Happy new year!

Just before Christmas the number of downloads of MONyog (from distinct email addresses) crossed 100,000. Here is the situation as of now:

This is of course a nice Christmas present for us to have. But more important: it reflects that today – as opposite to the situation just a few years ago – that even average MySQL users have understood that tuning the server configuration as well as the schemas and the queries used by applications is essential.

The default settings for the MySQL server are not appropriate for a heavy-loaded server and even the standard configuration files (or configuration ‘templates’) shipped with the server will not have the specific settings required for optimal configuration in most situations. And even the best server configuration won’t help much if databases and queries are poorly designed. We benefit from the growing understanding of this but also believe we have …

If you have done a good job of building your rails models, you may find that they are helpful for your non-rails system maintenance and such. They may even be necessary to reuse if you follow the rails model of using activerecord validations (rather that database RI) to preserve the integrity of your data.

Or you may just find yourself rewriting the same code again and again, and want all that good railsiness to make it easier to write and maintain. Personally I find myself in some instance of ./script/console as often as irb just so I can get the activesupport helper methods ( 4.days.from_now and such) that many rails developers are surprised to find are not actually a standard part of ruby.

So, the good news is it is easy to reuse rails code outside of rails.

Let's say you want to do some data manipulation (reporting, loading, scrubbing, etc) in your rails db, …

If you have done a good job of building your rails models, you may find that they are helpful for your non-rails system maintenance and such. They may even be necessary to reuse if you follow the rails model of using activerecord validations (rather that database RI) to preserve the integrity of your data.

Or you may just find yourself rewriting the same code again and again, and want all that good railsiness to make it easier to write and maintain. Personally I find myself in some instance of ./script/console as often as irb just so I can get the activesupport helper methods ( 4.days.from_now and such) that many rails developers are surprised to find are not actually a standard part of ruby.

So, the good news is it is easy to reuse rails code outside of rails.

Let's say you want to do some data manipulation (reporting, loading, scrubbing, etc) in your rails db, …

Times are a-changing, and the past couple of months have witnessed a flurry of activity on the cloud computing front; namely, SQL Azure and Amazon RDS. Touted as the harbingers of a new era — the era of Relational DBMS-as-a-Service (DBaaS) — these latest offerings pointedly reassert the fact that databases are now part of the utility model of cloud computing.

For those planning on an early adoption, even with just two significant products (no one seems to have noticed Joyent’s Accelerator for MySQL), it could get really difficult to choose. Here’s a list of 5 things that will help you make the right choice.

1. Targeted Customers: Microsoft’s target for SQL Azure (based on extensive research, I’m sure) is business applications running in the enterprise using databases of 5GB or less. Amazon RDS, …

Upgrading MySQL Server is a very interesting task as you can approach it with so much different "depth". For some this is 15 minutes job for others it is many month projects. Why is that ?

Performing MySQL upgrade two things should normally worry you. It is Regressions - functionality regressions when what you've been using before does not work any more or works with different result and performance regressions when performance (in a broad sense) is negatively affected.

In general even minor MySQL version upgrade can have both of these issues. It gets larger as you have a larger leap in minor version - Upgrade of MySQL 5.0.30 to 5.0.32 is generally likely to expose less issues than 5.0.30 to 5.0.86. The largest amount of potential issues happens when you upgrade to different major version, especially if you skip over one. MySQL 5.0 to 5.1 upgrade is a lot safer upgrade path than 4.1 to 5.1 just …

We recently made transactions in TokuDB 3.0 durable. We write table changes into a log file so that in the event of a crash, the table changes up to the last checkpoint can be replayed. Durability requires the log file to be fsync’ed when a transaction is committed. Unfortunately, fsync’s are not free, and may cost 10’s of milliseconds of time. This may seriously affect the insertion rate into a TokuDB table. How can one achieve high insertion rates in TokuDB with durable transactions?

Decrease the fsync cost

The fsync of the TokuDB log file writes all of the dirty log file data that is cached in memory by the operating system to the underlying storage system. The fsync time can be modeled with a simple linear equation: fsync time = N/R + K, where N is the amount of dirty data that needs to by written to disk, R is the disk write rate, and K is a constant time defined by the …

Things that happened in 2009:

We got a major chunk of MySQL refactored into Drizzle. Thanks to Jay we have a new replication system that we are shaking out. Monty Taylor has created an impressive bit of porting kung-fu that has made porting cake. Eric has the the Listener plugin work in shape which makes NULL plugins, drizzled console, and the future "whatever a server side script is" cake to work on. We have a BSD based libdrizzle so the "well if you link like this..." license questions all go away, along with any historical FUD that has been created around them. Lee, Jay, and community have put together an impressive regression system which is far beyond anything we ever had for MySQL. Stewart killed FRM which has always been one of our "we could do this, if we could replace FRM...". We have full time developers now in multiple companies and contributions continue to …

To get a quick idea of what ports you have open on your local box, you can use nmap.

~ jhaddad$ nmap localhost
Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2010-01-05 11:06 PST
Interesting ports on localhost (127.0.0.1):
Not shown: 499 closed ports, 492 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
80/tcp open http
88/tcp open kerberos-sec
548/tcp open afp
631/tcp open ipp
3306/tcp open mysql
3325/tcp open unknown
5900/tcp open vnc
9000/tcp open cslistener
10000/tcp open snet-sensor-mgmt

For more detailed information, try netstat:

netstat -an

You’ll get a breakdown of every socket open on your machine – useful for figuring out who’s connected and from where.

The OSX version of netstat lacks a few options – such as the useful ‘-p’ option to display the process id (PID) – which can be useful combined with kill to get …

VMware to acquire Zimbra? 2009’s open source legal developments. 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.”

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

# All Things D reported that VMware is buying Zimbra from Yahoo.

# Mike Hogan speculated on what else would be missing from VMware’s virtualized software stack.

# …

OK, I acknowledge that I'm probably not one of the names that springs to anyone's mind when they think of well known MySQL community folks. So for the vast majority of you out there that have no idea who I am, I'll try to bring you up to speed.

I have been working with MySQL (the product) since the end of 2000. Originally I did LAMP development for various businesses in Australia up until September 2004, when I had the opportunity of a lifetime - the chance to join a little database company that could called MySQL AB as a MySQL Support Engineer -- the first one south of the equator, I might add!

I was nicknamed "the guy doing support upside down".

As the support organisation grew along with the company I was later made manager of the Asia-Pacific MySQL Support Team at the beginning of 2007. I continued in that role right up until the end of 2009.

I'll spare you from too much gushing, but I …