It’s fortunate that I’m watching Veronica Mars again with a mate; a more-than-you-think amount of detective work is required to understand the relationship (and format) of the TABLE_SHARE, the FRM file and HA_CREATE_INFO. Oh, also you’ll need drizzled/base.h and drizzled/structs.h and drizzled/table_share.h is also a good one to have open.

The FRM file is really a FoRM file from UNIREG (see copies of really old mysql docs around the place or even better, the links off Sheeri’s blog post). Also, Jan has some thoughts on FRM too and …

I’m enamored by the middle path.

Basically, the idea is that extremism is an evil and often ideological perspectives are non-optimial solutions.

The Dalai Lama has pursued a middle path solution to the issue of Tibetan independence.

The two opposing philosophies in this situation are total and complete control of Tibet by the Chinese or complete political freedom by the Tibetan people and self governance. The Dalai Lama proposes an alternative whereby China and Tibet pursue stability and co-existence between the Tibetan and Chinese peoples based on equality and mutual co-operation.

How does this apply to Linux?

The current question of swap revolves around using NO swap at all or using swap to page out some portion of your application onto disk.

Even with …

I am currently working on putting together and pushing a 0.4 version of Waffle Grid. Which I think will be the last until we switch over to Plugin model. This version includes the use of libmemcached NoReply, all kinds of new stats ( latency stats for disk & memcached ), turning read ahead on/off, and a slew of fixes. I was able to push a lot of transactions using this, so It should be good for people to play around with and see what kind of performance they can get.

Next up for us on the development side will be:

• the planned port to the Innodb Plugin – this version should include a dynamic server list which will allow adding memcached server without a restart.

• work on some scalability issues with  our current code ( namely we open 1 connection per innodb thread, per memcached server )

• evaluating more performance …

After lots of motivation from colleagues now is the time: I will start my own blog.Why? Is anybody interested in what I learn and see in my life? Maybe.  So many times in the last years I learned things through blogs, recipes and private websites where people documented rather petty findings, or procedures that were useful for me, that I felt guilty for not sharing my own experiences. Without other people's blogs I couldn't sync my phone, use most of the software or build funny electronic things like my barograph.
What will I blog about? Mostly it will be my work experience as a Systems Engineer with Sun. Technical stuff about MySQL and the tool ecosystem around it, Solaris, maybe a little hardware as well. I left the field of hardware some months ago after nearly ten years. But sometimes there are things with hardware that are so crazy, that I MUST blog about it... e.g. Brandon discovering that harddisks are emotionally …

If you would like to contribute to MySQL development, you can read the relevant top-level page on the MySQL Forge.

This page has some useful links to various forms of contributing to MySQL, including contribution of code to MySQL. (The MySQL|Sun team have recently simplified some of these pages in order to make them more useful to community members and potential contributors.)

Note that after some simple paperwork submitted to Sun ("Sun Contributor Agreement" or "SCA"), any signatory can contribute to any Sun-sponsored …

Stimuluswatch.org is a great example of how easy it is today for people to, as Clay Shirky says, “organize without organizations.” Stimuluswatch.org began after Jerry Brito attended a mayor’s Conference and posted this request:

"Let’s help President-Elect Obama do what he is promising. Let’s help him “prioritize” so the projects so that we “get the most bang for the buck” and identify those that are old school “pork coming out of Congress”. We can do this through good clean fun crowdsourcing. Who can help me take the database on the Conference of Mayors site and turn each …

Percona is hiring. We've added several experts recently and we're growing at a fast but sustainable pace. The demand for our services is strong, and we have openings for more experts in the next couple of months.

Let me explain a little about what we're looking for at the moment. While we do have a career path for less experienced people, right now we are looking for people who are top-level, senior experts in LAMP/Open-Source performance and scalability. Most of our work involves MySQL (at least peripherally, usually centrally) but not all of it; and we are looking for a PostgreSQL expert as well as systems administration and operations skills. If you're also an expert in a related technology (e.g. Hadoop, popular cloud platforms, or some other component that you might expect to see at the Percona Performance Conference) we'd like to …

If you would like to contribute to MySQL development, you can read the relevant top-level page on the MySQL Forge.

This page has some useful links to various forms of contributing to MySQL, including contribution of code to MySQL. (The MySQL|Sun team have recently simplified some of these pages in order to make them more useful to community members and potential contributors.)

Note that after some simple paperwork submitted to Sun ("Sun Contributor Agreement" or "SCA"), any signatory can contribute to any Sun-sponsored …

If you would like to contribute to MySQL development, you can read the relevant top-level page on the MySQL Forge.

This page has some useful links to various forms of contributing to MySQL, including contribution of code to MySQL. (The MySQL|Sun team have recently simplified some of these pages in order to make them more useful to community members and potential contributors.)

Note that after some simple paperwork submitted to Sun ("Sun Contributor Agreement" or "SCA"), any signatory can contribute to any Sun-sponsored …

In Brooks Johnson's blog posting, Database Science: Are MySQL stored procedures slow?, he mentioned how much slower MySQL's stored procedures are and then compared it with a small piece of .Net code.

Using Perl, a stored procedure which counts to the same value is obviously not going to be as fast as bytecode languages with JIT compilers but it is a lot faster than MySQL's native SQL stored procedures. These perl stored procedures are able to perform dynamic SQL using the familiar DBD::mysql driver without any risk of self-deadlock.

Of course, you can also write stored procedures in Java for many databases but I haven't yet written the neccessary Type 2 JDBC driver to perform a in-thread connection back into the database server to be able to do sophisticated work with MySQL.

 …