One of the things we've been working on in Drizzle is having automated performance regressions run when we push new code. Although the fully automated system isn't quite there yet, one of the pieces is, which is a Drizzle-supporting version of sysbench.

I've pushed the code to:

 lp:~drizzle-developers/sysbench/trunk

This new version of sysbench has a libdrizzle driver which can be used to run benchmarks against Drizzle, or, since libdrizzle can also talk to MySQL, to MySQL.

Getting started playing with it is pretty easy, just make sure you've installed a recent copy of libdrizzle first.

  bzr init-repo sysbench

  cd sysbench

  bzr branch  lp:~drizzle-developers/sysbench/trunk

  cd trunk

   ./autogen.sh

  ./configure

  make

  make install

From that point, you should be able …

If you are a Mac developer, interested in a new professional challenge and like what we have done with MySQL Workbench so far, please consider applying for our open position in the Workbench team.We are looking for an Objective-C / UI coding wunderkind who is also not easily scared by C++.

You can be located anywhere around the world, only hard requirements are that you are comfortable with working from home, have a decent internet connection and are not too far from an airport.We would be happy to have you on the team.

More details about the job below. To speed up the hire process please send your CV to workbench@sun.com. We are preferring people with open source background so please do not forget to include links to your open source work.

Job Summary:

Sun Microsystems is looking for a strong Mac UI developer with in-depth knowledge of Objective-C, C++, X-Code and the …

Monday was my talk at Ames, Iowa at Iowa State University. To get there, I took the Greyhound from Chicago to Ames, a nice lovely eight hour bus ride across snowy, icy weather. And it is in Ames that I discovered the wonderful reason to have an iPhone. For the first time in the trip I had neglected to find out where it is I would be dropped off, and neglected to take the phone number of the hotel.

The bus station for Ames is in the middle of nowhere in an industrial complex. At 2am on a cold night after a storm, there was nobody about as the bus unceremoniously dropped me on the street and sped off with me standing there baffled... no sign, no taxi number nothing. I was suddenly picturing me using my backpack as a windbreaker and huddling against a building trying to make a fire with all the business cards that I had with me.

An iPhone would have been very nice. Instead I used my "call a friend" lifeline and woke up …

The MySQL Connector/OpenOffice.org project is still alive. The code of the alpha version has been "frozen". The Hamburg based Sun OpenOffice.org QA team is testing the alpha builds of the OpenOffice.org extension for OpenOffice.org 3.1. Initial feedback is very promising. Under the hood, the alpha version is using the recently released beta of the MySQL Connector/C++. The MySQL Connector/OpenOffice.org is implemented as an OpenOffice.org extension. OpenOffice.org extensions are extremly easy to install Plug-Ins for OpenOffice.org.

The MySQL Connector/OpenOffice.org is also refered to as "native driver". The term "native driver" in MySQL speech means that the driver implements the …

The MySQL Connector/OpenOffice.org project is still alive. The code of the alpha version has been "frozen". The Hamburg based Sun OpenOffice.org QA team is testing the alpha builds of the OpenOffice.org extension for OpenOffice.org 3.1. Initial feedback is very promising. Under the hood, the alpha version is using the recently released beta of the MySQL Connector/C++. The MySQL Connector/OpenOffice.org is implemented as an OpenOffice.org extension. OpenOffice.org extensions are extremly easy to install Plug-Ins for OpenOffice.org.

The MySQL Connector/OpenOffice.org is also refered to as "native driver". The term "native driver" in MySQL speech means that the driver implements the …

Since some time I am a dual-head user. I recently bought a 19" Ilyama 1680x1050 (cool resolution for 19") and it served me well. It is much more smaller than the 24" Dell UltraSharp I have. The differences in the resolution is not that big. The Dell is 1920x1200. Yesterday I saw that Ilyama have a Prolite series monitor, the same as the 19", 22" which has 1920x1200. I have followed in the recent times the 23" line of Samsung - the 2343 NW. Which is about 160 Euro and offers not that standard resolution (2048 x 1152 / 16:9). The resolution is strange, right? But gives the possibility to have 2 browsers at 1024 pixel width next to each other. In the last years the monitors got bigger and cheaper, more real estate. And they got wider. Probably driven by the multimedia market, although widescreen is good also for those who use IDEs.

There are a finite set of cases where mySQL clients will hang on a connection-for a small period of time (seconds) or indefinitely. Most notably no-route to host causes a timeout to occur which in most clients are on the order of seconds to recovery.

In a web environment if a database is connected to on the fly, each connection made should take milliseconds-when the net is healthy. However, when a database server crashes a timeout for each connection takes seconds and there are cases where connections can just hang (recovery of INNODB as an example). For instance have you ever had a ssh session hang and a kill (SIGHUP..) does not work? This happens for mySQL client connections too.

I want the front ends to recover gracefully from a no-route to host, or more notably a hanged connection condition. I want to avoid that damn timeout all together on stateless connections. Why? Because if you use up all your worker httpd …

I've started using Xtrabackup to backup MySQL on my MacBook. Here's an example of a quick backup and restore:

1. Download the latest .tar.gz from Percona:

$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://www.percona.com/mysql/xtrabackup/0.5/xtrabackup-0.5-macos.x86_64.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf xtrabackup-*-macos.x86_64.tar.gz
$ cd xtrabackup*

2. This directory should contain innobackupex-1.5.1 and xtrabackup. You need to install these into a directory that appears in your $PATH. In my case, I am going to group it install it where my MySQL binaries are located (/usr/local/mysql/bin):

$ ls
innobackupex-1.5.1 xtrabackup
$ cp * /usr/local/mysql/bin/

3. Create a directory where you want your backup to go. In …

I've started using Xtrabackup to backup MySQL on my MacBook. Here's an example of a quick backup and restore:

1. Download the latest .tar.gz from Percona:

$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://www.percona.com/mysql/xtrabackup/0.5/xtrabackup-0.5-macos.x86_64.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf xtrabackup-*-macos.x86_64.tar.gz
$ cd xtrabackup*

2. This directory should contain innobackupex-1.5.1 and xtrabackup. You need to install these into a directory that appears in your $PATH. In my case, I am going to group it install it where my MySQL binaries are located (/usr/local/mysql/bin):

$ ls
innobackupex-1.5.1 xtrabackup
$ cp * /usr/local/mysql/bin/

3. Create a directory where you want your backup to go. In …

Apart from the primary "here's how we ended up using Infobright for data warehousing and how is that working out" topic I'm going to discuss in my MySQL Conf presentation I'll touch on another application, the use of Infobright's open-source Community Edition server for collection and storage of event logs. This is a system we've implemented in the past couple of months to solve a number of data management problems that were gradually becoming problematic for our infrastructure.

We've traditionally stored structured event log data in databases for ease of management. Since Habbo uses MySQL for most everything else, putting the log tables in the same databases was pretty natural. However, there are significant problems to this approach:

• MyISAM tables suffer from concurrency issues …