New version of kontrollkit – mysql database administration scripts available for download. I’ve fixed the cnf file to support MySQL 5.1 – there are some small changes there. Also added the mt-backup-simple.sh script which is a simple backup script that will do email reporting, file completion checking, compression, and filesystem pruning to keep your backup directory within scope for retention policies. Get the new package here: http://kontrollsoft.com/software-downloads

Kristian Nielsen was just noticing that some valgrind issues have made it in to Drizzle's trunk. I just wanted to follow up and say that, as if we knew he was going to check, Brian and I spent much of yesterday (Friday) cleaning them all up.

We were merging in Jay's replication work and noticed a memory leak (not related to Jay's work - it was in another branch that was also being tested as part of the overall process) That brought us to the Valgrind situation.

There are a couple of remaining issues, one of which is on Stewart's plate for as soon as it's a reasonable time down in Australia. As soon as it's clean, we'll push those fixes along with Jay's replication work. Additionally, we're adding Valgrind to the set of things that a branch has to pass to be pushed into trunk. We honestly should have done this a while ago - but things happen. We're …

Kristian Nielsen was just noticing that some valgrind issues have made it in to Drizzle's trunk. I just wanted to follow up and say that, as if we knew he was going to check, Brian and I spent much of yesterday (Friday) cleaning them all up.

We were merging in Jay's replication work and noticed a memory leak (not related to Jay's work - it was in another branch that was also being tested as part of the overall process) That brought us to the Valgrind situation.

There are a couple of remaining issues, one of which is on Stewart's plate for as soon as it's a reasonable time down in Australia. As soon as it's clean, we'll push those fixes along with Jay's replication work. Additionally, we're adding Valgrind to the set of things that a branch has to pass to be pushed into trunk. We honestly should have done this a while ago - but things happen. We're …

Kristian Nielsen was just noticing that some valgrind issues have made it in to Drizzle's trunk. I just wanted to follow up and say that, as if we knew he was going to check, Brian and I spent much of yesterday (Friday) cleaning them all up.

We were merging in Jay's replication work and noticed a memory leak (not related to Jay's work - it was in another branch that was also being tested as part of the overall process) That brought us to the Valgrind situation.

There are a couple of remaining issues, one of which is on Stewart's plate for as soon as it's a reasonable time down in Australia. As soon as it's clean, we'll push those fixes along with Jay's replication work. Additionally, we're adding Valgrind to the set of things that a branch has to pass to be pushed into trunk. We honestly should have done this a while ago - but things happen. We're …

Like so many others, I got interested in the Drizzle project when it started. Some good ideas, lots of enthusiasm, and just pure GPL license, no "yes, we will take your work for free and sell proprietary licenses to it" SCA.

I even started contributing some development, fixing a number of Valgrind-detected bugs in Drizzle. I am proud that we kept the MySQL code 100% free of Valgrind errors, and wanted to help keep the same in Drizzle. So I debugged and fixed quite a few of the Valgrind-detected bugs that had crept in since forking from MySQL.

As I remember, I got down to two or three remaining or so. However, I it did discourage me somewhat to see how quickly these bugs had been allowed to enter the code. I remember one case where there was a Drizzle patch that had tried to simplify some field types. As I remember, the patch tried to simplify the code by eliminating some of multiple variants of string types. All well and good, but …

Eric Day and Patrick Galbraith spoke on Drizzle, Gearman and Narada at the July 2009 Boston MySQL User Group. This is part 1 of the video, which is about an hour long and is about Drizzle.

"We will explain what the Drizzle project is, what we aim to accomplish, and an overview of where we are at."

The slides can be downloaded from http://www.oddments.org/notes/DrizzleGearmanBoston2009.pdf

The User Group calendar item for this event is http://www.meetup.com/mysqlbos/calendar/10607736/

read more

I'm pleased to announce the release of Spider storage engine version 0.16.(beta)
http://spiderformysql.com/

The main changes in this version are following.
- Add server parameter "spider_same_server_link" and "spider_table_init_error_interval".
  "spider_same_server_link" is used for creating table link to same MySQL server's table.
  "spider_table_init_error_interval" is used for protection from connection consumption of eternal loop of table link. Please increase this parameter using "set global" command if eternal loop of table link causes connection consumption.

Please see "99_change_logs.txt" in the download documents for checking other changes.

Enjoy!

I’ve been editing a task description in our worklog:
WL#411 Computed virtual columns as MS SQL server has.

The quirky thing about the description, nowadays, is that the columns aren’t necessarily computed, aren’t necessarily virtual, and — if anybody follows the general policy that we should be like the standard — won’t much resemble SQL Server. So it’s not a very good name, eh?

The topical thing about the description is that it differs from a bugs.mysql.com feature request
Bug#46491 Patch: Virtual columns (WL#411). This is another name that could be questioned, since in reality the patch doesn’t look like WL#411. (And before I edited the specification, the resemblance was no better.) Yet it’s perfectly acceptable, as evidenced by the fact that a non-MySQL …

I was fortunate enough to speak with Marcin Zukowski earlier about VectorWise.  If you missed it, VectorWise came out of stealth mode a day or two ago.  The have announced a joint partnership with Ingres and essentially are claiming impressive analytic RDBMS performance gains on conventional hardware.

To start with, a key message that I think needs to be communicated here is that this is not a product announcement.  Ingres and VectorWise have announced a partnership in which they of course plan to build products together, today those products are still in the works.

VectorWise is a spin out of CWI based on research that was undertaken by Marcin and others, research …

We have been trying to understand the cause of a bottleneck that causes intermittent query pileups. By pileup I mean that the number of concurrent queries jumps from 10 to 1000 in a few seconds and stays high for 10 or more seconds. Query response time increases significantly during a pileup. Users tend to dislike that.

Debugging, step 1

I think that bug 46459 is the cause. The search for the bug was interesting. We started with monitoring data from a subset of iostat, vmstat, SHOW STATUS and SHOW INNODB STATUS counters using a sample interval of more than 30 seconds. The data from this wasn't sufficient to understand the problem so we deployed mstat.py to sample counters more frequently on selected machines. While it would be great for my debugging efforts to always sample all counters every second, such a change would overwhelm the monitoring infrastructure and …