The MySQL Administrator’s Bible is out. Writing a book is not something you can just squeeze into a Sunday afternoon; it takes real dedication and more effort than you could possibly imagine.

So congrats on having the book for MySQL DBAs (and I’d venture to say application devs should also be reading it) out and on Amazon so people can buy it now.

For the past few months, I’ve been helping my friend develop and market Philtro .
We’ve gone through various iterations of the elevator pitch for it, and the one that seems to be kinda working, is: “It’s like a spam filter for your Twitter account.”

At SXSW, I got the opportunity to talk to Guy Kawasaki about this tool, and he said “There is no spam on twitter, if you don’t like it, don’t follow them”.

While that’s an easy way to handle spam, I also realized that the word Spam means different things to different people.

On Twitter, nothing is UCE. It’s easy to block the profiles with …

A few months ago I installed ActivePerl 5.10 on a Windows XP Pro workstation. Next I tried to install DBD::mysql using CPAN, it failed. When I browsed modules via ppm, a GUI in this version of ActiveState Perl on Windows, DBD::mysql was not listed as an available module.

I then downloaded the source code, manually modified the MAKE file, fiddled with Visual Studio NMAKE, compiled it a few times, without success.

Google revealed the existence of Strawberry Perl. So I removed ActiveState Perl, installed Strawberry, ran ppm install DBI, ppm install DBD-mysql. And it worked.

Fast-forward a few weeks, I started playing with EPIC, a plugin for Eclipse that supposedly provides a nice IDE for Perl development and debugging. As a result, I started fiddling with PadWalker, a prerequisites for EPIC. I couldn’t remember all the details now due to frustration, but suffice it …

Maybe it's a sense of shared adversity, but recent MySQL meetings have had this "we're all in it together" feeling. Today Monty Widenius announced the Open Database Alliance: the community feeling is starting to look like a real business entity.

The Open Database Alliance is appealing at multiple levels. First, it's good for the companies that join--a steadier flow of business and ability to offer bigger solutions by combining with partners. Second, it's good for users: first rate software, services, and support without vendor lock-in. Third, the parties are going to be excellent.

Sometimes you have to think hard before signing up for partnerships. But this one looks like a no-brainer. Count us in!

…

Sun Microsystems today announced that the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) in Germany has purchased a MySQL Enterprise Unlimited database subscription to provide extra support for the E-learning system that the university's IT staff has developed and deployed for the entire University Alliance Metropolis Ruhr (UAMR). With Sun's MySQL Enterprise Unlimited offering, the UDE receives access to the advanced MySQL Enterprise Monitor software as well as around-the-clock technical support for any number of database applications – all for one affordable, fixed price.

The big news coming from the MySQL Community today is that Monty Widenius and Percona have founded the Open Database Alliance, a group focused on “unifing all MySQL-related development and services, providing a solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL”.

I, for one, am 100% behind this. I’ve always been a big fan of community foundations being a focus point for development efforts, they work well to bring everyone together, and to provide a sensible foundation to help avoid much of the uncertainty that seems to spring up around MySQL. I certainly hope that the ODA is able to do the same.

Though I do have one question, how does the ODA plan on handling competing members? If you have two companies offering the same service in the same market, which one will the ODA recommend? …

If you’ve looked at your WordPress.com blog stats today, you might have noticed the charts look a little different. We’ve replaced the old proprietary chart object with Open Flash Chart, an open source alternative.  Charts now look like this:

(Though I can’t guarantee you’ll see numbers like that).

All the old charts are still available in more or less the same form.  And we’re hoping to explore some of the new possibilities Open Flash Chart has to offer – so keep an eye on your stats.  Like we had to ask.

And in case you missed it: yes, blog stats now work in your time zone.

…

I do not know if you noticed it, but Google (Mark Callaghan, Justin Tolmer and their internal mysql-team) made a great contribution to MySQL. Patches global transaction IDs, binlog event checksums and crash-safe replication state are separated and published on Launchpad (https://code.launchpad.net/~jtolmer/mysql-server/global-trx-ids).

For me it was a big wall in using these patches that they were part of one big patch, which you can apply only to 5.0.37, and now there is no barrier to include patches into our builds or MySQL releases.

If you do not know what is Global Transactional ID is - it is worth to look …

I've been looking at the cost recently of fetches for libmemcached, and seeing if there was anything I could do to increase performance.

What did I find? Half the cost currently is in the snprintf() sitting at the protocol sender.

Half!

Good news about this?

If you are using the new binary protocol with Memcached this goes away completely :)

snprintf() sucks.

Back in 2007 I, and then several others, pointed out the Innodb Concurrency should be set to zero (or any large number) if you are planning on scaling.

http://krow.livejournal.com/542306.html

I don't get why anyone is congratulating themselves on this self discovery, since we have all known about this for over two years. It is great to see that the default setting for 5.4 is finally being fixed but this shouldn't be a revelation to anyone who has been working with the server for years (and the Innodb team fixed this in their own plugin a while ago, which should be no surprise since they author the code). This was one of the first, and frankly simple, changes made to Drizzle.

Here are some more obvious ones:
Kill the query cache (and disable Stored procedures and their cache if you can).
Remove the locks around show process …