Samsung has announced a new line of 64G SSDs for use in consumer laptops. Nice to see innovation but I REALLY want to see more SSDs in the server space.

I JUST want to use a CHEAP 2-5G SSD for write ahead and binary logs. I just need 1k write ops per second with a SATA interface. Then I could drop them in cheap commodity servers and get a significant performance boost. My disks would still use software RAID 0 (at least until I replace this partitioning) but only store data.

Give me one of these for $50 to $100 and I’ll buy one with ever server.

The fsync’s required for writing to disks on INNODB can really hurt performance. My bet …

Today I needed the ability to create a Oracle-style sequence generator outside of the normal MySQL auto-increment functionality.

I was performing a table format upgrade and one column needed a unique index and we’re not using auto-increment on this table.

This little bit of SQL should work fine:

SELECT @sequence:=IFNULL( @sequence + 1, 1 );

You’d have to use this construct with INSERT INTO ... SELECT constructs.

So for example:


CREATE TABLE TEST_SOURCE
(
ID BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
PRIMARY KEY(ID));

INSERT INTO TEST_SOURCE (ID)
VALUES (NULL), (NULL), (NULL), (NULL), (NULL), (NULL);

… will give us a TEST_SOURCE table with 6 auto-increment values.


mysql> SELECT * FROM …

OK. First off. I broke the rules. There are actually seven here.

I figure Marten, Jay and Stewart can’t be wrong.

… so here it goes.

* Smarter InnoDB checkpointing. The fuzzy checkpointing seems less than ideal. I think you could just fill up memory with data pool modifications and then checkpoint every 3-5 minutes or so writing the entire DB out to disk in one head pass. You’d be able to fully saturate the disks in this manner. Granted faster is better but our 100MBps drives only see 15-30MBps in practice.

You’d need copy on write semantics though so if you’re seeing full …

This weekend, Monty and I got together for a different kind of hacking session.

Instead of developing software, we were working on developing a set of rough principles and rules for running a Free Software/Open Source business. We both have a good amount of experience working with various FLOSS projects (like Mozilla, MySQL, PHP, etc.) and FLOSS companies (like eZ Systems, Mozilla, MySQL, Zend, etc.) and hope that we can put this experience to good use.

For me, this was a tremendous help - I’ve been putting off working on this for Foo Associates for some months now. It is much easier to work on meeting the needs of customers than it is to work on planning for the future.

The notes are still extremely rough, but both Monty and I want to post them so that people can discuss. Also, …

I’ll be attending the Openmind conference from October 2nd to 3rd and will be giving a keynote at the event.

Openmind is being organized by COSS, an interesting Finnish Free Software and Open Source development agency that helps Finnish and Scandinavian businesses and projects use and develop FLOSS.

Other keynote presenters at the event (that readers of this blog may know) include Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, Aleksander Farstad, CEO of eZ Systems AS and FLOSS researcher Rishab Aiyer Gosh.

I also hoping that since Monty is in the area, he will also be able to attend.

…

I just received word that my proposal (which was to present my Age of Literate Machines presentation) for FrOSCon has been accepted.

I’m pretty excited - the event should be fun and it will give me a good chance to see friends (including a good number of my German MySQL colleagues)

I’ve noticed that in the last five years I’ve started to become very conservative about adopting new technologies.

We’re JUST now migrating to Opterons for example. I’m only now considering adopting Java 5.0.

My stack is essentially Java 1.4.2, MySQL 4.1.22, Debian 3.1 (migrating to Etch), and Athlon processors.

There just aren’t any surprises. The entire stack works and everything is a known entity. Since I have a pretty stable foundation I can look at technologies one at a time without fundamentally changing the stability of the entire system. Java 5.0 looks interesting but no real pressure here at the moment.

MySQL 5.1’s partitioning support will probably be the only feature that pushes us to upgrade. There are some InnoDB fixes I want to incorporate as well.

I really like this thread:

“OpenBSD is free as in air,” Theo de Raadt [interview] stated in a recent thread on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list. The discussion began with a note that the Open Sound System [story] had recently been “open sourced” under the GPLv2 and CDDL leading Theo to comment, “noone cares about being Open and Free anymore. They just care about being called Open and Free, and how convenient — a bunch of laywers generated an organization that will label then Open and Free when they are not in fact so.”

This is an interesting statement.

The GPL and BSD licensing camps have always had a core fundamental difference in theory. If GPL is copy-left and Microsoft is copyright then the BSD is copy-center.

What’s nice about the BSD license is that there’s NO complexity. You can turn around and sell the code if you want to and just …

I’m surprised to see so little being said about the First Discussion draft of the Affero GPL v3. I see only 9 comments as of 9PM PDT 6/13. That’s not very many.

Perhaps the reason is that the only difference is the single paragraph in Section 13 which states:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must give all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.

Fabrizio here seems bullish on the new license and goes on to say:

Bottom line: if GPL v3 and AGPL v3 are exactly the same document and are 100% compatible, why would an open …

I will be giving a 3 hour tutorial on July 23rd at this year's OSCON entitled "Target Practice: A Workshop in Tuning MySQL Queries". If you attended my tutorial last year, this one is quite different. It's much more of a workshop-type tutorial than last year's lecture-style tutorial, so there's loads of demos, code examples, and I'll have lots of goodies to pass out (books, shirts, etc) for folks who answer questions correctly or shout out interesting questions...

Here's a quick overview of the tutorial:

This tutorial is for all those database developer gun-slingers who want to rid their applications of poorly performing queries and their outlaw cousin, the inefficient schema.

Take aim at poor application performance by learning how to read and understand MySQL …