Given the amount of time since my last post on installing OurDelta MySQL on EC2. It allowed me to show quickly how to get your OurDelta MySQL install up-to-date. Prerequisites: You have already installed the OurDelta Repository as per this … Continue reading →

Just over a year ago we registered the domain name mysqlfoundation.org in the hopes that Sun/MySQL will actually create such an entity.

My idea was to move the development of the MySQL Community server to the Foundation and make the development fully community orientated. The Foundation would have its own development goals and release schedule. Sun could then pull patches from the Foundation's Community server into the Enterprise server once they had stabilized.

I pitched the idea to several people at Sun back then and over the last year, however, for some reason, the foundation concept just proved impossible to push through.

I believe this would have been a great opportunity for Sun to take the leadership in the community, as the foundation idea dates back to before things really started …

Last year, Erik Ljungstrom (sensei in the #ourdelta IRC channel on Freenode) created patch for a bug Arjen identified with the handling of (among others) the open-files-limit option; the patch was first included in the OurDelta build of MySQL 5.0.67.

Now, Sun engineer Guilhem Bichot has committed the (modified) patch into the 6.0-maria tree, so it should appear in 6.0 and potentially 5.4. That’s good.

See http://bugs.mysql.com/40368 for details and history.

As I described yesterday, Open Query is doing some tests on SSDs and other devices pretending to be harddisks (SANs, battery-backed RAID controllers, etc). To aid this, I wrote a small tool to test the different kind of I/O operations MySQL would/could do, which is not quite the same as what other general purpose apps would do, and also not what other test tools measure. For instance, it tries Direct I/O as well as fsync() after each write, and also it a range of different I/O block sizes.

In a nutshell, it’s aimed to do what MySQL does, without MySQL! Testing lots of different setups for this particular purpose (even with fantastic tools like MySQL Sandbox) is a complete pest, and changing InnoDB page size requires a recompile. While Percona has tried a larger page size in the past and decided it wasn’t worth it (the default is 16K), I thought it worthwhile to include …

We had to apply a weird tweak as the default Ubuntu Jaunty packages are named something like 5.1.30really-5.0.xx. Several people have filed bugs on it with Ubuntu on Launchpad.

What I suspect happened (unconfirmed!) is that Canonical was contemplating putting 5.1 into Jaunty, had it in a beta but went back to 5.0  before release. Since downgrading by version number is a manual process in apt-get, the above hack allows a downgrade that looks like an upgrade…

Our original Jaunty build worked fine if you were starting from scratch, however an upgrade from the default MySQL on Jaunty would not work. Peter has built 5.1.30really-5.0.77-d8-ourdelta, which upgrades happily from the default Jaunty install or any other earlier install (such as from Intrepid). If you upgrade from an earlier Ubuntu version, do make sure you fix up your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ourdelta.list with …

OurDelta builds of MySQL 5.0.77-d8 for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) builds are done, thanks to some smart and fast work by Peter. The packages are getting copied to the main site right now, and the mirrors should be up-to date within half a day or so.

...is that truth is stranger than fiction. Reality does not appear any more plausible than plain nonsense.

We were discussing this yesterday on #ourdelta (Freenode IRC) in the context of How MySQL really executes a query by Baron. Antony Curtis noted that if he'd write a truthful post on that topic, people would think it was made-up regardless of the day of the year!

Another proof of the premise: Baron has now put a giant banner above/below his post, explaining that it was a joke. Apparently that's necessary?

I tend to come up with neat ideas for April Fools throughout the year, neglect to write them down, and come the day I have a blank. But, given the above, there's another option: you just write a truthful story, still leaving people …

…is that truth is stranger than fiction. Reality does not appear any more plausible than plain nonsense.

We were discussing this yesterday on #ourdelta (Freenode IRC) in the context of How MySQL really executes a query by Baron. Antony Curtis noted that if he’d write a truthful post on that topic, people would think it was made-up regardless of the day of the year!

Another proof of the premise: Baron has now put a giant banner above/below his post, explaining that it was a joke. Apparently that’s necessary?

I tend to come up with neat ideas for April Fools throughout the year, neglect to write them down, and come the day I have a blank. But, given the above, there’s another option: you just write a truthful story, still leaving people wondering …

If you'd like to follow shorter scribbles of what I get up to, like my work at Open Query, OurDelta and of course the BlueHackers initiative, I've got myself organised at http://twitter.com/arjenlentz or http://identi.ca/arjenlentz (you can pick one, they have the same feed).

Peter has done the prep work for building on Lenny, see our Debian page for info on how to configure apt for easy updating (Lenny comes with 5.0.51).