For the past many years, there’s been a conference in April, at the Santa Clara Convention Centre where the topic has been MySQL and the surrounding ecosystem. The first year I went, I gave a talk on the new features in MySQL Cluster 5.1 to a overflowing room of attendees. For me, it’s an event that’s mixed with speaking about something I’ve been working on and talking to other attendees about everything from how a particular part of the server works to where we can escape to for nearby good vegan food.

So, I thought I’d share some of the sessions that I’m really looking forward to. My selection is probably atypical, but may be interesting to others. I’m not going to list the

At Percona, we’re now using sphinx for our documentation. We’re also using Jenkins for our  continuous integration. We have compiler warnings from GCC being parsed by Jenkins using the built in filters, but there isn’t one for the sphinx warnings.

Luckily, in the configuration page for Jenkins, the Warnings plugin allows you to specify your own filters. I’ve added the following filter to process warnings from sphinx:

As you may have read on the MySQL Performance Blog post – I’ve recently joined Percona. This is a fairly exciting next step. I’ll be in New York for Percona Live next week, where I’ll be giving a session titled “Drizzle 7, GA and Supported: Current & Future Features”.

I’ll write more soon, there’s a lot keeping me busy already!

A couple of months ago (December 1st for those playing along at home) it marked five years to the day that I started at MySQL AB (http://www.mysql.com) (now Sun, now Oracle). A good part of me is really surprised it was for that long and other parts surprised it wasn’t longer. Through MySQL and Sun, I met some pretty amazing people, worked with some really smart ones and formed really solid and awesome friendships. Of course, not everything was perfect (sometimes not even close), but we did have some fun.

Up until November 2008 (that’s 3 years and 11 months for those playing at home) I worked on MySQL Cluster (http://www.mysql.com/cluster). Still love the product and love how much better we’re making Drizzle so it’ll be the best SQL interface to NDB :)

The ideas behind Drizzle

Drizzle originally inherited the FRM file from MySQL (which inherited it from UNIREG). The FRM file stores metadata about a table; what columns it has, what type those columns are, what indexes, any default values, comments etc are all stored in the FRM. In the days of MyISAM, this worked relatively well. The row data was stored in table.MYD, indexes on top of it in table.MYI and information about the format of the row was
in table.FRM. Since MyISAM itself wasn’t crash safe, it didn’t really matter if creating/deleting the FRM file along with the table was either.

As more sophisticated engines were introduced (e.g. InnoDB) that had their own data dictionary, there started to be more of a problem. There were now two places storing information about a table: the FRM file and the data dictionary specific to the engine. Even if the data

Wanting a quick build-and-play way to get Drizzle? We’re dropping weekly-ish tarballs for the Aloha milestone. The latest milestone also has preliminary GCC 4.4 support

You can see regular announcements on:

• http://planetdrizzle.org/
• http://blog.drizzle.org/ – which is just announcements and the like.

The past 3 years, 11 months I have worked full time on NDB (MySQL Cluster). It’s been awesome. Love the product and people. In the time I’ve been on the Cluster team, we’ve gone from a small group that would easily fit in the (old old) Stockholm office to one that requires large rooms to house us all in. It’s also been all about smart people (you have to be to work on a distributed database).

With MySQL Cluster 6.4 we’re getting in a bunch of features that have been on the “wide adoption” wishlist. With each release of NDB we’ve gained a wedge of applications that can be used with it - and 6.4 is no exception.

One of the biggest things that’s been worked on is multithreaded data nodes. If you check out Jonas‘ recent posts on

It’s like removing the brakes from your car. yes, it will go faster (slightly less weight) but, dude, you just removed the brakes.

So after seeing Paul Fenwick rave about the presenter screen for OO 3, I decided to grab the debs and give it a go.

It still is very slow opening large presentations (i.e. mine), but it does look nicer at least… well… at least some of the widgets do.

Will report back when I’ve had a bit more time to fiddle with it.

It’s very weird having mail arrive at different times… e.g. when in the US, it’s less likely for some peolpe to mail you in the middle of the night US time.

