If you have been using opentaps 0.9 or 1.0, you should find the new screens for creating purchase orders in the upcoming version 1.4 much easier to use.

First, the screen for initializing purchase orders has been streamlined. Instead of having to go through two screens to select a supplier and agreements, there is now one screen to do both:Second, when you're adding items to your purchase order, there is now an auto completion which it to prompt you for a product based on either the product ID or a portion of the product name


If the product has not been set up already with a supplier entry in the catalog manager, opentaps 1.4 will let you …

I see this post in MySQL internals: http://lists.mysql.com/internals/36630

It states that "Starting from January 2009" there's a re-engineering effort to improve the modularity of the code base, reduce the number of bugs introduced with new features and a better pluggable architecture to make it easier for third-parties to implement plugins.

Hey, this sounds great! However, I have some questions:

1. This sounds a bit like Drizzle
2. Why the announcement now, in May, when this effort was started in January? If this is all about openness, should not there have been some sort of pre-announcement to the community to solicit opinions?
3. How pervasive will this be? A re-architecture or a gradual direction of development?
4. Where's the code? Where are the plans? Other forks/branches, there is code to show. Is this an …

Have you ever wanted to fire off a post from your phone, Blackberry, Outlook at work…? Following on from Comment Reply Via Email we’re introducing our latest feature to make it even easier to publish to your blog: Post by Email.

Maybe you’re on holiday and want to show your journey. Maybe you’ve captured something with your cell phone that you just have to share. Maybe you’re at work and should be doing something else. With Post by Email you can keep everyone up-to-date without even opening a browser.

Post by Email is super simple to use. From the new My Blogs menu you can generate special email addresses:

You can create as many email addresses as you need, one for each blog you have access to.

Now for the fun part – send an email!

You can send email …

When benchmarking MySQL with InnoDB we quickly discovered
that using InnoDB Thread Concurrency set to 0 was an
improvement to performance since the implementation of
InnoDB Thread Concurrency used a mutex which in itself was
a scalability bottleneck.

Given that InnoDB Thread Concurrency is a nice feature that
ensures that one gets good performance also on an overloaded
server I was hoping to find a way to make the implementation
of this more scalable.

I tried out many different techniques using a combination of
mutexes and atomic variables. However every technique fell to
the ground and was less performant than setting it to 0 and not
using the InnoDB Thread Concurrency implementation. So I was
ready to give up the effort and move on to other ideas.

However after sleeping on it an inspirational idea came up.
Why use a mutex …

About 10 days ago I did a post on Meetup.com expirations and trying to find out what was going on. I have to apologize that I didn't update since then while I contacted Meetup.com and we negotiated what was to happen. Yesterday we blogged about the future of our MySQL User Groups. Yes, if you hadn't heard, we're suggesting that those that wish to continue to have free MySQL User Group management, they should migrate to Facebook. My colleague Colin Charles has produced a guide.

Let me tell you frankly that this is not what we …

On my non-MySQL blog, I just wrote a blog post called “Photo Manager: How do you keep track of your pictures?“. I’m looking for Open Source Software that helps me keep track of my 100,000+ digital pictures. I wrote specs on dreamt-up software called “Robfat” (for rename, order, backup, find, archive, tag) as I want to remove excess fat from my HDs (and CD/DVD cabinets).

And then I thought this may have a MySQL dimension:

What if we had an “EXIF Storage Engine”? What if we could update EXIF tags directly from the MySQL command line, with UPDATE statements, and SELECT picture file names based on tags and other file …

Several people commented on our last blog post or contacted us via our Twitter account, asking questions and raising concerns about migrating the MySQL user group organization to FaceBook. It seems like there is some confusion that we would like to address: you are not required to move to FaceBook. This was just a recommendation, you are of course free to choose whatever service you prefer to manage your MySQL user group. In fact, you are of course welcome to continue using Meetup.com for this! However, be advised that you will have to take care of any occurring fees by yourself from now on, as the sponsorship agreement between MySQL and Meetup.com was not renewed.

And if Facebook is not your cup of tea, there are other services that provide similar functionality. We've tried …

The kind folks at The Dallas PHP/MySQL Users Group have asked me to repeat my 'MySQL Cluster -- a gentle introduction' presentation tonight at their meeting. This was after sitting through the original performance where I talked about how to set up complete cluster on a laptop. The presentation has been updated to reference Cluster 7.0 and the demo will work now that I have static IP addresses figured out with Virtualbox. So you know where to be if you are in the DFW Metroples and are not watching American Idol tonight.

The presentation in PDF format is available on NorthTexasMySQL.org

Just received an email newsletter from Sun titled "MySQL 5.4 Preview Release" which states:

Sun Microsystems recently released MySQL 5.4, delivering performance and scalability improvements enabling the InnoDB storage engine to scale up to 16-way x86 servers and 64-way CMT servers.

MySQL 5.4 also includes new subquery optimizations and JOIN improvements, resulting in 90% better response times for certain queries.

Apparently, the confusion about the contents of the release I wrote about earlier continue to reign inside Sun as well. MySQL 5.4 has not been released by any reasonable meaning of the word, since there's "only" a preview available at this time. Compare this to Windows 7: that's already a Release Candidate, but it has not been released. Also, the preview release available does not include new subquery optimizations nor JOIN improvements. Having planned such improvements …

The plan was only to do two quick posts on RAID Performance on the X-25e, but this was compelling enough to post on it’s own.  So in part I Mark Callaghan asked hey what gives with  the SLC Intel’s single drive random write performance,  It’s  lower then the MLC drive.   To be completely honest with you I had overlooked it, after all I was focusing on RAID performance.  This was  my mistake because this is actually caused by one of the Achilles heals of most flash on the market today, crappy performance when you fill more of the drive.  I don’t really know what the official title for it is but I will call it “Drive Overeating”.

Let me try and put this simply:  a quick trick most vendors use to push better random write #’s and help wear leveling is to not …