic_quotes_gpc is so horrible, is that it is a FALSE SOLUTION. It doesn't provide any safety net at all -- merely the ILLUSION of a safety net, which encourages programmers to assume they're safe, and be sloppy. That's MUCH WORSE than not providing a safety net at all, and forcing programmers not to be sloppy, without giving them a false sense of security.

MySQL Guide to Security:

Magic Quotes
Given the potential harm that can be caused by SQL injection, PHPs automatic input escape mechanism, magic_quotes_gpc, provides some rudimentary protection. If enabled, magic_ quotes_gpc, or "magic quotes", adds a backslash in front of single-quotes, double-quotes, and other characters that could be used to break out of a value identifier. But, magic quotes is a generic solution that doesnt include all of the characters that require escaping, and the fea- ture isnt always enabled (for reasons outlined in the first chapter). Ultimately, its up to you to implement safeguards to protect against SQL injection.

PostgreSQL: 8.1.4 et. al. Security Release FAQ

Q: Is anyone in particular danger?
A: Applications using Far East encodings (SJIS, BIG5, GBK, GB18030, and UHC) which use ad-hoc methods to "escape" strings going into the database, such as regexes, or PHP3's addslashes() and magic_quotes. Since these bypass database-specific code for safe handling of strings, many such applications will need to be re-written to become secure. (Note that the PHP team deprecated addslashes() and magic_quotes in version 4.0 because of the security risk. Unfortunately, it still appears in a distressing number of freeware PHP applications online.)

The designers of PHP have a long track record of making foolish decisions that competent language designers would have never considered in the first place. Then they make it even worse by coming up with half-assed kludges that try to address the symptoms, but fail to cure the disease, with side-effects that are much worse than the problem they were trying to solve!

For example: PHP originally had only deep structure copy semantics (pass by value of arrays and objects, by deeply copying them instead of passing references): when you pass an array, the ENTIRE deep array is recursively copied, instead of being passed by reference, like in almost every other programming language. So then they half-bake a horrible idea they called "references" into the language to paper over the problem, which are entirely unlike references in any other language (even Perl!), even more confusing, and are notorious for causing many bugs in user code as well as crashing the interpreter itself!

PHP's deep copy semantics were such a bad idea, that many programmers don't even realize it works that way, and don't catch on until it causes bugs and extreme inefficiencies in their code. So to kludge around the problem, PHP merely provides the ILLUSION of a safety net, by mimicking and syntactic appearance and name of references in languages like C++ (which are rigorously designed and well defined in terms of pointers), but PHP's references are totally fucked up, and cause more problems than they solve.

So any C++ programmer who reads or writes PHP code is likely to think something totally different is going on, and be surprized when their code doesn't behave as expected, and the PHP interpreter dumps core. The decisions to make PHP copy semantics and references work the way they do were WRONG. But what was even WORSE was to call that half-baked kludge "references", and make them look identical C++ references, so they totally mislead people into misunderstanding how they work, and making many bugs, crashes and security holes, which otherwise would not hav

I've heard many a DBA-type praise PostgreSQL up and down. However, for most end users, they aren't going to run something that requires the load of Slashdot or Google.

Slashdot runs MySQL:

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/success-stori es/slashdot.html

Most PostgreSQL advocacy I've heard ends up being an anti-MySQL rant. It must be frustrating to think you have better technology and find people using the competition's stuff anyway. I like MySQL though, and the complaints sound a bit shrill to me.

MySQL's Support group includes:

• men and women
• heterosexual and homosexual
• single and married
• with dogs and without dogs
• one with a large tat collection, probably the one Monty was referring to
• those who read Slashdot and have a 100% article submission acceptance rate and those who don't
• those who seem to read emails even while brushing their teeth and those who don't.
• those who are nocturnal and those who aren't
• people in about a dozen countries

It also includes a couple of Wikipedia (also mentioned in the Fortune story) DBAs with experience designing systems to scale MySQL from a single box to multiple handling a couple of billion queries a day, among others with excellent real-world experience.

