Phipps speaks to ZDNet Australia about the MySQL acquisition and community engagement on OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris.

I thought I would write a few blog posts on what I am calling the 5 minute DBA. The content of these is  interesting or frequently asked questions that I get when out on a gig, you know those ones were a developer or a dba runs up and says: “Hey how do I do this?” I figure, If nothing else maybe it will save me some time in future.

There are two audiences here. The first is the true 5 minute dba. Their seems to be a lot of folks out their who end up responsible for fixing or maintaining a MySQL database who are not really DBA’s. They maybe developers, sysadmins, or even network guys who know just a  little about databases. These guys and gals become DBA’s five minutes at time during the day generally when something goes wrong.  They tend to be  looking for the quick fix, something that can be done in five minutes or less so they can get back to their other important tasks.

The second group are comprised …

Innodb source code is organized into directories where each directory holds the C source code files for a given module. Within the directory are 1 or more files that are part of the module. The file names have a structure which I will describe below.

The first part of the file name indicates the module name. The module name is followed by a '0' character which is a separator. The second part of the file name represents the sub-module. Most modules have one file where the sub-module is the same name as the module, this file represents the primary file in the module.

For, example the main file for Btree is located in the btr directory and named: btr0btr.c
The first btr indicates the module name, the 0 is a separator and the the second btr is the sub module name which is the same for the primary file.

The file that handles the Btree cursor is also located in the btr directory and named: btr0cur.c …

At the January 2009 Boston User Group I presented a session on the new partitioning feature in MySQL 5.1. I go through how to define partitions, how partitioning makes queries faster, the different types of partitioning and when to use each type, and the restrictions and limitations of partitioning.

The slides are available at http://www.technocation.org/files/doc/2009_01_Partitioning.pdf. The 380.6 Mb .mov movie (1 hr 16 min) can be played directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/671/play or downloaded at http://technocation.org/node/671/download.

Notes:
The partitioning part of the MySQL Manual is at: …

At the January 2009 Boston User Group I presented a session on the new partitioning feature in MySQL 5.1. I go through how to define partitions, how partitioning makes queries faster, the different types of partitioning and when to use each type, and the restrictions and limitations of partitioning.

The sildes are available at http://www.technocation.org/files/doc/2009_01_Partitioning.pdf. The 380.6 Mb .mov movie (1 hr 16 min) can be played directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/671/play or downloaded at http://technocation.org/node/671/download.

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We were running Drupal benchmarks to measure the performance of Drupal/Galera cluster and were surprised to find locking sessions (LOCK TABLES...UNLOCK) in the SQL profile. Locking sessions were originally left out of Galera supported feature set, but now we need to re-consider our policy a bit. Apparently, we are going to encounter more applications, which were originally written for MYISAM usage, but were later migrated to INNODB. As a rule of thumb, it seems that if application can be configured to both MyISAM and INNODB usage, it quite probably uses locking sessions as well.

Eager Replication
We have in the past, implemented one pretty effective method for replicating locking sessions in synchronous cluster. This, "eager replication" method, used transaction sequencing from group communication level to order the table locks. However, the implementation required eventually complete re-write of thr locking …

Did you know that MySQL has stated principles for its products as well as for its employees. It's a bit more substantial than your average mission statement blah ;-)
Every person who once signed up to be an employee of the original MySQL AB essentially also signed for upholding these principles, but perhaps you haven't seen them. Since it is public info, why not take a peek!

To me personally, both lists have always felt mainly like a written down description of how Monty (MySQL's original author and co-founder of MySQL AB) likes to work (and I do see that as a positive thing). The product ones get quoted often enough, but not the employee ones, so here's they are:
We want the people working on MySQL to:

• Subscribe to the Open Source philosophy
• Aim to be good citizens
• Prefer partners that share our values and mindset …

EnterpriseDB and Ingres just reported banner years, suggesting that open source is thriving beyond MySQL in the database market.

The point is part of the line.
The line is part of the circle.
The circle is the wheel of the car.
The point is that we will never know what the point is.