If you use the Sphinx search engine and have been watching the development branch (0.9.10) and wondering when to upgrade, I'm here to tell you that "now" is a great time. As of r2037, the last major issue I regularly saw has been fixed. The other big bug was fixed in r2031.

Late last week I began testing those fixes in a "burn-in" test I've developed that makes liberal use of indextool --check. Instead of seeing index corruption within an hour, I saw none. After 3 days of no failures, I deployed it to a subset of our search back-end servers. Yesterday we deployed it to half of the remaining servers.

So far, so good!

I should note that all our index corruption was merge …

First, a quick introduction: my name is Mark Roberts and I am responsible for the QA activities at Calpont.  Today, I wanted to share with you that, in addition to the release of the InfiniDB Community Edition database engine, we also have made available a set of test scripts that you may use.  The set of test scripts, available at http://infinidb.org/downloads/cat_view/56-test-scripts, enable you to get a quick start on using the databaRead More...

I made changes to mk-query-digest yesterday that I didn’t expect to cause any adverse affects. On the contrary, several tests began to fail because a single new but harmless line began to appear in the expected output: “Databases 0″. Perhaps I’m preaching to the choir, as you are all fantastic, thorough and flawless programmers, but as for myself I’ve learned to never take a single failed test for granted.

One time a test failed because some values differed by a millisecond or two. Being curious I investigated and found that our standard deviation equation was just shy of perfect. I fixed it and spent hours cross-checking the myriad tiny values with my TI calculator. Probably no one cared about 0.023 vs. 0.022 but it’s the cultivation of a disposition towards perfection that matters.

My innocuous changes yesterday introduced a case of Perl auto-vivification. Doing:

my ($db_for_show) = $sample->{db} ? …

Government adoption. Financial results. New funding. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

Government approval
The US Department of Defense issued guidance on the adoption of open source software, while ComputerWorld reported that the U.S Department of Defense has open-sourced an …

First, a quick introduction: my name is Mark Roberts and I am responsible for the QA activities at Calpont.  Today, I wanted to share with you that, in addition to the release of the InfiniDB Community Edition database engine, we also have made available a set of test scripts that you may use.  The set of test scripts, available at http://infinidb.org/downloads/cat_view/56-test-scripts, enable you to get a quick start on using the databaRead More...

If you are wondering about the title, it makes reference to a special tea very popular in Argentina: yerba mate (maté \ˈmä-ˌtā\ in English). In Argentina, matear (drinking mate) is a social activity, someting you often do among friends sharing stories. To avoid confusion, I'll write matein italics in rest of this article.
In Between Mates In Spanish, entre mate y mate refers to the stories that are shared in a circle of friends while drinking the infusion. The person who has the mate, always makes a pause in the conversation, sip the mate and …

Today I saw a note that once high flier KANA was being sold for $49 million in cash to a private equity firm. Not because they have any real assets but because they have a $400 million operating loss. The company is essentially a publicly traded shell that might be used to roll a profitable or growing company who wants to go public into. This has many advantages I suppose for the shareholders of the new company but what about the customers?

Under the marquis with the big liquidation announcement is a link that states:  Half of Fortune 100 companies rely on Kana including Dell, Intel and AT&T yet after the Tuesday sale of the company it seems …

Many configs have thread_stack_size configured explicitly, but that can cause rather bad trouble:

• if the stack inside a thread it’s too small, you can get segfault crashes (stack overflow, essentially). Particularly on 64-bit.
• if the stack is too large, your system cannot handle as many connections since it all eats RAM.

Let mysqld sort it out, on startup it does a calculation based on the CPU architecture, and that’s actually the most sensible. So for almost all setups, remove any thread_stack_size=… line you might have in my.cnf.

If you get the following error on login: “Database write access incorrect. Please check database configuration.” – and let’s say you’ve checked the login and it works just fine. Mass confusion sets in and you start blaming the opensource community for writing bad code and are very annoyed. Don’t get too upset. Chances are you [...]

The two predominant forms of open source licenses are BSD and GPL. PostgreSQL is licensed under the BSD license , while MySQL is licensed under GPL . While the details are arcane, the business impact is significant, and that is what this post addresses.

The BSD (or BSD-style) License: This license basically says: ‘This code is provided as is, do what you want with it, and include this copyright in your resulting product.’

The GPL License: This license, also known as the copyleft license, essentially says: ‘This is free and distributed as source code, and any addition or extension must also be distributed under these exact terms.’

BSD essentially says I prefer open source code, so I’m making my source code open and freely available, but what …