One of the things that makes it a good company to work for? I've met Monty in person a few times. On the occasions where we talked a lot about technical issues, he and I disagreed quite strongly at times. I still work for the company. I've done the same with other senior people in the company, communicating messages they were really unhappy to hear, with the same result. Make good arguments and you can dissagree with anyone from the CEO on down and still do well. As Monty said a few days ago: "Our support people are very pragmatic. They don't recommend things they don't believe in." You can tell the truth. Even unpleasant truth.

That's also part of the reason for MySQL's success.

MySQL grew from about 180 people to about 300 in the year I've worked for the company. It's still hiring anyone from database gurus like Jim Starkey through sales people, teachers and administrators. If you like open source and overturning established business models, it's a company worth working for. One thing it isn't: a high-paying company. If you don't value working form home and the other attributes of the comapny, you can probably make more money elsewhere. If you think this is just a sales pitch, read what Monty wrote about MySQL Support people two paragraphs back. :) He's right.

MySQL's Support group includes:

• men and women
• heterosexual and homosexual
• single and married
• with dogs and without dogs
• one with a large tat collection, probably the one Monty was referring to
• those who read Slashdot and have a 100% article submission acceptance rate and those who don't
• those who seem to read emails even while brushing their teeth and those who don't.
• those who are nocturnal and those who aren't
• people in about a dozen countries

It also includes a couple of Wikipedia (also mentioned in the Fortune story) DBAs with experience designing systems to scale MySQL from a single box to multiple handling a couple of billion queries a day, among others with excellent real-world experience.

One of the things that makes it a good company to work for? I've met Monty in person a few times. On the occasions where we talked a lot about technical issues, he and I disagreed quite strongly at times. I still work for the company. I've done the same with other senior people in the company, communicating messages they were really unhappy to hear, with the same result. Make good arguments and you can dissagree with anyone from the CEO on down and still do well. As Monty said a few days ago: "Our support people are very pragmatic. They don't recommend things they don't believe in." You can tell the truth. Even unpleasant truth.

That's also part of the reason for MySQL's success.

MySQL grew from about 180 people to about 300 in the year I've worked for the company. It's still hiring anyone from database gurus like Jim Starkey through sales people, teachers and administrators. If you like open source and overturning established business models, it's a company worth working for. One thing it isn't: a high-paying company. If you don't value working form home and the other attributes of the comapny, you can probably make more money elsewhere. If you think this is just a sales pitch, read what Monty wrote about MySQL Support people two paragraphs back. :) He's right.

Probably he is talking about something like MySQL's LOAD DATA INFILE. In MySQL, inserting data into a table directly from a delimited text file, without using SQL statements, is just as much fast, if not faster.

yup yup yup. I currently use keywords for google, google images, traceroute, whois, ebay, wiki, xe.net, php.net, mysql.com (though their website is mostly useless (in comparision with the brilliantly useful php.net)), amazon, archive.org, a file extension search page, and ip2country. yay for bookmarks! your suggestions welcome.

FYI:
http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/tracert.ch?ip=%25s
http://filext.com/detaillist.php?extdetail=%25s&Su bmit3=Go!
http://whois.webhosting.info/%25s
http://web.archive.org/archive_request_ng?collecti on=web&url=%25s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search =%25s
http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi?Amount=%25s&From =USD&To=GBP
http://www.ezwhois.net/index.php
http://search.ebay.co.uk/search/search.dll?satitle =%25s&ht=1&sokeywordredirect=&from=R8&fkr=1&soloct og=9
http://www.php.net/search.php
http://www.mysql.com/search/?q=%25s&charset=
http://puremango.co.uk/ip2country.php?ip=%25s
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle- form/026-9212734-6757257

If SQL is pronounced 'ess cue ell', is MySQL pronounced 'emm why ess cue ell'?

From your post, I am assuming you think it's pronounced "mysequel" which it's not. Officially, it's pronounced "my ess que ell".

