This is about wasting a lot of time, effort and some energy on an unfortunately not so successful transition from smaller to bigger disks. Actors include a few external drives, Time Machine, an iMac with a dying system disk and me, being a little stupid. Fortunately there were no really serious consequences, however if I ever face a similar situation again, I might come here and read up on how to migrate systems and backups more sensibly.

Previously on Lost Daniel’s machine

To understand the situation fully, this is what my drive and partition layout used to be:

• 320GB internal hard drive called “Snow Leopard internal”
• 2TB external USB drive
  
  • 500GB partition called “TM500” for Time Machine
  • 1.5TB partition called “TMRest” for media, disk images etc.
• 2x1TB in a Firewire 800 Western Digital MyBook II …

HA Provided by OVM

Join us for a webinar this Wednesday (13th July) to understand more about the benefits of using the new Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition as well as how to get started with it. As always the webinar is free but please register here. The webinar starts at 9:00 am Pacific (5:00 pm UK, 6:00 pm CET) and even if you can’t make that time register anyway and you’ll be sent a link to the charts and replay.

As a reminder, a new white paper is available that goes through some of the details – if you have time then take a look at this paper before the webinar and then get any of your questions answered. …

A while back, I wrote a two part post on how you can extract an amazing amount of information about a system’s performance, scalability, queueing, and more by just measuring request arrivals and completions, and the timestamps thereof.

I promised to develop this into a more complete description of how to analyze MySQL’s performance and scalability through nothing more than TCP/IP packet headers. I presented the results of that research at Percona Live in New York City, and the slides and video are online. The video editors didn’t synch the slides …

I tried to put every subdirectory of InnoDB codebase into a chart that would explain some of relations between subsystems and modules inside the source. This is what I got (click to enlarge):

Update: Check Vadim’s diagram for a more operational view of InnoDB
Another update: There’s a vector PDF version

Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 5.6

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a CentOS 5.6 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

If you need to change MySQL’s innodb_log_file_size parameter (see How to calculate a good InnoDB log file size), you can’t just change the parameter in the my.cnf file and restart the server. If you do, InnoDB will refuse to start because the existing log files don’t match the configured size.

You need to shut the server down cleanly and normally, and move away (don’t delete) the log files, which are named ib_logfile0, ib_logfile1, and so on. Check the error log to ensure there was no problem shutting down. Then restart the server and watch the error log output carefully. You should see InnoDB print messages saying that the log files don’t exist. It will create new ones and then start. At this point you can verify that InnoDB is working, and then you can delete the old log files.

The typical error …

Strata (Big Data Conference) - Sept 19-23 in NYC http://strataconf.com/stratany2011 - the call for proposals is still open until July 15th.

OSCon, the Open Source Convention, is Jul 25 - Thu Jul 29th
Co-located this year:
OSCon Data
OSCon Java

OSCon Data content mentioned:
Hadoop
Cassandra

read …

Harmony disharmony. Microsoft’s Android revenue. And more.

# The Harmony Project released version 1.0 of its templates for standard contributor license agreements prompting comment and criticism from Dave Neary, Stephen Walli, Richard Fontana and Bradley M Kuhn.

# Microsoft reportedly demanded $15 for each Android smartphone handset made by Samsung, while the company …

We have two engineers from SkySQL who will be talking at the MySQL London Meetup on the 18th July and we welcome anyone who wants to chat to us to sign-up and come along.

I (Andrew Hutchings) will be giving a talk on Drizzle (a database server that originated as a fork of MySQL) and mydumper (a multi-threaded, high-performance dump/restore toolset for MySQL).

We also have Mark Riddoch coming along to talk about the work on our Reference Architecture toolset.

There will also be other representatives of SkySQL there and we will be hanging around in the pub afterwards to talk about anything in the MySQL ecosystem.

Oh well, I know I shouldn’t poke directly at people, but they deserve that sometimes (at least in my very personal opinion). Heck, I even gave 12h window for this not to be hot-headed opinion.

Those who followed MySQL at facebook development probably know how much we focus on actual performance on top of mixed-composition I/O devices (flashcache, etc) – not just retreating to comfortable zone of in-memory (or in-pure-flash) data.

I feel somewhat sad that I have to put this truism out here – disks are way more cost efficient, and if used properly can be used to facilitate way more long-term products, not just real time data. Think Wikipedia without history, think comments …