I still exist.

Currently working with a number of fun technologies (Xen, Gentoo, Virtualization, TPM, Vt-X, and Vt-D. Researching ways to measure how resilient the security of a computer system is.

I've also learned how to dance recently.

This blog started out as a way to report my progress on Google Summer of Code.
I worked on adding memcache support to MySQL's query cache.
Since then I've completed my Masters in Computer Science and am pursuing my Phd.

If you’re like me, you’ve gotten tired of writing endless test cases for parsers that can understand the thousands of variations of text output by SHOW INNODB STATUS. I’ve decided to solve this issue once and for all by patching MySQL and InnoDB to output XML, the universal markup format, so tools can understand and manipulate it easily. Here’s a sample snippet:

<status><![CDATA[
=====================================
100320 15:46:24 INNODB MONITOR OUTPUT
=====================================
... text omitted, but you get the idea ...
]]>
</status>

PS: Yes, this is a late April Fool’s joke.

Related posts:

1. Don’t forget about SHOW PROFILES It seems t
2. …

Welcome to my new Production DBA blog, through this blog I aim to fully explore and understand some of the common tasks undertaken when administering MySQL in a production environment.  I’ll be looking at options for backups, high availability, scalability, and monitoring, as well as various other general administration tasks in between.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading “Python Testing: An easy and convenient approach to testing your python projects” from Packt Publishing. It’s been a quick read but a solid set of instructions on the different methods for the subject.

The book starts out very quickly with details about the various methods that are available, the means of automation for testing, and of course the environment you’d want to be in for working on the subjects that the book covers. It then, in the second chapter, moves into the guts of testing by describing the basics of doctest via syntax and some simple examples, and then moves on to a real world example via the AVL tree. It’s all very basic testing until chapter three where the author gets into unit testing, …

Talend raises $8m. Cisco leaves a TIP. Exit strategies. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Talend raised $8m Series D from existing investors Balderton Capital, AGF Private Equity and Galileo Partners.

# Cisco promised to open source Telepresence Interoperability Protocol.

# Alfresco Community 3.3 included CMIS 1.0, Google Docs and IBM Lotus integration.

# Exit strategies – secrets of success for open source companies, from the Open Source Think Tank.

# …

In the last post choosing about the right type; there is a case about quoting the tuple values; that I forgot to mention which is pretty much a common mistake when string data types are used for storing int or float/double representation (well sometimes you need to use string due to length or to avoid [...]

Here's another interesting session from the South by Southwest Interactive conference a few weeks ago... Dharmesh Shah, co-author of the Inbound Marketing book, gave a concise, high-speed presentation on some of the best practices in social media marketing.  Here are a couple of video clips from his session:

A lot of the startups I work with, both open source companies and SaaS, are now taking Inbound Marketing more seriously as a way to grow their business, whether it's an open source business, cloud, SaaS or some combination.  The reality is it's just not good enough to have a killer product.  You need to have a dialog with prospects and make sure …

"Sir, we advise you to not board this aircraft". The plane was ready for departure but the empty gate seemed to underline what the ground staff just said. All other flights to Europe were cancelled. And there are certainly worse places to be stranded than San Francisco in spring. After speaking at the MySQL Users Conference my already re-scheduled via Frankfurt in two days was likely to be cancelled again. I had to try something to avoid being stuck in US for days if not weeks.
7 hours later cold air streaming in through the front door welcomed me to Reykjavik. At departure time in US no onward flights were scheduled from there. Eyjafjallajökull (see picture) was still erupting sending its ashes to Europe. Rather than being stuck in US I could be easily stuck on Iceland. But I wanted to see my family. And I wanted to see the volcano.
By the time of my arrival on Iceland individual transfers to Northern Europe opened, I got a seat to Oslo …

We’re sticking with databases for our current round of webinars. Up next is an overview of Oracle high availability clustering on Linux.

In this 45-minute presentation, we will show you how to quickly and easily configure an Oracle database with an associated TNS Listener in a failover configuration, how to monitor both your database and your listener for failures, and how to have Pacemaker automatically intervene and recover from outages.

Brought to you in association with our friends over at Novell, we’ll showcase Oracle in combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension.

This webinar is scheduled for April 28, 2010 at 1500 UTC.

As all of our webinars, this one requires registration — but we’ve made things easier for you. …

Last week I was surprised to see this paper bubble back up on Planet MySQL. It describes the pros and cons of thread and event based programming for high concurrency applications (like a web server), arguing that thread-based programming is superior if you use an appropriate lightweight threading implementation. I don't entirely disagree with this, but the problem is such a library does not exist that is standard, portable, and useful for all types of applications. We have POSIX threads in the portable Linux/Unix/BSD world, so we need to work with this. Other experimental libraries based on lightweight threads or "fibers" are really interesting as they can maintain your stack without all the normal overhead, but it is hard to get the scheduling correct for all application …