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/what-is.htm l

And what piece of software has put the whole OSS community in the spotlight and given it the fame it has today? This whole issue might very well go deeper than you want to realize.

As to BerkeleyDB: why compare a library used by certain software with a server product? Not only that, a server product which also considers it important enough to support it.

Here are the official compiler flags for OS X as well as a performance hint for heavy loads:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mac-os-x-10 -x.html

Here is some discussion on the issue and how performance could be affected by programs written with a focus on linux which does tend to take short cuts for the sake of performance.
http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/archives/2005/06/03 /mystery/

I think you should reread what I wrote. I was wondering why they did not include Oracle in their test suite. Perhaps, they did not include it because it performs better on OS X than linux and they were writing with a pro-linux/anti-OS X slant?

;-)

YaSSL support is included in the MySQL binary builds for most platforms in 5.0.20a, with support for fewer in the original 5.0.20 release. Release note.

Wouldn't be so sure at this point, they are using 4 machines to load-balance a mysql server with 2 storage points ? Perhaps the ultra monkey is a good name for it ...

  Is it just me or does it seem a bit bad idea in most cases where the data amount is small but traffic is high? The latencies created all over this ultra monkey setup will make it slow, if compared to one smtp box with 2 cpu's and a really good raid card in it, attached to 15k rpm scsi disks, i don't think there's much of a difference in performance for that case (and little data, lots of interaction is the most common thing that you meet with mysql). As for failover, multiple machines sure look great, but right now this scheme here seems to depend on 1 management node, if that one falls down, nothing works and 3 machines stand around scratching their head ? Maybe 2 management nodes and 4+4 machines for loadbalancing/sql nodes would have more impact ? Machines really don't cost much today, having downtime is much more expensive.

People who need it, probably already know how to it. The ones who can't, can makes things even worse.

Picked up some notes from the mysql doc associated with it (available on http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-clust er-faq.html)

* innodb and myisam storage engines not supported
* to add one node, whole cluster has to restart
* fulltext doesn't work
* stuff stored in memory
* transactions are kept to some level, so a massive power failure doesn't really kill you (it gives you the rope)
* The NDB engine does not support foreign key constraints. As with MyISAM tables, these are ignored.
* you can have multiple management nodes, i'd suggest you have more than 1 to make failover effective :)
* it is advised to keep your transactions short ;)

Porting stuff from an existing innodb based application over to this, may be quite an effort.

The mysql doc however contains no word about stored procedures. So i wouldn't bet my 5 cents on it yet.

All-in-all, it's nice to see people sharing knowledge and it's nice to see that people put effort into making mysql as the most common opensource rdb clusterable. My opinion is that perhaps a bit more effort is needed, but at least people are making the steps in the right direction.

I still love postrgres ...

The MySQL Protocol is proprietary.

The MySQL Protocol is part of the MySQL Database Management System. As such, it falls under the provisions of the GNU Public License (GPL). A copy of the GNU Public License is available on MySQL's web site, and in the product download.

Because this is a GPL protocol, any product which uses it to connect to a MySQL server, or to emulate a MySQL server, or to interpose between any client and server which uses the protocol, or for any similar purpose, is also bound by the GPL. Therefore if you use this description to write a program, you must release your program as GPL. Contact MySQL AB if you need clarification of these terms or if you need to ask about alternative arrangements.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/internals/en/licensing-no tice.html

It's not so clear if MySQL is 'free for commercial use' or not:

"The Commercial License ... for organizations that do not want to release their application source code."
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/comme rcial-license.html

"Free use for those who never copy, modify or distribute. As long as you never distribute the MySQL Software in any way, you are free to use it for powering your application, irrespective of whether your application is under GPL license or not."
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/opens ource-license.html

So if you ship your (commercial) application with (the unmodified) MySQL, you need to use the commercial license. I don't think this is so with Linux, because the important libraries (LIBC) are LGPL and not GPL. Also, each part of the system can have a different license in Linux. Not so if you use MySQL (see above). At least this is my understanding, please tell me (with the relevant links) if you think I'm wrong.
--
http://www.h2database.com/

