After a long but nice ferry trip (9hrs) from Port Melbourne, quick pizza dinner and another 3hrs or so drive from Devonport, we arrived in Hobart late last night (Hobart is located on the Southern coast of Tasmania). For some reason pretty much all accomodation was booked out for that one night, but one of our group found an apartment earlier with extra rooms so we even had space to put up additional linux.conf.au travellers we met on the ferry. The conference accomodation for most of us only starts on the Sunday.

It's nice to be back in Hobart and Tasmania in general. There's even more fresh air here (like New Zealand) and space and lots of nature (as long as bloody Gunns doesn't chop it all down to feed its stupid papermills). Last time here was several years ago when I was invited by the Tasmanian government …

I have had a number of request for help on how to use the DBT2
tree I'm maintaining on www.iclaustron.com. There is an extensive
set of scripts used to make it very easy to run DBT2 runs and
to start and stop cluster nodes and MySQL Servers. I personally
use it also to start MySQL Servers and clusters also when not
using DBT2.

However these scripts haven't had an overall description yet
although each component is very thoroughly documented by
using --help on the scripts (I tend to document very
heavily these things since I otherwise forget it myself).

Now I added a new README file README-ICLAUSTRON which
explains which scripts are used and their relation
and which configuration files to set-up and a
pointer to example configuration files.

Hopefully this will make it easier to use DBT2,
particularly DBT2 for MySQL Cluster. …

As I’ve written in my previous post “1/3 Implementing an AutoSuggest feature using MySQL fulltext indices”, it’s possible to use the MySQL/MyISAM full-text index to extract search words for an AutoSuggest feature with great performance (because the index tree is used actually). This tool, called myisam_suggest, is my first implementation of this. Download Here: myisam_suggest.c [...]

The MySQL full-text index Current MySQL versions provide a full-text index (FTI) which is generally used to index and search MyISAM (the default storage engine in MySQL) tables like this: SELECT id, content FROM documents WHERE MATCH(content) AGAINST ("tes*" IN BOOLEAN MODE) Internally, every indexed (text) column of a row is splitted into its words. [...]

Monty Taylor recently took my import progress patch and ported it into Drizzle.  I managed to spot a small bug in his conversion so took a bzr branch and fixed it.  I then spoke to Jay Pipes who suggested I could improve it by making it take a parameter which would be the number of lines per output (rather than fixed at 1000 for the original patch).

After I made the improvement I have started taking on more work for the Drizzle project in my spare time and have somehow got myself into the top 20 contributors.  But that is another story.

I have now taken my work on Drizzle …

Today's Competitive Global Economy Environment for DBAsWith today's competitive environments, the more marketable you are the better. Being flexible and being able to support different solutions is very important. Environments surrounding databases are getting more complex, so increasing your expertise in different areas is important. There are a lot of options with application servers,

MySQL 5.1 went GA (Generally Available) recently. Can I let you in on a secret? Promise you won't tell anyone? The MySQL.com websites have been using 5.1 for 18 months now. It is a little known fact that quite often before even beta testers get hold of our software that little bunch of anarchists that is the web team get their grubby paws on it. But we aren't the only ones. In fact there were over 2 million downloads of 5.1 before it went GA. And 11 point releases.

Why do we do this? Well for one thing the web team is like any team of highly motivated, intelligent computer geeks and we love new toys. More than that we like to try and break them. But we are also responsible and don't like software that breaks and brings our websites down. It is a delicate balancing act, but one which we are committed to in order to
improve the product and as a side benefit get to play with all the new features.

MySQL depends a lot on its web …

Over a month ago I applied for a real port for Gearman (before the default port was conflicting with AFS). After some back and forth with IANA:

We have assigned the following registered port number to 'gearman'
with you as the point of contact:

gearman         4730/tcp   Gearman Job Queue System
gearman         4730/udp   Gearman Job Queue System

See: http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

I’ll be updating this in the C version for the next release (which will trickle down into the MySQL UDFs). I’m also in the process of notifying other API and server maintainers to get their ports updated. So, if you use Gearman, watch out for possible port mismatches while the various packages transition!

Check the blueprint document on how to use DTrace integrated with MySQL
to fetch useful information that can not be obtained by other

Check the blueprint document on how to use DTrace integrated with MySQL to fetch useful information that can not be obtained by other means:
here

Today marks the one year anniversary of Sun acquiring MySQL, which had the codename "Heineken."  So we had a little reception over at our offices at Sun's Menlo Park campus.  We also opened up a beer called "Sandels" which was the codename for our IPO project.

No doubt there will be more drinking this evening.