Like I said yesterday I downloaded the IDE and played with it a bit. Note that its quite a hefty download if you go with the "all-in-one" package (so pick your mirror wisely!). But I kinda like software that you just unzip and go.

The highlighting is nicely done. The interface looks nice, although there are way too many buttons that I do not know what they do (and I assume a lot of them will never be relevant for a PHP developer).

The same goes for the settings. I looked them through a couple times but did not find such basics things as being able to show all characters including whitespace (I have become so used to this that I just cannot read code without seeing the whitespace) or changing tabs to become 4 spaces (you can set the tab width though). The #eclipse channel also seems to suffer from a huge imbalance of questions to answers.

I should probably get …

Today I was musing about how great \c is, and how it seems that many people are not aware of it, even though it’s in the banner of MySQL, and has been for a while.

So I decided to see what else I could find. I typed \h and found that a simple \W will show all warnings automatically after a query. That is great for the commandline interface! Now I just have to figure out if it’s possible to automatically do a \W (or “warnings”) whenever I log in with the commandline client.

I was trying to find an old article at Planet MySQL. One about a MySQL UDF to write to /var/log/messages. No luck.

Anyway, there is no search option on the site, and the latest addition of 10 entries per page makes it difficult to review pages. The RSS feed doesn’t give me a full option.

Anyway, it led me to look back in time to just how many articles are listed on Planet MySQL, and read some old stuff. I only came across it after I stumbled across the Brisbane MySQL Users Group back in Sep 2005.

Anyway the count was 2146. I’d like to see a stat on the home page of how many articles, and perhaps how many, last day, last week, last month.

I was reading Zack Urlocker’s MySQL Workbench Beta article and was keen to look at the Extensible architecture. Not much detail yet in the Figure Stylesheets, Scripts and Plugins, which will be good when it’s there, however it lead me to another secret.

The MySQL Forge. This was mentioned at the Brisbane MySQL Users Group Meeting with Brian Aker in January. There isn’t much content at present, but there is a Call for Content.

• Register your favorite projects
• Create a Wiki article
• …

Another slightly disappointing article regarding MySQL, this one from a printed magazine. Below are my comments to the editor of Linux Format. The Dear Editor is an email link should others wish to make any comments. (Previous article comments What makes your blood boil?, Review of Database Magazine Article - ?The Usual Suspects?)

Dear Editor,

I’ve recently subscribed to LXF, and have generally been very happy with the content in past months. I’m disappointed in your recent LXF77 article “Harness a database” Pg 57. Being a strong MySQL supporter, your article includes a number of practices which are less then ideal, and especially for the newly initiated, overly complicated when simplier alternatives exist.

I am happy to see that you had the …

While at the MySQL developers meeting in Sorrento, Italy, we are getting the chance to take the MySQL 5.0 certification exams, which are currently in beta. We are proud that we make the exams fair but very challenging - it will be interesting to see if any of the developers who helped write MySQL 5.0 fail the exam! I’m glad that MySQL makes these exams available to internal developers, as it would otherwise be far to easy to focus on your own particular area of specialization. Studying for the exam is a good reminder of the different ways that it is possible to use MySQL.

The beta exams are also available to the public, and while the exams are in beta you get the benefit of extra time.

(almost) enough said. Good to see people again. Now just a talk to prepare for tomorrow.

Okay, not totally prepare - but a bit of it.

The one I’m giving today - on Cluster Replication is pretty much done. Would like to run through beforehand - but not sure how that plan is going to go.

I’m in Sorrento for the annual MySQL internal developers meeting, and had some really excellent espresso after dinner tonight. The result is that it’s 2AM and I’m pulling code out of bitkeeper and looking at bugs rather than sleeping, even though I am supposed to get up at 6AM to go have breakfast.

I did Windows development for many years, but these last few months I’ve spent most of my time on Linux and OSX, mostly because Ubuntu just works so well on my laptop, especially now that I’ve got Tomboy and NetworkManager. I switched back to Windows during meetings last week in order to spend some time working on reproducing BUG#17719, delete of binlog fails on windows, and I’ve been forced to acknowledge that running the MySQL test suite on Windows isn’t nearly as smooth as it should be. Fortunately, Reggie has done some great stuff with CMake, and Magnus fixed …

As part of my A call to arms! post about a month ago, I’ve had a number of unofficial comments of support. In addition, I’ve also been approached to assist in the completion of a MySQL Transactional support engine. More information on the PBXT engine will be forthcoming soon by it’s creator.

Anyway, I’ve taken on the responsiblity of assisting in testing this new storage engine. This will also give me the excuse of being able to pursue some other ideas about the performance of differing storage engines for differing tables in business circumstances, such as MyIsam verses InnoDB in a highly OLTP environment. Part of testing will be ensure ACID conformance in varying situations and multi-concurrency use. Of course the ability to also do performance and load testing would be a obvious extension.

Considering how I’m going to benchmark is an interesting …

Apache JMeter is a 100% pure Java desktop application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions. Specifically it provides complete support for database testing via JDBC.

Some References: Homepage http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/  ·  Wiki Page  ·  User Manual

Initial Installation Steps

$ su -
$ cd /opt
$ wget http://apache.planetmirror.com.au/dist/jakarta/jmeter/binaries/jakarta-jmeter-2.1.1.tgz
$ wget …