It's not so clear if MySQL is 'free for commercial use' or not:

"The Commercial License ... for organizations that do not want to release their application source code."
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/comme rcial-license.html

"Free use for those who never copy, modify or distribute. As long as you never distribute the MySQL Software in any way, you are free to use it for powering your application, irrespective of whether your application is under GPL license or not."
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/opens ource-license.html

So if you ship your (commercial) application with (the unmodified) MySQL, you need to use the commercial license. I don't think this is so with Linux, because the important libraries (LIBC) are LGPL and not GPL. Also, each part of the system can have a different license in Linux. Not so if you use MySQL (see above). At least this is my understanding, please tell me (with the relevant links) if you think I'm wrong.
--
http://www.h2database.com/

MySQL actually has a storage engine like what you want, "Archive".

http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/stora ge-engine.html

It only supports INSERT and SELECT operations, but you can easily prevent reading from it if you want. However, no one, not even root can change or delete the data from inside of MySQL. You of course could physically delete the database from the command line, but you can do that with prettymuch everything.

It also stores data in a compressed format.

...in MySQL all database engines except InnoDB (which is disk-based) silently fail to enforce transaction semantics.

...in MySQL all database engines except InnoDB (which is disk-based) silently fail to enforce transaction semantics.

I found this page which states that DBD::mysql uses the MySQL client libraries (It says this for Net::MySQL).

If you perldoc DBD::mysql, it says it's licensed under the same license as perl (the artistic license).

Unless DBD::mysql is saying that their code is licensed under the artistic license, but as soon as it's built against the MySQL client library it becomes GPL (and just leaving out the last part), I don't see how the MySQL client libraries could possibly be GPL only. .. Any takers?

Personally I always use the syntax ENGINE=BLACKHOLE .

Kind of OT, but from their site:

The official way to pronounce "MySQL" is "My Ess Que Ell" (not "my sequel"), but we don't mind if you pronounce it as "my sequel" or in some other localized way.

(Near the bottom)

I don't know, in my line of work (Data Warehousing) where I need to move around large amounts of data, no amount of tuning beats a large amount of spindles.
In that regard, I find the new advances that MySQL is making on table partitioning (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/partitioni ng.html ) in their 5.1 beta VERY interesting.

[warning: shameless plug ahead!]
If you combine this with my own Free/free open source ETL tool Kettle (http://www.kettle.be/ ) you can build your data warehouse just as fast or faster than most commercial ETL tools.

The deal then becomes very simple: spend the money you save on licensing on hardware! You'll be amazed at the results...
Oh, and try the Pentaho (http://www.pentaho.org/ ) open source BI solution while you're at it...

Cheers,
Matt

Like all Linux desktops, Ubuntu has limitations. It lacks applications such as Photoshop, Framemaker, Pagemaker, Visio, Access, Quickbooks, a PDF converter, legal DVD players and most importantly income tax preparation software. Without those applications ported directly to Linux, Ubuntu remains a mid-level desktop.

• The GIMP satisfy virtually all "photoshop" needs (maybe not some small part in some graphics shops, but otherwise you're bitching without real knowledge).
• I don't do much in the area of Framemaker or Pagemaker, but most desktops will do fine with the functionality present in OpenOffice.org Draw
• Visio has some nice features, but I've lived for years with Dia managing a network of almost 200 equipments in a variety of multi-level networks
• Access is b0rked by design. PostgreSQL and MySQL are on Enterprise level, and they're at your feet on most GNU/Linux distributions
• PDF Converters? Have you tried printing? Go there. Notice the Create a PDF Document option...
• Legal DVD players? Write your congressmang, senator, whatever favorite politic of choice and influence and tell them how wrong DMCA is.

According to the MySQL 5.0 Manual mysqlhotcopy is a Perl script that does LOCK TABLES, FLUSH TABLES and then cp or scp. So you go read only with your 500GB production database while the darn thing is shoveling it over the wire to the other server? I wouldn't call that "flawless", but then again, my definition of 24x7 seems to be quite different from yours.

