As I mentioned in a previous post, developing MySQL requires a fairly lengthy build and regression test process. While tests are running, it is normal to switch to another virtual or physical desktop and continue programming, discussing things with colleagues on IRC, or answering email. While working on my Mac, I got very used to writing a line like
make; say build is done; make test; say tests are done
. This kind of ad-hoc scripting is useful in a surprising number of situations.

The built in ’say’ command would use TTS (text-to-speech) to announce when the build was done and when the tests were done, which was nice because I would be notified when it was time to go check the test results, even if I was on the other side of my office working on a different machine.

I wanted something similar for linux, and my colleagues informed me that most distributions the festival speech synthesis package, but …

If you ever find yourself compiling MySQL (or any other large project) from source, no doubt you are interested in finding ways to speed up the process. For every single bug that is fixed, MySQL has to be compiled at least twice, and tested at least twice. So speeding up the process has a huge impact on how much capacity a single person has for fixing bugs (discounting the time it takes to figure out the fix, many bugs are easy to fix).

MySQL is build on *nix with Autotools (I’ll save that rant for another day). The generated makefiles have built in support for using the excellent ccache, which is a caching pre-processor for C/C++ compilations. The basic idea is that by taking a hash of the preprocessed source code, you can easily create an object cache using the hash as a key. When you get a cache hit, you simply yank the already-compiled object file out of the cache rather than …

When you develop software for a living and for fun, shortcomings in other systems really bother you. A lot. Especially when you feel like you could fix it yourself. Fortunately, this has been an absolutely stellar week for making things work that didn’t work before. Not only did we fix a lot of bugs in MySQL, I got my laptop running better than I ever thought would be possible. For the first time ever, I really think my linux laptop is very usable.

Started the week last Sunday by installing a the release candidate of Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) on my HP Pavilion zd8000 laptop. I was absolutely stunned at how well it worked (even though the previous version of Ubuntu was really great). Now my volume keys, mute button, WiFi button (and WiFI via Ndiswrapper), video acceleration (via ATI binary driver) all work. Even the hard drive seems faster, wouldn’t surprise me if something was tuned properly there also. I also finally discovered the …

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!

I have started to get into an MDB2 hacking frenzy. This is not necessarily a good idea as I have tons of writing to do. Oh well I guess I will have to get into a writing frenzy soon as well.

• I have decided to ignore the FrontBase SQL driver entirely for now.
• The MySQL and MySQLi driver are now uptodate it seems. I did a number of tweaks to the reverse engineering and schema management code on both drivers.
• The PostGreSQL should in theory also be uptodate.
• The SQLite is also looking good, aside from the fact that the field reverse engineering code is broken (raise your hand if you want to take care of this ..) and primary key support is missing from createIndex()
• According to David the MSSQL driver is also uptospeed (right?), though it seems to lack an implementation of createIndex()
• The Interbase and Oracle drivers may need some code to be able to list primary contraints …

Well, once again it’s been some time since I managed to find any time to write anything for my blog. The past month certainly has been one of the most hectic I’ve had in many many years!

I’m now working for MySQL AB - as a Support Engineer for the Americas Group!

I applied a little over a month ago now, and when I found out that I got the job I had a very short space of time with my old company, Cool-Tools., to do wrap up what I was doing with the monitoring tool that I was working on, and to make sure that everybody was happy with taking over from my old position in support.

I got a weekend off.

I then started directly with MySQL the following Monday (2 weeks after discovering I had gotten the job). From then it’s been a pretty fast learning curve, working with some of the best colleagues I’ve ever had so far. The guys here at MySQL really are a fantastic bunch of people!

I notice that …

Well, once again it’s been some time since I managed to find any time to write anything for my blog. The past month certainly has been one of the most hectic I’ve had in many many years!

I’m now working for MySQL AB - as a Support Engineer for the Americas Group!

I applied a little over a month ago now, and when I found out that I got the job I had a very short space of time with my old company, Cool-Tools., to do wrap up what I was doing with the monitoring tool that I was working on, and to make sure that everybody was happy with taking over from my old position in support.

I got a weekend off.

I then started directly with MySQL the following Monday (2 weeks after discovering I had gotten the job). From then it’s been a pretty fast learning curve, working with some of the best colleagues I’ve ever had so far. The guys here at MySQL really are a fantastic bunch of people!

I notice that …

Last week I made the promise to make another round of MDB2 and MDB2_Schema releases by the end of next week. Appearently more and more projects are picking up MDB2_Schema like Jaws and Chiara_PEAR_Server. So I have a few more days to fix things up. I am a bit sick after 3 days of outdoor mixed championships. My frisbee team ended up second. We lost the finals 14:12 after leading 10:12 (game was played til 13, cap 2, with a maximum of 15). However it was still quite exciting to play at such a high competitive level for me. We have multiple teams in Berlin and so I am a member of two teams, but I have mostly played with the one that plays 2nd league level. So …

the bastedo blog

(I did matching versions [5.x] don’t know how diff versions will work)

Setting up a slave with a newer version of MySQL is quite a common setup. It has a couple of advantages:
- it lests you test a new version before deploying on the master (to test that everything goes smoothly)
- it lets you test new major versions (e.g. 5.0) before they are released GA (helps find bugs that may affect your setup).

I know at least one customer generally has a slave runnin the latest BK tree - just to be sure that nothing is going to even potentially break for them. Kudos to them :)

Having a slave that you use for backups is a great idea. No extra load on the master (i.e. you can safely stop the db on the slave and back things up quickly - without having locks held on your master!).

Also, if …

I was tinkering a bit with integrating Wordpress and Gallery2 and in the process posted some photos from a trip to Prague I took earlier this year as part of a MySQL developer conference. If all works well, you can click the image below to see them: