Since opening up the comment reply via email feature to everyone last month we’ve been continuing to improve it. Here are some of changes that have gone in during the last few weeks:

• Better detection of email auto responders / vacation messages
• Added a reminder to the bottom of comment notification emails about the reply via email feature
• Vastly improved support for non-English character sets
• Fixed a problem that some iPhone users were seeing
• Improved email address parsing for Blackberry users
• Fixed cases where signature blocks weren’t being properly removed
• Better paragraph formatting when parsing comments

And many little tweaks to deal with the oddities of various email clients. You’d be amazed how many email …

If you’ve pulled the latest Drizzle code from lp:drizzle, you may have noticed a new plugin/gearman_udf directory in there. This is a new UDF that acts as a Gearman client. This is mostly a port of the Gearman MySQL UDF I wrote, but I did it the proper C++ way to fit in better with Drizzle. It also uses the new plugin system Monty Taylor has been working in, which makes it much easier. :)

To use it, just make sure you have the Gearman C library installed and Drizzle will pick it up and build it for you. No extra configuration required!

The following example assumes you have a Gearman job server and a reverse worker running (see examples/reverse_worker in the C library package).

 …

I just applied the external stored procedure patch to a branch of MariaDB and uploaded it to LaunchPad.You can see the branch at https://code.launchpad.net/~atcurtis/maria/5.1-wl820Note that this is not in any reasonable condition to merge into MariaDB. Hopefully we can engage in dialog as to how we can bring this feature properly to MariaDB, MySQL and Drizzle, hopefully making the plugins

Hello and welcome to the 146th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. I have to make this a quick one, but I hope (as always) that the links give you the highlights of this week’s blogs.

Oracle

Let’s start with Jonathan Lewis’s report from IOUG Day 4: ” Not so much a little gem today as a little surprise and a few consequential thoughts. In a presentation on optimising star transformations the presenter pointed out that bitmap indexes are only available in Oracle Enterprise Edition.”

Here’s Doug Burns with the first of a series on …

Open Database Alliance formed. Oracle buys Virtual Iron. AccesStream reaches version 1.0. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

I’ve just met a fork named Maria
MySQL founder Monty Widenius and Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev announced the launch of the Open Database Alliance - “a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL.”

Continuent and Open Query quickly announced their membership, while Monty later …

There are various setups and solutions to solve the problem of having redundant mysql masters and scaling writes on them. MySQL Cluster can be an alternative. Here is why and how:
Pros:

• No need to worry about DRBD failover and recovery times
• No need to worry about potential data loss when failover from active master to standby master (has all binlog really been replicated over from the failed master?)
• Writes go to any mysql server connected to the Cluster - thus writes are easy to scale
  The data nodes will then send the committed writes to every mysql server with --log-bin enabled.
  
• MySQL Cluster can handle a lot of writes (but the slaves can become the bottleneck)
  
• Data nodes can be added online (MySQL Cluster 7.0) - …

Response times of any web application are very critical for the end-user experience. Steve Souders takes a detailed look at several large Web sites and concludes that 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend, i.e., program code that is running inside your Web browser.

Traditional parallelization techniques and caching are without a doubt very effective in the design of scalable Web servers, databases, operating systems and other mission-critical software and hardware components. Assume that all these components are perfectly parallel and optimized, Amdhal's law still suggests that response time improvements will be very modest, or barely measurable.

Response times of any web application are very critical for the end-user experience. Steve Souders takes a detailed look at several large Web sites and concludes that 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend, i.e., program code that is running inside your Web browser.

Traditional parallelization techniques and caching are without a doubt very effective in the design of scalable Web servers, databases, operating systems and other mission-critical software and hardware components. Assume that all these components are perfectly parallel and optimized, Amdhal's law still suggests that response time improvements will be very modest, or barely measurable.

I want to make this Friday a bit more interesting - how do you feel to train a bit in InnoDB data recovery techniques.
I have .ibd datafile which was created by query
CREATE TABLE `tryme` ( `email` mediumblob, `content` mediumblob ) ENGINE=InnoDB ... (SOME PARAMETERS SKIPPED) ...;

and I inserted one record into this table with email address and English sentence into field (content). Some transformation where applied to both fields so just HEX viewer may not help you there.
Size of meaningful de-transformed content is
length( ... (content) ... ) = 15.

Can you recovery both email and content fields ? To add some competition I want to give a prize for winner, first who sends content (meaningful English sentence) to given email - will receive our book "High Performance MySQL" 2nd edition, or if he has already this book or just hate it by some reason - I can propose Amazon 25$ Gift Card as replacement.

…

It seems the mantra that we hear from clients most often is "...[it] must be a database problem." The reality is that it almost never is, in fact, a "database problem!" It seems that the DBA is most often "guilty until proven innocent," rather than the other way around. At first, I thought maybe this was how MySQL was viewed because of the whole open-source stigma, but I have seen the same reaction on other DBMS platforms. After chatting with Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, etc., DBA's, I heard the same thing repeated over and over...

Let me give you some of the examples I have seen. Maybe you can identify with some of these. Either way, perhaps it will generate a little smile. Naturally, this will be a short list of some of the problems and not the whole list:

Not too long ago, I was asked to troubleshoot a "problem" with the database where an ESB server could not connect to a MySQL server. I was told there was an issue with …