I have allways admitted that the design goals of the Slony-I replication system introduced some rather ugly implementation flaws. But I would have never made the compromise to let it interfere that severely with a production database by design. mysqlhotcopy is lame and plain useless in a 24x7 environment.

Have a nice day
Jan

BSD vs GPL for contributions has been discussed repeatedly in the Slashdot forum. But, more important to me is the manner in which the software may used. mySQL AB puts restrictions on the redistribution of application, with a special exception for PHP based applications. Also, it appears that a for-profit company would be on the hook to purchase commerical licenses, unless they were willing to publish the source code to their mySQL powered application.

http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/opens ource-license.html

So now, as an application developer for a commercial enterprise, one starts looking at all freely available alternatives, including those published by the top database vendors. If you could live within the size or license restrictions imposed by the no-cost commercial versions, PostGreSQL and mySQL become just two of many choices.

Ah, but MySQL does have graphical administration tools. They don't come in the server installation package, but they are available and work quite well. They're certainly not the train wreck that SQL Server's tool is.

Ah, but MySQL does have graphical administration tools. They don't come in the server installation package, but they are available and work quite well. They're certainly not the train wreck that SQL Server's tool is.

DISLAIMER: I have never used a database in my life, shut up already.

And you know what? I originally chose PostgreSQL because it was ACID compliant, but I have to say that MySQL sucks a lot less than it used to. It defaults to tables that support commit/rollback. It supports sub-transactions (which PostgreSQL v7 doesn't support, not sure about 8). It (FINALLY) supports sub-selects. If you're still turning up your nose at MySQL, it really isn't as bad as it used to be.

And you know what? I originally chose PostgreSQL because it was ACID compliant, but I have to say that MySQL sucks a lot less than it used to. It defaults to tables that support commit/rollback. It supports sub-transactions (which PostgreSQL v7 doesn't support, not sure about 8). It (FINALLY) supports sub-selects. If you're still turning up your nose at MySQL, it really isn't as bad as it used to be.

Well, how do you get stored procedures to get to work on mysql at all?

By using MySQL 5.0.

HTH,
JP

The article says Oracle compares its US$15G/yr revenue to MySQL's US$30M/yr. But as Paul Graham says, it is OK to shrink a US$30G/yr industry to US$30M/yr, if your absolute share of the new US$30M is bigger than the one on US$30G was. Or in other words, MySQL will laugh to the bank on growing from US$30M, while Oracle will strive to keep their US$15G.

Also, IBM, Oracle and Intel did not make Linux. Richard Stallman created GNU, Linus used GNU and complemented it with Linux, and now IBM, Oracle and Intel help Linus with Linux and RMS with GNU.

I wonder how long will IBM and Oracle continue think they can sell proprietary servers on free platforms, without facing significant competition from free servers too. And how long Intel think they can sell proprietary machines to run free software without facing competition from free (think 'open') hardware? Now they are winning, IBM and Oracle using GNU/Linux to face competition from Microsoft, and Intel to crush proprietary RISC (think they ignoring OpenFirmware); but how long before we are running PostgreSQL (or better yet, Rel) on some OpenCores system booting with OpenFirmware or something the like? Not on the short term, for sure, but eventually maybe it is inevitable, unless DRM forces us into a police state.

If you're a PHP/MySQL person, check out Eventum... a nice balance of ease of use and power.

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/other/eventum/

I saw the message below and you may want to re-post so GP sees it. However I still can respond.

I'm not so sure with the statistical optimizer that traditional SQL developer can really do much to tune in most cases. As long as the statistics are good its rare that hints would matter (especially given long term maintenance and issues of runtime utilization) and most are pretty obvious at this point. Back in the days when Oracle was rule based, yes this would make a difference. Again if the system runs one type of query almost all the time.... but then the DBA would know how to tune.