Back home… common to get response between local time 2-5am… which is rather not 2-5am their local time.

But my habit of pulling mail in the morning after having done so late at night…. hard to break.

This is great news - a beer that everybody knows is vegan is right there (see, even photographic proof). Now if only it wasn’t 10:50am….

Neither of the books I’ve been an author of has been just me. For Practical MythTV (Christmas is coming, buy it for all your TV and tech loving friends!), Michael Still and I worked hard to get a well rounded and practical (not to mention good) book. I think we succeeded - certainly has gotten positive reviews (check the amazon page).

For my second endeavor (just to make it fun, I was working on both at the same time) we have a much longer list of authors. The aim was to write a study guide for those wishing to be certified in MySQL Cluster. Being a developer

I am very good at just staying up late to adjust to a timezone. I can do this fairly reliably. Going to the US and Europe can be done by this method (rather well). Coming back is another story though. Going to sleep at an earlier time (for me) doesn’t come easy. Grr…

Arrived early morning, not much sleep, took forever to get to hotel and then had to wait for room (double not happy), got some work done in the office and am now in desperate need of sleep before a way too early start.

Rusty talks about the “fun” of floating point and how this all ties into Wesnoth.

Platform consistency is certainly a good thing - so I’m guessing the attack_prediction code isn’t run by each node in a network game in a way where machines could disagree on the outcome.

This does however bring up an interesting thing. What if, in the future, it was going to be on a per-node basis and people wanted it to be consistent. How do you warn that this isn’t the case (to somebody who is really just reading the docs on this function)?

Is it easy (or is there even a good way) to separate code that’s on one machine versus every one? In NDB we have some protocols where some things are done on a master and

phpBMS

Basically I want something to generate invoices for me. This should greatly help in a bunch of things - namely not being a retard and fucking it up every month.

Primarily I want to just be able to *not* have a whole bunch of spreadsheet files (one for each month of work plus one for each months expenses) and actually have something that works and takes a lot of the pain away for me.

Then I can do queries to fill out stuff for the tax office.

I think phpBMS fufills this for me. In fact, I’m very much inclined to migrate to it right now.

It stores all its data in a MySQL Database (which is nice, as I use that - and like it). It also means I can do arbitrary queries (in fact, the queries it does are viewable via the Web UI - funky!)

It’s even buzzword compliant with AJAX.

nipple chips and other such python fun.

adnarim_abroad: I know it’s controversial to say, but i’

I now want to be bumming around Melbourne city during the games. My house is 2mins walk from a  train station that’s less than 30mins to the middle of town. But never spend enough time there.

It’ll be good to get home.

Although i think the tired and hungover thing isn’t helping.

Possibly Ubuntu’s fault too for shipping the not-latest un-bugfixed release. But either way, it’s really annoying seeing the “Document Recovery” screen more than the edit text widget.

Copy and Paste slides in Impress is not flakey - it’s damn right crushed to pieces. Occationally it does something useful - like paste and not crash.

update: yes, i am just using it to put together presentations for our upcoming devconf - as well as the user conference. Why these things are so hard to do is beyond me. A simple app that didn’t crash *cough* magicpoint *cough* is looking rather superior at the moment.

update part 2: yes, the title changed. arguably i like this one better. although adding “right under the fingernail” is tempting

AUSTRALIA PRESS: Telstra To Charge More For Fixed Lines

great - I get to pay more for a service I DON’T WANT! I just want internet, not a phone line (which I aparrently have to have to get ADSL).

On an internal list, a thread switched over to breifly mentioning the film Munich which incidently, I saw a few weeks ago just after linux.conf.au and really enjoyed.

I thought it was really well done and a good film. I really recommend going to see it - it’s a good cinematic experience. Possibly don’t see it if you’re feeling really sad though - not exactly a happy film. Eric Bana and Geoffrey Rush are superb in this film (both Aussies too!).

I found it to be more about his journey than anything else and enjoyed it as it was a personal story.

