You can check it yourself – 5.1 seems to be shipped with InnoDB plugin in future :-) (oh the joy of open source repositories, always ready to spoil the surprise, eh?:)

loops is a small and lightweight framework for Ruby on Rails and Merb created to support simple background loops in your application which are usually used to do some background data processing on your servers (queue workers, batch tasks processors, etc).

Originally loops plugin was created to make our (Scribd.com) own loops code more organized. We used to have tens of different modules with methods that were called with script/runner and then used with nohup and other not so convenient backgrounding techniques. When you have such a number of loops/workers to run in background it becomes a nightmare to manage them on a regular basis (restarts, code upgrades, status/health checking, etc).

After a short time of writing our

In a nutshell: What’s New in MySQL 5.1.

Release notes: Changes in release 5.1.x (Production).

And yes, very early on (at about two minutes in), I talk about my take on Monty’s controversial post at Oops, we did it again.

To play the video directly, go to http://technocation.org/node/663/play. To download the 146 Mb video to your computer for offline playback, go to http://technocation.org/node/663/download. The slides can be downloaded as a

Update: I’ve been suffering some ungly and stupid bugs today, so I’ve fixed them and released version 0.2. It also includes a new script wp-update-home.

I’ve just published some scripts that help me manage my personal wordpress installations, and publish some plugins I’m working on.

Warning: these are early versions which I use for small tasks. If you find
a bug or have suggestions, contact me at jbernal@warp.es

Download version 0.1

Liveblogging: Extending MySQL by Brian “Krow” Aker

Brian wins the award for “most frequent great quotes during a talk”.

Before MySQL 5.1 a UDF was the only way to extend MySQL.

All you need in a UDF is: init() execute() deinit()

my_bool id3_parse_init(UDF_INIT *initid UDF_ARGS *args, char *message)

UDF_ARGS tell you about incoming args
char *message is the output that might return
args->arg_count is the # of args

WARNING: use STRICT mode in MySQL, otherwise there are tons of silent failures.

“When you work on databases you start to put everything in databases. Tip, don’t put a DVD into a database, because really long BLOBs aren’t actually supported….”

In MySQL 5.1, you can now install plugins (example is

How often do we think about our http sessions implementation? I mean, do you know, how your currently used sessions-related code will behave when sessions number in your database will grow up to millions (or, even, hundreds of millions) of records? This is one of the things we do not think about. But if you’ll think about it, you’ll notice, that 99% of your session-related operations are read-only and 99% of your sessions writes are not needed. Almost all your sessions table records have the same information: session_id and serialized empty session in the data field.

Looking at this sessions-related situation we have created really simple (and, at the same time, really useful for large Rails projects) plugin, which replaces ActiveRecord-based session store and makes sessions much more effective. Below you can find some information about implementation details

This release fixes some minor bugs and adds a plugin mechanism. Now you can extend MySQL Archiver with your own code easily. You could use this to run setup and tear-down, hook code into the archiving process, and more. Possibilities include building summary tables in a data warehouse during archiving, handling dependencies such as foreign keys before archiving each row, or applying advanced logic to determine which rows to archive.