Incidentally, since this is a MySQL thread, MySQL has made some progress in this direction see Statistics System Tables. My guess is that because of this it also holds true for MySQL that SQL tuning is passe.

Guess its like Coke in green bottles or hand written assembler :)

> I can't even find what the the license cost for MySQL I have vague recollections of something about $250.00 for a commercial
> license free for non profit. On the web site there is a $595.00 survice contract, but no mention of a commercial use license.

MySQL Network Basic is $600/server/year: https://shop.mysql.com/
You *may* not have to pay anything however. But that depends on GPL/LGPL licensing complexities, and you will probably need a lawyer to know for sure (MySQL AB recommends just buying a license if you're confused).

In comparison, Oracle/DB2/SQL Server are free for small databases, regardless of how you use them. Then if you need to license it can still be cheaper than mysql - since they typically have an initial license (say, $750) and then just 18%/year afterwards. All three of these databases can be *far* more expensive, but db2 in particular can also be cheap in many configurations. I'm running a terabyte-sized data warehouse on about $28k in total licensing. Compared to the cost of the hardware this is nothing.

And of course, postgresql & sql
    - http://www.postgresql.org/
    - http://www.sqlite.org/
are completely free.

> So I can only assume that those of us that need a database and not even a feature rich database will simply move on to something
> else or pony up the $5000 to $40000 to have a DB to keep track of the CD collection.

No, you're fine for several reasons:
    - you can probably get by with the free mysql version for now
    - postgresql is completely free
    - sqlite is completely free - and is probably the best choice for a tiny project like this
    - oracle is completely free for something of this size
    - db2 is completely free for something of this size
    - sql server is completely free for something of this size

Unless of course you're talking about building a competitor to cdnow, in which case you will face some costs ;-)

To get a consistend dump you'll need to use FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK. That takes a lock which blocks all updates until the dump is complete and the lock is released. Please see manual page http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/backup.html .

The TIMESTAMP data type has varying properties, depending on the MySQL version and the SQL mode the server is running in. These properties are described later in this section. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/datetime.ht ml

You expect good work from the same people who wrote such poorly planned code that it necessitated this kind of text in the manual? Even if MySQL wasn't a featureless pile of garbage, it's only really usable for in house and GPL applications due to licensing restrictions.

mysqldump --single-transaction

Allows you to take a clean snapshot of the entire database without taking it down. We've been using this for quite a while now (a couple of years I think). You need to use 4.0.2 or later.

Nice load of crap, until recently the only choice for commercial use of mysql was the $1499 enterprise license, which wasn't year limited. Now the choices all seem to be per year.. M$ starts at free for the express edition (which is freely redistributable even for commercial use, but has limits on the number of CPU's and RAM it can use, and goes to about $4k, which you don't have to keep paying for. The base standard edition of sql server is $900 which is two years of basic mysql. Mysql is free for opensource use, but commercial use of it doesn't count as opensource if anything connecting to the box isn't opensource.

http://www.edirectsoftware.com/product_category.ph p?catID=57
https://shop.mysql.com/network.html?rz=s2

Red hat enterprise edition used to be ~1.5k per license and was node locked, while the base windows server licenses were 1k. That has changed so the basic windows license is now ~370 (ive seen them as low as $150) bucks for web edition (unlimited cal) ~550 for the standard edition (5 CAL) and $800 for the small business version which has sql server, sharepoint outlook etc already included.

https://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/rhel/compare/serv er/

says the RHE ES is ~349 bucks, basic edition and goes to $800, AS is ~1500 to ~2500. ES and AS have been in the past diffrent kernel versions and such, We have software where I work that _ONLY_ runs on AS forcing us to buy the $1500 versions to get the updates. This ends up costing us more per machine than the extra CALS for the windows box. In fact last year we spend nearly twice as much on the linux machines as the windows ones. We also ship a product that uses mysql as an internal database. The per year licencing costs are a very significant portion of the sale price of the machine over the expected 10 year lifetime of the products in customers locations.