Last week I received a really extensive questionaire from the European commission. They investigate in the case of the Oracle/Sun merger and supplied a long questionaire how Mayflower sees the Oracle/Sun merger. One of the question, for example, is if the quality of InnoDB has increased or declined since Oracle bought Innobase Oy some years ago. I wrote to the commission and asked if I could distribute the two Word documents they delivered to me. Important information: the questionaire has to be sent back until August, 13th!

This is what Vera Pozzato on behalf of the team told me:

Dear Mr. Schotte,

Many thanks for your email and for the interesting information you have provided us with.

As our investigation is a rather extensive and complex exercise, we would appreciate if you could send us, if possible, the contact …

At a customer I have had the opportunity to work with some really state of the art equipment.

The customer is in the online gaming industry and we are building a platform based on MySQL Cluster where we are consolidating a number of applications. Workload is mainly inserts, updates, pk reads, and index scans (quite frequent), and a few joins. The cluster handles the transient data (current working set), and is replicating to a long term data store (following this approach), and we are also feeding other back-end support systems from this.

The cluster (>8 computers) is interconnected with Dolphin DX adapters. Computers are SUNs Nehalem …

There are many wrong ways to find a "random" row. For example:

SELECT .. ORDER BY rand() LIMIT 1;


The rand() function is great, and LIMIT is phenomenal, but the above query is really, really bad. It evaluates the rand() function for every row of the table and then (if that wasn't bad enough) it orders all the rows by the result of the rand function. Then it returns the first row. Wow. Don't make MySQL do that much work!

There are better ways to find a "random" row. Maybe in a future blog post I'll go into them, but at the very least consider calculating a random number ahead of time and looking up a row with that id.

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/

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