I wanted to write a few administrative updates in one so I didn't spam everyone's feed readers too much. Here we go:

• We've had reports of some lost comments.  We reported this via Twitter a while ago, but thought it was fixed.  We'll try and pay more attention to spam filtering, but we wanted to reach out and say - let us know if you are one of the people having problems.  We're listening.  (Of course if you have any suggestions on how to manage/filter through thousands of spam items/week, we'd like to know as well).
• Pingbacks were recently dropped when we upgraded to Wordpress 2.8.  Miss them? …

I'm now working in a CentOS Linux environment, and since my Solaris days are over, I'm feeling a bit handicapped by not having DTrace and iosnoop. It still amazes me that monitoring MyISAM table data and index IO is not more common, especially in heavy duty environments.

My search for an analogous tracing system on Linux lead me to strace. I have been playing with this a little and although I am disappointed overall, I have been able to figure out how to gather what I need. It isn't pretty.

So far, my favored invocation of strace on an active mysqld process is :

strace -q -tt -e trace=open,close,read,write,pread64,pwrite64 -s 256 -f -v -p 2>&1

strace by default directs it's output to STDERR, unless you specify a file ( -o ). I wanted the output to go to STDOUT so I can pipe it into a script that will roll up the output and report by the minute. My goal will be to print an example …

Look back at the early / mid 1990's and if there was one paradigm that would rule the world after that, it was the everything would Object Oriented after that. I was pro-OO as a general idea also, and still am, but I believe that there are still stuff to solve. But hey, that wasn't the early 1990's, everything OO was supposedly good. SQL with OO extensions (remember the ORDBMS ideas? I still have Stonebreakers book, and it's worth reading, but nothing much came out of it).

I think there are a whole bunch of reasons why OO didn't end up being as important as it was foreseen to be back then (it's still important and widely used, I know that, but if you were there in the early 1990's OO rage, you could even go to the bathroom or have a beer without creating an object, and as we realize, after a few of those "Beer objects" it turns more and more difficult to create them), and you could go to a bar and chat a lady up without getting …

Sometimes we have to add new reserved words along with new features. This can cause irritation. For example, if you have a table named NONE and we make NONE a reserved word, you have to start using backticks or change the name. Beware particularly of these words that might someday become reserved according to one worklog task or another.

ARRAY ASYMMETRIC AUDIT BOOLEAN CIDR CONNECT CUBE CURRENT CURRENT_CATALOG CURRENT_PATH CURRENT_ROLE CYCLE DEFAULT DENSE_RANK EXCEPT FOR GET GLOBAL INET INTERSECT LOCAL MACADDR MERGE NEW NONE OLD OVER PARTITION RANK RESIGNAL ROWNUM ROW_NUMBER ROWS SESSION_USER SIGNAL START SOME SYMMETRIC SYSTEM_USER TRUNC UNKNOWN WINDOW

For an old list that includes reserved words in other DBMSs, check the end of an article I wrote several years ago for DBAzine, SQL Naming Conventions.

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As Brian mentioned, a number of us traveled up to Seattle last week to discuss the road map for Drizzle, Gearman, and memcached. Thanks to everyone who was able to make it! It was great to see folks again (Northscale guys, Robert Hodges, Padraig), and meet a couple new people like Nathan, one of the Google Summer of Code students for Drizzle. I thought I’d take a moment to mention some of the discussions related to the tasks I’m working on.

For Drizzle, we talked about the new configuration and plugin system I’ve been digging into lately. Monty Taylor has been doing a great job refactoring the plugin loading, but there are still some steps to be taken to get things where we want. One of the big goals with all this is to have the plugin and config system not specific to Drizzle at all so we can use this in other projects as well (one being Gearman). There are a bunch …

The latest version is available for download. Big changes include a debug log file view tab, redesigned system management screen, authentication ACL fixes, host state fixes for server-loop, AJAX’d user/host/client pages, data grids for all pertinent tables, and a fix for the slate theme submit button. If you are running an older version of Kontrollbase I would highly recommend upgrading. I’ll be adding an “upgrade” page to the documentation today for just that purpose. Download the new release here: http://kontrollsoft.com/software-downloads

We decided that the simplest way for people to experience the new version of Kontrollbase was to setup an online, fully functional demo. Now you don’t have to download and install the application to see what it offers to your database environment. The application is free, the demo is free, check it out now: http://kontrollsoft.com/software-kontrollbase#demo – while you’re there be sure to check out the comparison between Kontrollbase and other MySQL monitoring applications.

My concept of a home server system has evolved over time.

I got in to a home network early on, long before I had broadband internet or even a modem connection shared via a proxy server. The purpose was sharing files and printers, playing the occasional networked game. The network was peer to peer.

I originally decided that I needed a server right after I lost a hard disk on my home computer system containing irreplaceable information, and decided right then that one fatal hard disk crash was too many, and I needed to be fault-tolerant in the future. My initial implementation of a server was with the oldest, slowest system that I had, a 486 with 20 meg of ram, to which I attached a SCSI disk farm featuring three 6 gig hard drives made into a RAID-5 array. Windows NT Server 4.0 was my choice of operating system, influenced in no small way by similar systems I was working with professionally. This served me well for quite …

Recently Mark Callaghan(who I trust a lot) published on his facebook blog a post about a Doublewrite Buffer impact . And Sarah Sproehnle (who I trust a lot too :-)) commented it by saying:

..the doublewrite buffer is actually a benefit. Beyond guaranteeing that pages are recoverable, it also reduces the required fsyncs. Without it, each page that is written to the tablespace would need to be fsync'ed. With doublewrite enabled, a chunk of pages is written to the doublewrite buffer then 1 fsync is called, then pages are written to the tablespace and then 1 fsync...

While I'm completely agree with Mark that we absolutely need a recovery …

This was accidently posted to the MySQL blog site.  The full article on Oracle Fusion middleware can be found at http://fusioninsidersedition.blogspot.com.