I wasn’t prepared for this. After spending months playing with GDB development trees I somehow entirely missed that 7.0 release is getting close, and took me more than an hour to spot it.

My favorite features are python scripting and non-stop debugging. I was toying around with python scripting for a while, and was planning to make backtraces make sense. Having hands that open means that one can see PHP backtraces, when gdb’ing apache, see table names and states when MySQL thread access handler interfaces, or remote IPs and users, when it is writing to network. Process inspection can simply rock, if right tools are created using these new capabilities, and I’m way too excited when I think about those. “Always have debugging symbols” gets way more meaning now.

Another issue I’ve been trying to resolve lately is avoiding long locking …

I'm happy to extend a warm welcome to two new members of the Percona team.

First is Yves Trudeau, about whom I can say many things:

• One of the top MySQL Cluster (NDB Cluster) experts in the world.
• An expert on all things High Availability, including DRBD and Heartbeat.
• Many years of experience with Huge Data.
• Half of the Waffle Grid team.
• A really nice person!

Yves joins us after a tenure of several years as a senior consultant at Sun/MySQL. Together with Matt Yonkovit, he plans to work on WaffleGrid (but as a new project under a new name, to be determined), and integration with XtraDB. Yves lives in Quebec with his family.

Next is Fernando Ipar. Fernando is our first dedicated Shift Support Captain[1]. Fernando specializes in MySQL, GNU/Linux, systems administration, and high availability. Fernando has been involved in computer programming since …

Why would you care about UNICODE? Come on now, most people can read english and english can be written using only 7-bit ASCII, so who needs more? Well, I think it's safe to say that Internet (remember that? Netscape, WWW, .com booms, pet food on the net etc) changed all that. Now applications can be found and run everywhere by anyone, more or less, so even if the application speaks english, and even if the user does, you may end up with users inputing data using some other character sets.

For someone like myself, having grown up in a "beyond A-Z" part of the world (Sweden, which is one of the easy cases), I can tell you how annoying it is when I input my address on some webpage (this happens even on swedish website)s using some swedish characters (I got 2 of the 3 beyond A-Z characters in the name of the street where I live), and it comes out looking like someone just smashed a fly prominently placed in the name of my street.
…

How To Set Up Apache2 With mod_fcgid And PHP5 On Mandriva 2009.1

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on Mandriva 2009.1. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.

As you saw, I've not blogged for a long time on this site. I managed two different blogs for a while, but now it's the time to condense everything on one of it; and the winner is: It's Just About Communication.

I moved all the old posts, so that it becomes the unique source of informations about myself and my job. You can find a bunch of new articles on the sidebar, pointing to the aforementioned blog.

See you on the new home!

Q: What SQL is running on your MySQL database server now?
A: The bane of pain for MySQL DBA’s when there is no official MySQL instrumentation that is dynamic and fine grained sufficiently to solve this problem at the SQL interface.

While hybrid solutions exist, the lack of dynamic and real-time are the issues. There is however great work being done by Baron and others on Maatkit mk-query-digest and packet sniffing the MySQL TCP packets.

$ sudo tcpdump -i eth0 port 3306 -s 65535  -x -n -q -tttt | ./mk-query-digest --type tcpdump
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes
# Caught SIGINT.
5444 packets captured
8254 packets received by filter
2809 packets dropped by kernel
# 2.1s user time, 40ms system time, 22.23M rss, 57.60M vsz
# …

As you saw, I've not blogged for a long time on this site. I managed two different blogs for a while, but now it's the time to condense everything on one of it; and the winner is: It's Just About Communication.

I moved all the old posts, so that it becomes the unique source of informations about myself and my job. You can find a bunch of new articles on the sidebar, pointing to the aforementioned blog.

See you on the new home!

As you saw, I've not blogged for a long time on this site. I managed two different blogs for a while, but now it's the time to condense everything on one of it; and the winner is: It's Just About Communication.

I moved all the old posts, so that it becomes the unique source of informations about myself and my job. You can find a bunch of new articles on the sidebar, pointing to the aforementioned blog.

See you on the new home!

If you’ve ever done any non-blocking programming (usually for socket I/O), you’ve probably had to come up with a non-trivial state machine to handle all the places where everything can pause. Say you’re reading an application level packet from a socket, and half way through the read() system call it screams EAGAIN. You need to stop, save any state, and exit out of whatever chain of functions got you there so the calling application can regain control. I’m going to explain a few techniques I’ve come up with over the years, each with their strengths and weaknesses, and I hope this will spur some conversation of what other folks have done. While I’m fairly happy with how I handle these state machines now, but I’m always looking for a more succinct way of handling things. Please share your thoughts!

Switch Statements

The obvious way to handle non-blocking I/O is with one or more switch statements. Say we need to …

The past week has brought a surge of Gearman related releases. They include:

C Server and Library
Perl Server and Modules
Gearman::XS Perl Module (based on C library)
PHP Extension (based on C library)
PHP Extension Documentation
Drizzle UDFs
PostgreSQL UDFs
MySQL UDFs

Some of …