Today a little history lesson.

I was on a quest to find the origin of this line in include/mysql_com.h:

#define CLIENT_LONG_PASSWORD    1       /* new more secure passwords */

“new” ? “more secure” ?

These CLIENT_* flags are used between client and server to negotiate what capabilities they support. It allows the server to add new features to the protocol and let’s the client add support for it along the way. MySQL 5.5.x has 21 of these flags.

But back to CLIENT_LONG_PASSWORD and its wonderful comment. What would one expect if someone reads “new” and “more secure”?

new

Well, let’s check the file history:

$ bzr blame include/mysql_com.h
2            bk@work | #define CLIENT_LONG_PASSWORD     1 …

Today a little history lesson.

I was on a quest to find the origin of this line in include/mysql_com.h:

#define CLIENT_LONG_PASSWORD    1       /* new more secure passwords */

"new" ? "more secure" ?

These CLIENT_* flags are used between client and server to negotiate what capabilities they support. It allows the server to add new features to the protocol and let's the client add support for it along the way. MySQL 5.5.x has 21 of these flags.

But back to CLIENT_LONG_PASSWORD and its wonderful comment. What would one expect if someone reads "new" and "more secure"?

new

Well, let's check the file history:

$ bzr blame include/mysql_com.h
2            bk@work | #define CLIENT_LONG_PASSWORD 1   /* new more secure passwords */
$ bzr log …

bad idea..

tmpdir..
..on tmpfs

upgrade..
..to 5.5

default engine..
..innodb

create..
..temp tables statements

optimizing my.cnf...
..io_direct sounds good..

tmpfs..
..and io_direct
do not..
..play well together

..lucky...
..just slave..
..had backup

It seems that whenever I have a cross-continent flight, Mondrian gets a new feature. This particular flight was from Florida back home to California, and this particular feature is a time-dimension generator.

I was on the way home from an all-hands at Pentaho's Orlando, Florida headquarters, where new CEO Quentin Gallivan had outlined his strategy for the company. I also got to spend time with the many smart folks from all over the world who work for Pentaho, among them Roland Bouman, formerly an evangelist for MySQL, now with Pentaho, but still passionately advocating for open source databases, open source business intelligence, and above all, keeping it simple.

Roland and I got talking about how to map Mondrian onto operational schemas. Though …

I found Baron’s reasoning on why the Percona Nagios plugins do not use caching interesting. On the surface, the logic is sound – you do not want to cache when you want real-time monitoring.
I have not yet had time to look at the Percona plugins for Nagios, though I do want to, because back at PalominoDB I helped write a Nagios plugin for MySQL that allows you to do arbitrary calculations. By “arbitrary calculations” I mean you can have a calculation like “Threads_connected/max_connections*100″ and set a threshold of “>80″. You can mix and match MySQL status variables and system variables, and use any perl functions as well, including basic arithmetic.
We put a caching …

DBD::mysql 4.014 breaks pt-table-checksum 2.0.  The cause is unknown, but the effect is a lot of errors like:

DBD::mysql::st execute failed: called with 2 bind variables when 6 are needed [for Statement "..." with ParamValues: ...] at ./pt-table-checksum line 7216.

The fix is simple: upgrade (or even downgrade) DBD::mysql to any version except 4.014. To see which version of DBD::mysql a system has, execute:

perl -MDBD::mysql -e 'print $DBD::mysql::VERSION, "\n";'

This bug may affect other Percona Toolkit tools, but currently pt-table-checksum 2.0 is the only victim. This bug does not affect pt-table-checksum 1.0, and it cannot be worked around in pt-table-checksum 2.0 because the bug in in DBD::mysql.

This bug affects …

Last weekend Vadim from Percona published his MariaDB 5.3.4 benchmark results. As the new benchmark guy at Monty Program I take this oportunity to add some more results of my own.

One question in the comments to Vadim was if it is fair to compare MariaDB-5.3 with MySQL-5.5. Or if this comparison should be done with MySQL-5.1. The answer is: it does not matter much. MySQL-5.5 and MySQL-5.1 show very similar results in the Sysbench OLTP benchmark.

So I created a Sysbench environment pretty much like Vadims and tested the following versions of the MySQL Server:

• MariaDB-5.3.4 – the Monty Program release candidate, both with XtraDB and the InnoDB plugin
• Percona-Server 5.1.61 because it is based on the same XtraDB version as MariaDB-5.3
• Percona-Server 5.5.20 – the current Percona flagship …

Oracle is pleased to be a Bronze Sponsor of DrupalCon Denver.
 
DrupalCon will be held the Colorado Convention Center in Denver on  March 19-23, 2012. There are community events scheduled throughout the entire week, some officially by DrupalCon, others by sponsors and other community members.

Come visit Oracle Booth #400 and find out the latest information about MySQL and Linux!  I will be at the booth so please stop by and say hello.

For event information and to register, click here.

 Oracle Events page with additional information can be found here.   …

Splitmytab.net is finally for the public to check out. Splitmytab is a bill splitting and IOU system for friends. It uses facebook’s login, so you won’t need to put in anyone’s emails, names, or get people to sign up for an account.

It’ll automatically keep balances of who owes who, so you can keep a running tab with friends and always know who’s buying the next case of beer.

Please note: I’m not a designer, so there’s a few rough corners, but what’s there is simple and it works.

Tech Notes:

• Backend is MySQL 5.5
• Written in Python
• Nginx with tornado
• Redis used on occasion
• Originally was writing pure JS then switched to Coffeescript

Enjoy, and please leave feedback!

I see that MySQL 5.5.21 has just been released. This sounds interesting. I’m mainly running 5.5.16 which has been broadly stable, but I have been caught by a few important issues which 5.5.21 fixes according to the change list:

• Bug #57480
• Bug #61104
• Bug #54035

These together with a few earlier fixes after 5.5.16 are certainly interesting to me, so I’m eager to try out 5.5.21 and see how it fairs.