Oh, and why haven’t Margaret and David reviewed it yet? I would love to know what they thought. It’s not often I see a film before I’ve seen them review it :)

Oracle has 50,000 employees. Thats 50,000 people waking up each day to work on Oracle products, and those 50,000 get paid by Oracle each day. We have 50,000 people download our software everyday and work to make it better. But we dont pay them. Which model would you rather have?

A quote from our CEO Marten Mickos in “Oracle’s New Enemy” over at forbes.com.

It is pretty neat to have your work seen by that many people each day.

Noticed this about our web based forums today:

the “Re: What is this? “Can’t find record in ‘'’ on query.”" post on the cluster forum from 10/02/06 07:53:20 isn’t the last message in that thread. there are currently 6 messages of which I only see 2.

Not only that, but from looking at the RSS, I can’t even see this post.

argh! So I shot off an email to our internal guys. The reply was that they don’t have hacking Phorum on their radar (fair enough). Of course, this just means that Phorum sucks[1] (or at least did in the version we do) and adds to the list of reasons why web based forums are much like doing $adjective to $noun.

What is it with new internet lamers and the inability to use

Blog | rml

struct __packed s { … }This attribute tells GCC that a type or variable should be packed into memory, using the minimum amount of space possible, potentially disregarding alignment requirements. If specified on a struct or union, all variables therein are so packed. If specified on just a specific variable, only that type is packed. As an example, a structure with a char followed by an int would most likely find the integer aligned to a memory address not immediately following the char (say, three bytes later). The compiler does this by inserting three bytes of unused packing between the two variables. A packed structure lacks this packing, potentially consuming less memory but failing to meet architecture alignment requirements.

It should also be noted that non aligned data access on some

PortaWiki is going pretty well. We’ve got a couple of contribututors at the moment and getting good little bits on the various oddities of various platforms. I encourage you to check it out and add things that you know.

It’d be great to have a MySQL section there too. In versions previous to 5.0 for example, you may get different results from some math operations on different platforms as we used the floating point stuff. In 5.0 we have precision math so this isn’t a problem - but it probably caused somebody to raise an eyebrow in the past. Volunteers?

it’s annoying. grr.

but, on the other hand, I am speaking about MySQL 5.0 at OSDC.

This is even cooler as 5.0 has gone GA. So it’s not “upcoming features” it’s the “here and now”.

I’ll now have to release MemberDB 0.4 (the MySQL (http://www.mysql.com) release). Converting the Linux Australia installation over at some point soon too. The 0.4 tree fixes enough bugs that it’s worth it (one of which Pia found the other day).

At AUUG2005 last week, Arjen, myself and others were discussing the idea of trying to assemble some sort of common resources that multiple projects can use to contribute and find out about portability issues they stumble across.

The idea being that we can all then learn from each other and write better, more portable software.

So, I’ve set something up.

I present, the incredibly bare (okay, not quite completely bare) PortaWiki.

Please add whatever stuff you find, you know or anything. No idea how this is going to work - I plan to let it evolve.

(Arjen tells me that Peter Gutmann should receive credit as he thinks he came up with the idea. Kudos to him).

http://www.flamingspork.com/portawiki/

I can now give presentations from my laptop - yay.

It requires running the ATI binary drivers instead of the open source ones.

Then VGA out works without being squiggly. (that’s on my Asus V6V laptop with a Radeon X600 running Ubuntu Breezy) - there’ that should be enough google juice.

However, as if being binary only wasn’t crappy enough - suspend doesn’t work. So it’s open source drivers for all other times! I don’t use GL, so that doesn’t worry me. Of course, it may start to worry me what with all the neat cairo stuff and other accelleration coming… but not yet.

This should come in handy for the Melbourne MySQL Users Group meeting tomorrow night!

GNU/Linux and the K750i Bluetooth Remote

Works with my K700i too. Useful to know that the remote control stuff works. will be great for presentations :)

Microsoft loses in Eolas patent ruling | CNET News.com

Come on Microsoft - join us in the fight against software patents. This clearly hurts the entire industry - be it big vendors like yourself or small ones.

Let’s not all get royally screwed.