This Thursday (June 3rd, 14:00 UTC), Reggie Burnett, head of Connector/NET development, will present the New Features in Connector/NET 6.3.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, and more.)

MySQL University is a free educational online program for engineers/developers. MySQL University sessions are open to anyone. All sessions (slides & audio) are recorded; the links will be on …

This Thursday (June 3rd, 14:00 UTC), Reggie Burnett, head of Connector/NET development, will present the New Features in Connector/NET 6.3.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, and more.)

MySQL University is a free educational online program for engineers/developers. MySQL University sessions are open to anyone. All sessions (slides & audio) are recorded; the links will be on …

A common problem I see people running into when using a cloud computing service is the trap of under-provisioning. There’s a chain effect that leads to this result: 1) people don’t understand how virtualization works, and therefore 2) they don’t realize how much of a computing resource they’re really buying, so 3) they assume they are entitled to more than they really are, and 4) they under-provision. A few other causes and effects come into play here, too. For example, the choice to use the cloud is sometimes founded on economic assumptions that frequently turn out to be wrong. The cloud service looks more economically attractive than it really is, due to under-provisioning.

Let’s get back to this idea that people under-provision. How do I know that’s happening? I’ll use anecdotal evidence to illustrate. Here’s a real quote from a recent engagement about database (MySQL) performance problems:

Do you think it’s …

I use MacOS X for most of my development work, but part of my job is writing apps that run on all major Unixes and Win32. Most of the time bugs and memleaks are “portable”, meaning that they appear on all platforms in the same way and fixing them on your dev-platforms, fixes them everywhere else.

Well, “most of the time”.

Today I had the joy of a win32 only mem-leak. We actually ”bisect”ed it down to the locking support for openssl that we just added http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/threads.html. But starring at the code didn’t reveal anything obvious. So, back to the tools. Let them find it.

Going through the web on the search for “how to find mem-leaks on win32” I came along:

• http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_and_Valgrind

I use MacOS X for most of my development work, but part of my job is writing apps that run on all major Unixes and Win32. Most of the time bugs and memleaks are "portable", meaning that they appear on all platforms in the same way and fixing them on your dev-platforms, fixes them everywhere else.

Well, "most of the time".

Today I had the joy of a win32 only mem-leak. We actually ''bisect''ed it down to the locking support for openssl that we just added http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/threads.html. But starring at the code didn't reveal anything obvious. So, back to the tools. Let them find it.

Going through the web on the search for "how to find mem-leaks on win32" I came along:

• http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_and_Valgrind

The idea is …

This is a friendly reminder to check the publication date and discussed version you MySQL books before starting out hacking or even posting about limitations. Lots of old books are still going around. Maybe it's good to destroy them rather than giving them to students or newbies.

Few days ago (28 May 2010), for example, we had a word-for-word copy of a book on a blog post (now removed) which was discussing MySQL Cluster limitations from years ago. Well, it was funny at first and we had a good laugh. But it's a bit worrisome. My colleague Matthew posted a rebuttal post.

How would you recycle the old, technical books? It's not worth giving them to public libraries, it's maybe unhealthy to burn them? How would you do it?

Having just written an interview response about NoSQL concepts for a RDBMS audience it was poetic that an inconspicuous title “(4 of 3)” highlights that both a MySQL read scalable implementation via replication and a NoSQL solution can share a common lack of timely consistency of data. For the sake of Group Commit I hope my data is always consistent at some location at some point in time as soon as possible.

In attempting to comment to Kristian Nielsen’s Fixing MySQL group commit (part 4 of 3) I was forced to watch an ad before I could even add a comment. Go jump Live Journal, it’s quicker to write my own blog post.

And if anybody is still reading, I had just written the following.

“There is clearly a place for NoSQL solutions. The two primary types of products are a key/value store and a schema-less solution. You need to learn …

Sorry for this not getting out sooner.  Connector/Net 6.3.2 was released several days ago but somehow the release announcement was never made. MySQL Connector/Net 6.3.2, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is a beta release and is intended to introduce you to the new features and enhancements we are planning. This release should not be used in a production environment.  It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.3.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can’t find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.) The new features or changes in this release are:

• Visual Studio 2010 RTM support
• New sql editor.  Create a new file with a .mysql extension to see it in action

…

The Maatkit tools provide a suite of additional MySQL commands. There is one command I use constantly and that is mk-query-digest.

Unfortunately the documentation does leave a lot to be desired for usability. While throughout, it is a man page and not a user guide. Several of us have discussed writing better documentation however it’s always a matter of time. I have however learned a number of tips and I’d like to share them in smaller digests.

The first is showing additional display. Maatkit works on truncating per line output to a reasonable length of 73 characters?

One of those lines is the list of hosts that connected to MySQL for a query, for example.

# Hosts                  4 192.168.40... (2), 192.168.40... (2)... 2 more
# Hosts                  3 99.99.245.14 (12), …

In so many cases troubleshooting applications I keep thinking how much more efficient things could be going if only there would be a good instrumentation available. Most of applications out there have very little code to help understand what is going on and if it is there it is frequently looking at some metrics which are not very helpful.

If you look at the system from bird eye view - system needs to process transactions and you want it to successfully complete large number of transactions it gets (this is what called availability) and we want it to serve them with certain response time, which is what is called performance. There could be many variables in environment which change - load, number of concurrent users, database, the way users use the system but in the nutshell all what you really care is having predictable response time within certain range. So if we care about response time - this is exactly what our instrumentation should …