As I was driving with a colleague in California a couple of weeks ago during the conference, the topic of conversation turned to the notion that Percona and the rest of the MySQL community really need the presence of a central entity that provides a recognized home for the MySQL server. The conversation went something like “I was talking to so-and-so, and he said, you know, you guys really need Sun/MySQL, because without the mother ship, things will fall apart and your own business will fail.

Ever been handed a new server only to wonder whether it is 32-bit or 64-bit? Well, it is rather simple to tell without having to ask! On a Linux server one of the following commands could just give you the answer very easily!

We remember being given a supposed "64-bit" server once and being assured by a manager that it was "definitely" 64-bit. After trying a few times to install a MySQL binary, it became obvious something was wrong. We checked and sure enough the "64-bit" server was actually "32-bit!"

If you want to be sure, the easiest thing to do is run the "gentconf" utility in Linux:

getconf LONG_BIT

The above will display either 32 or 64. It doesn't get any easier than that!

Another method is below though this output is less obvious:

uname -m

You might also want to check all of the output of the "uname" command which can give you some great …

The bad news is that whatever agreement MySQL AB had with Meetup.com has ended. As per the wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/How_to_create_a_user_group:

MySQL AB has an agreement in place with meetup.com to cover the organizer fees. Simply click at the link at the top of the meetup.com page to request your electronic voucher so you can become an organizer.

Unfortunately, this agreement has ended, so there’s going to have to be a more manual process to get MySQL to sponsor the meetup groups. At its cheapest, a year of meetup.com is $144.

The good news is that Giuseppe and Dups (as well as the local Sun/MySQL folks in Boston who also sponsor the pizza and soda we have) have expressed that they are dedicated to sponsoring these user groups, so nobody has to go around digging for spare change just yet.

Here’s the sad e-mail I …

Not so long ago, in a galaxy not very far away... a middle-aged programmer battled to free memory from the dark side of the hibernate query cache.  He was successful, or so it seemed. For the query cache memory problems had risen from the ashes -- stronger and more bloated than ever...

What's With All This Garbage?
We hit a case at work (again), where the java server process came to a grinding halt.  It wasn't dead, it just wasn't making much forward progress either.  A quick look at the heap stats showed we were nearly at capacity and that garbage collection was eating all CPU time, thus not allowing any real work to happen.  Looks like it is time to whip out the ol' memory profiler.  This time I went with Eclipse's Memory Analysis Tool .  …

We present our results to all of those who took part in this survey in the summer of 2008 and to all others interested. We outline your impressions, ideas, comments and suggestions for the XAMPP user interface.

Thank you again for your time and participation and your dedicated responses.

Karin Kunkel, Sonja Uhl, Constanze Weiland

Für all die, die im Sommer 2008 an der Umfrage teilgenommen haben, und für alle anderen Neugierigen stellen wir hier unsere Ergebnisse und damit eure Eindrücke, Vorstellungen, Kritiken und Wünsche zur Weboberfläche des XAMPP vor.

Nochmals vielen Dank denen, die uns mit ihren engagierten Antworten diese Untersuchung ermöglicht haben!

Karin Kunkel, Sonja Uhl, Constanze Weiland

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to remember MySQL 3.23...

Is anyone still running it I wonder? We held out for a long time before ugrading to 4.0 and finally 4.1. By that time, we were so smitten with MySQL, we were ready for 5.0, 5.1, 6.0, and whatever is next. After a while, we couldn't wait until there was a new version! But, it is nice to remember our roots sometimes...

Where you around when MySQL 3.23 was released? We certainly were.

Many of us remember thinking about this new open-source hotrod, known as MySQL that was transforming dynamically-driven Web sites. We downloaded it immediately and started "playing" with it. Within no time, we found that we were building all of our sites with a MySQL back-end, even the ones that would have been fine as static sites!

We soon began work on a custom PHP backend to allow our clients to access their database and make updates. This …

Many of the DBA's at Valcora, began their careers as PHP Programmers, or before... We remember times sitting in a small office together writing PHP code before there were even books on the subject! We were scouring the web looking for examples and such and relying heavy on the documentation at the php.net site!

We wrote custom shopping carts before the days of oscommerce, zencart, and such. We wrote code to interface with payment gateways and process credit cards live. We also wrote code to pull products from MySQL databases, show staff members, and such. We worked for a newspaper group and were writing news "engines" to pull the articles, archive data, etc.

Why am I reminiscing about all of that? Well, because frankly, we have been there. We know a lot of other developers are still there doing the kind of work that we began with. We know that we can help others not to make the same mistakes we have seen some of our …

Over the past two weeks I've been mostly focused on MySQL, but the big-ticket item in the Sun/Oracle deal is not databases, it's Java. However, it's also the domain which is far less clear to predict. It was a big deal when Sun decided to open source Java, but the fact of the matter is that the first fully open source release isn't out yet, and Sun has been keeping the testing and certification kit off-limits for open source communities. This means it would still be far too easy for OpenJDK to be killed off.

I've been keeping clear of Oracle for several years, and can't even begin to guess what their position on this is. Oracle has been a pretty active contributor to Linux in particular for several years, and I'm sure their open source strategy and how it works together with their business is pretty well established within at least the engineering …

Do you have_community_features? I do!

SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES LIKE 'have_community_features';
+-------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name           | Value |
+-------------------------+-------+
| have_community_features | YES   |
+-------------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

I am pretty sure this is one of those variables that MySQL has put in as an unused placeholder, but for now, it is not even documented as unused (as are table_lock_wait_timeout, http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/server-system-variables.html, and a Google search restricted to the site dev.mysql.com turns up only one match, …