InSourceCode developers work on "Madison" with volunteers.

There wasn't a great deal of hacking, at least in the traditional sense, at the "first congressional hackathon." Given the general shiver that the word still evokes in many a Washingtonian in 2011, that might be for the best. The attendees gathered together in the halls of the United States House of Representatives didn't create a more interactive visualization of how laws are made or a mobile health app. As open government advocate Carl Malamud observed, the "hack" felt like something even rarer in the "Age of the App for That:"

Impressed @MattLira pulled off a truly bipartisan tech event on the hill. …

Global Transaction IDs - simplifying replication management

There will be a webinar this Wednesday where you can get the latest information on all of the great new content that has been included in the MySQL 5.6 Development Releases as well as some features that are still being developed. As always, the webinar is free but you need to register here in advance. Even if you can’t attend the live event it’s worth registering so that you get sent the replay.

Some of the topics we’ll be discussing are:

• Enhanced data integrity: Global Transactions Identifiers, Crash-Safe Slaves and Replication Event Checksums;
• High performance: Multi-Threaded Slaves, Binlog Group Commit and Optimized …

There has been a lot going on in MySQL community and I didn’t blogged about MySQL for some time. So this is a small update regarding MySQL in openSUSE Build Service and in openSUSE in general. This post is intended to let you know what, where and in which version we’ve got in Build Service And as I recently dropped server:database:UNSTABLE repo, everything is now in server:database, so the where part is quite easy

MySQL Community Server

First, let’s take a look at MySQL Community Server provided by the open source company we all love – Oracle. There are several versions around. Which one is the right one for you? That question …

ScaleBase Releases Database DBT2 Performance Results

Technology achieves unprecedented transaction speed for a MySQL database at a low cost

Boston, Mass., December 12, 2011 – ScaleBase, Inc. today announced the results of its MySQL database benchmark, based on the industry-standard DBT-2 test. ScaleBase has achieved an unmatched 180,000 Transactions per Minute – the highest result for a MySQL database – while running on an Amazon RDS environment. Cost per Transaction was reported to be 50 cents, which demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of the ScaleBase solution on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Full details of the benchmark can be found at …

An interesting scenario that I came across today was the fact that if you use the same alias as the column name in a formatted string (using DATE_FORMAT) and you also use same alias in ORDER BY or GROUP BY clause then MySQL uses the string output of DATE_FORMAT to sort records rather than the actual date column.

(Tested with Android 2.3.3 SDK)

Sometimes, you need to simulate an incoming short message for your app. For instance, an encryption app could need to intercept incoming SMS using a BroadcastReceiver, then check if the SMS was encrypted and if so, decrypt it. Then the decrypted SMS and not the original one should be processed further (show up in SMS app etc.).

The usual way is to create a BroadcastReceiver, intercept the SMS_RECEIVED broadcast on the incoming message and abort the broadcast if necessary (if the message was encrypted or somehow else only for your app). Then you could generate a notifcation and put the SMS into the inbox:

Putting an SMS directy into the native inbox database

You will need the WRITE_SMS privilege.

public static final String SMS_EXTRA_NAME = "pdus";
public static final String SMS_URI = "content://sms";

public static final String ADDRESS = "address";
public static final …

I previously posted blog about the topic of a MySQL Cluster set up and replication to a MySQL Server. The first blog was just the installation, now lets test the cluster and get replication started. Both are extremely easy. Some people might ask, “Why set up replication from a cluster? It is a HA system why replication?”The ability to move data out of the cluster and allow others to do reporting, data exports, simple backups all can be done easily with it replicated into another MySQL server. Yes a Cluster can do all of those queries, but taking advantage of the replication to keep some users and queries out of your production database is rarely a bad thing.
Testing the Cluster Install. Of course more MySQL Documentation: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysql-cluster-quick.html
mysql> SHOW ENGINES\G
…

Back to year 2006 when I was working for my first sphinxsearch project I was playing with stopwords files. Stopwords is basically a small set of highly frequent words you often don’t want to search for (like “I”, “Am”, “The”, etc). For most sphinx instances they only wasting index space and slower your search queries by finding all occurrences of these non-important words.

Say if you are searching for “when is jane’s birthday” you are actually looking to find documents with “jane’s birthday”, and you don’t really care about lot’s of documents (blog posts, news articles, etc) with only “when” and “is” inside.

Remove those high frequency words from search index is usually smart move and ages ago I’ve created two stopword file samples which I’m using by now.

…

This is a major bugfix release. In addition to many important bugfixes, MySQL 5.5 patch sports a new feature: Rolling Schema Upgrade. Details in the download links.

Download here.

When an open source project becomes popular, bug reports start flocking in. This is both good and bad news for the project developers. The good news is that someone is using the product, and they are finding ways of breaking it that we didn't think of. The bad news is that most of the times the reporters assume that the developers have super human powers, and that they will find what's wrong by the simple mentioning that a given feature is not working as expected. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. An effective bug report should have enough information that the ones in charge will be able to reproduce it and examine in lab conditions to find the problem. When dealing with databases and database tools, there are several cases, from simple to complex. Let's cover them in order. Installation issuesThis is often a straightforward case of lack of functionality. When a tool does not install what it is supposed to, it is a show stopper, and a solution …