Welcome to the 145th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

MySQL

Since MySQL was surely the belle of the bloggers’ ball this week—why, everyone was talking—let’s begin with it.

Baron Schwartz started something with his post examining why MySQL might not benefit from having a mother ship. Dean Ellis of niflheim responded, arguing that everyone needs the MySQL mothership. And that got Sheeri’s Cabral’s attention—she took the middle path in her …

In an email disscussion for pre-allocating binlogs for MySQL (something we’ll likely have to do for Drizzle and replication), Yoshinori brought up the excellent point of that in some situations you don’t want to be doing zero-fill as getting up and running quickly is the most important thing.

So what does Linux do? Does it zero-fill, or behave sensibly and pre-allocate quickly?

Let’s look at hte kernel:

Inside the fallocate implementation (fs/open.c):

if (inode->i_op->fallocate)
ret = inode->i_op->fallocate(inode, mode, offset, len);
else
ret = -EOPNOTSUPP;

and for ext4:
/*
* currently supporting (pre)allocate mode for extent-based
* files _only_
*/
if (!(EXT4_I(inode)->i_flags & EXT4_EXTENTS_FL))
return -EOPNOTSUPP;

XFS has always done fast pre-allocate, so it’s not a problem there and the only other …

Recently we received a letter from our customer who was unsatisfied with the amount of Internet traffic that dbForge Studio for MySQL produced when he was working with the remote MySQL server via VPN connection.

Here are two tips on how you can reduce your traffic in version 3.50.

First tip: Turn off code completion

SQL editor code completion feature requires all object names from all databases to be queried from server. This is no problem when working with MySQL server on local network but it takes time on remote connection. To turn off loading completions from database go to Tools->Options->Text Editor->Code Completion option tab and turn off option ‘Load completions from database’.

Second tip: Use compression

Version 3.50 of dbForge Studio for MySQL contains database connection option named ‘Use …

When is "Static IP" service not a "Static IP" service?It is not a "Static IP" service when it is provided by Verizon FiOS Internet service.There is no way to assign the static IP address to your own equipment.Verizon FiOS Static IP is FAIL.

Must of really been worn out post UC because my experiments and blogging have dipped to all time lows… but rest assured I am on my way back. I will be following up posting some posts on my Sun/Intel SSD tests I did for my presentation at the UC. This will give those who did not go to the UC a chance to hear me babble on about SSD’s some more ( OH NO, not more babble about SSD’s! ).

Plus of course their is Waffle. Right now I am perplexed as ever by our mysterious index issue… and its been bothering me for weeks! I think I will post some details and look for external opinions very soon.

MySQL Connector/C++ is GA. It features virtually everything needed by the two "internal customers" MySQL Workbench and Connector/OpenOffice.org. Based on internal test results and bug inflow, the stability is quite reasonable for a 1.0.5. It is overdue to move the development discussion on the mailing list and to ask: what do you want for 1.1, 1.5, 2.0?

At least two users have already proposed changes. Matthias Brantner has filed Connector/C++ bug report #3 - a feature request. Christian Koch has spotted my earlier mailing list posting already and replied. …

If the Cluster fails to start, what can you do and what to check?

Initial system start
If it is the first time you start up the cluster and it fails, then check the following:

• Network - Check /etc/hosts
  You should have (on the line for localhost)
  127.0.0.1 localhost
  and nothing else! Then the normal IP address host mapping follows..
  REDHAT and others can add a lot of other things to that line, and this results in that the nodes won't be able to connect to each other (they will be stuck in phase 0 or phase 1)
  
• Network - Check if you can ping the machines
  
• Network - Check if you have any firewalls enables ( e.g check with /sbin/iptables -L)
  Disable the firewall in that case. Exactly how depends on OS and Linux distribution.
  On Redhat systems, then SELinux might be enabled. Googling "disable firewall <your …