Welcome to the 135th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

How about a little DB2 news to whet the palette? On IT, Life, DB2 pureXML, House Construction, Henrik Loeser Friedrichshafen has an item about Organic Food and pureXML. Completely unrelated! In the on-topic second part of this duo, Henrik relates the news: “I am happy to tell you that the so far separately priced pureXML feature will now be included in the core DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows.” And relevant links are included in this blog.

On the DB2PORTAL Blog, Craig Mullins admonishes, …

Have you prepared yourself?

mysql> select 1234567890 - unix_timestamp();
+-------------------------------+
| 1234567890 - unix_timestamp() |
+-------------------------------+
|                         25091 | 
+-------------------------------+

Not much longer now!

The demos include Load Balancer Visualization for SailFin, SailFin Communicator application (with MySQL cluster career grade server as the back-end …

For the ones who are interested, there will be a webinar on WaffleGrid next Tuesday, February the 17th at 10:00 am PST (1:00 pm EST, 18:00 GMT). Matt will present benchmarks he did with Dbt2 and Sysbench using GbE, Dolphin, SSD while, for my part, I will present the WaffleGrid concepts, status and roadmap. I will also be a good way to learn how to get started with WaffleGrid if you want to start experimenting!

Registration is free!

Giving a bunch of mysql instances something you do everyday and you might think ….. how should I do it? Write a bunch of selects and inserts manually? nahh that takes s**tload of time, should I run binlogs collected from a live system on my test server? nahh thats not practical nor is it real since it doesn’t contain selects, should I gather the general query log and try that out? nahhh  …..

MySQL has been kind enough to supply us with their mysql_slap which does the job for us and given I needed to do a proof of concept on monitoring a group of 4 circular replicated servers I wrote a small script which does the job of slapping them with a varying level of concurrancy, iterations, number of queries and connections for as long as you like.

Here it is and I hope some of you might find it useful for slapping their own test servers :).

#!/bin/bash

NumberOfConcurrentLoads=4
…

The open source vendor definition debate rumbles on. How open source could save the US government $3.7bn. Red Hat plans MASS migration to JBoss. Open source content management invades the US. Exploiting the attribution loophole in the GPLv3. And more.

Definition debate rumbles on
Roberto Galoppini joined the open source vendor definition debate, with a perspective looking at the impact on community engagement, and also caught up with David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, about the company’s strategy, noting that not all open source core vendors are created equal.

Meanwhile Tarus Balog of OpenNMS, who …

Just a small tip for using Bazaar on OpenSolaris: set the BZR_SSH environment variable to openssh if you don't have the Python module Paramiko installed.
For example, in your ~/.bashrc:

export BZR_SSH=openssh

Could be useful if you're pulling MySQL stuff from Launchpad and use (Open)Solaris. Could also be useful on other Unix-like operating systems when the default is missing (Bazaar uses Paramiko as default).

One of the most important features of MySQL is the support for pluggable storage engines. Since users use MySQL in different ways, one storage engine may not fit everyone 's needs. There are lots of engines for a user/application to choose from. Applications (and users) access MySQL using a uniform interface irrespective of what kind of storage engine is being used. As with any kind of software layering, it is possible to lose optimization opportunities as we cross layer boundaries. In this blog I will discuss one such lost opportunity.

Internally MySQL uses the PSAPI (public storage engine api) to communicate with the storage engines. The MySQL server uses a fixed row format. Storage engines are free to use whatever row format they choose (for ex, InnoDB uses a different row format). The advantage of using a different row format is that specialized storage engines could store rows optimally. For example, a storage engine for DSS could store …

One of the most important features of MySQL is the support for pluggable storage engines. Since users use MySQL in different ways, one storage engine may not fit everyone 's needs. There are lots of engines for a user/application to choose from. Applications (and users) access MySQL using a uniform interface irrespective of what kind of storage engine is being used. As with any kind of software layering, it is possible to lose optimization opportunities as we cross layer boundaries. In this blog I will discuss one such lost opportunity.

Internally MySQL uses the PSAPI (public storage engine api) to communicate with the storage engines. The MySQL server uses a fixed row format. Storage engines are free to use whatever row format they choose (for ex, InnoDB uses a different row format). The advantage of using a different row format is that specialized storage engines could store rows optimally. For example, a storage engine for DSS could store …

This isn’t exactly MySQL stuff.. but it relates in the sense that I am looking to move from our current workflow setup for MySQL Magazine to something that is (in order of importance):

• Able to generate pdf output along with attendant hyperlinks,etc.
• Able to effectively create a professional document with input from a number of authors
• Open Source if it meets the above criteria

I have been more than a little unhappy with previous setups (we tried openoffice and now currently Word to Adobe distiller). After the six freaking hours I wasted on the last go around because columns where right justified and looked perfect in Word, but when distilled in pdf the output came out with random spacing (including INSIDE WORDS), I am ready to chunk this approach and try something new.

One of the authors kindly offered to work with me on getting a latex setup. While I am grateful for the …