Spread the word; Just added Kontrollbase to MySQL Forge: http://forge.mysql.com/projects/project.php?id=318

Microsoft and TomTom settle patent claims. Alfresco makes progress and shifts its strategy. The Open Cloud Manifesto is published. Support for free software. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

Quietening the patent drums
Cnet’s Ina Fried had the scoop on the news that Microsoft and TomTom had reached a settlement in their patent dispute. The news story was quickly followed by Microsoft’s official statement, as well as a note from the Software Freedom Law Center that the situation is not completely dealt with. Jay Lyman delivered the 451 CAOS …

Check out the ideas from MySQL for Google Summer of Code 2009!

These are specially-selected projects for students who are looking to do some coding in a real, open-source, highly-adopted software environment. 

The learning experience will be tremendous given that MySQL engineers will be mentoring them. 

Some student stipend is provided by the Google Summer of Code. It is intended for students to gain "exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits."

One of the first steps when addressing a MySQL performance tuning problem is to perform a system audit of the physical hardware resources, then identify any obvious bottlenecks in these resources.

When dealing with CPU, a quick audit should include identifying the number of CPU cores your server has, and the types of these cores. The key file on Linux systems is /proc/cpuinfo.

Number of cores can be found via the command cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep “^processor” | wc -l

You need to look more closely at the file to determine the type of CPU (e.g. below the model name shows Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3220 @ 2.40GHz. The combination of knowing the number of processors (cores) listed and physical id and siblings helps identify how many CPUs and how many cores per CPU exist.

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model …

Memcache is a fantastic Hash table-very fast and one of the great successes of Brad Fitzpatrick-who in my opinion has done more for the open social movement as an individual then anyone else. I use memcache quite extensively, now I am thinking about adding ZLIB native to compress the value of each key-much like how INNODB does with the Barracuda file format. The theory is with a CPU hit, we can store more data per memcache instance. I've talked to the Northscale guys and they love the idea. What do you think?


Update: Well what do you know

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.memcache-setcompressthreshold.php

for PHP for instance compresses the data on the client side.

There still might be some value compressing the data on the server-side, but now I'm not as motivated.

What might be a good alternative is to compress keys into 8 byte longs in memcached …

Yesterday Patrick Galbraith asked What is the official branch of MySQL? which got a lot of attention, including on Slashdot (and the token PostgeSQL comments quickly appeared).

Here's the funny thing. It doesn't matter anymore. Patrick's question is interesting in an academic sense, but it's mainly a distraction from what really matters. (Hint: What's the official Linux and who really cares? Ubuntu? RedHat? Debian? CentOS?)

Storage Engines

Nowadays what matters is the set of available storage engines. InnoDB, Percona's …

I presented a webinar for ISV and OEMs on "Developing GlassFish- and MySQL-Backed Applications with NetBeans and JRuby-on-Rails" last week.



The slides and a complete recording of the webinar are now available here.

Technorati: webinar glassfish mysql netbeans jruby …

The first beta version of MySQL Connector/C++ is available for download. The MySQL Driver for C++ offers a convenient API derived from the industrial standard JDBC 4.0. You can use the driver to connect to the MySQL Server 5.1 or newer. Please find more details in the official announcement mail.

GA will be almost identical to Beta

The 1.0.4 beta release is the first combined source and binary release. You can either build the MySQL Driver for C++ from source yourself or use the convenience of a prebuild binary distribution. For the Windows platform we are offering the binaries as a MSI Installer or, like on all other platforms, compressed GNU tar …

The first beta version of MySQL Connector/C++ is available for download. The MySQL Driver for C++ offers a convenient API derived from the industrial standard JDBC 4.0. You can use the driver to connect to the MySQL Server 5.1 or newer. Please find more details in the official announcement mail.

GA will be almost identical to Beta

The 1.0.4 beta release is the first combined source and binary release. You can either build the MySQL Driver for C++ from source yourself or use the convenience of a prebuild binary distribution. For the Windows platform we are offering the binaries as a MSI Installer or, like on all other platforms, compressed GNU tar …

I've been reading through the comments on the Slashdot article from yesterday and I found this gem:

one of my biggest pet peeves of MySQL... when I say CREATE TABLE(varchar(255) blah NOT NULL) please do not add your own 'DEFAULT ""' to the end--it is considered by some to be rather rude! I can spot MySQL schema's a mile away by this single trait. Anything NOT NULL almost always has a bullshit default value. Got a NOT NULL int--it will have a DEFAULT 0! Got a NOT NULL date, "DEFAULT 0000-00-00", which isn't even a valid date! How is that for taking your data seriously?

I have always agreed with the above. When we set out to create the "strict" mode within MySQL we could never get agreement on the above sort of problems. Personally I have despised this stuff for over a decade. I know where they come from, aka the limitations of …