When your goal is to optimize application performance it is very important to understand what goal do you really have. If you do not have a good understanding of the goal your performance optimization effort may well still bring its results but you may waste a lot of time before you reach same results as you would reach much sooner with focused approach.

The time is critical for many performance optimization tasks not only because of labor associated expenses but also because of the suffering - slow web site means your marketing budget is wasted, customer not completing purchases, users are leaving to competitors, all of this making the time truly critical matter.

So what can be the goal ? Generally I see there are 2 types of goals seen in practice. One is capacity goal this is when the system is generally overloaded so everything is slow, when you're just looking to see how you can get most out of your existing …

You can read my conversation with Lenz Grimmer or look at other interviews conducted by the MySQL community team. 

Just in time for Christmas: After the usual 2-week beta test phase, we can now announce the new "final" XAMPP version for public downloading.

In both versions we updated Apache (2.2.11), MySQL (5.1.30), PHP (5.2.8) and phpMyAdmin (3.1.1). The Linux version also contains the new MySQL storage engine PBXT (1.0.07-rc).

With this version our support of PHP 4 ends and from this version on PHP 4 is no longer shipped with XAMPP. After PHP 4 was officially no longer supported since the end of 2007 this was just a matter of time.

On the other hand XAMPP now supports the brand-new MySQL 5.1 database generation. If you're upgrading from MySQL 5.0 please take a look at MySQL's official …

I’ve been thinking about the business of what’s variously come to be called commercial open-source and enterprise open-source. I’m interested in the gestalt – the product, development processes, marketing, licensing and so on. MySQL has tried many different ways to earn money. These include dual licensing, support subscriptions, a knowledgebase, consulting, an Enterprise/Community split, trying to make parts of the server closed-source, making tools in a split community/premium version, building functionality externally in closed-source software where they can charge for it, and most recently creating three tiers of functionality for the MySQL 5.

During my day-to-day activities, I use the Bash shell a lot. My #1 policy is to optimize the most frequently used activities as much as possible, so Iâ€ve compiled these handy bash shortcuts and hints (tested in SecureCRT on Windows and Konsole on Linux). The article only touches on the default bash mode – emacs, not vi. If you havenâ€t specifically assigned your shell mode to vi (set –o vi), youâ€re almost certainly using the emacs mode. Learn these and your shell productivity will skyrocket, I guarantee it.

Update #1: In response to a few people saying this list is too short and “[he] could've added something to it, to atleast make it look longer†(quote from one of Stumbleupon reviewers), I want to clarify something. I deliberately did not include …

How To Back Up MySQL Databases With mylvmbackup On Ubuntu 8.10

mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly creating MySQL backups. It uses LVM's snapshot feature to do so. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, creates a snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. This article shows how to use it on an Ubuntu 8.10 server.

Our fiendish plot to provide advanced open source replication for MySQL and Oracle took another step forward yesterday. The Tungsten Replicator beta-3 build is available for download on our Forge site. This build is fully open source. Tungsten Replicator provides heterogeneous replication from MySQL to Oracle, seamless failover from a master to one of several slaves, event checksums, event filtering hooks, and a number of other useful replication features for MySQL and Oracle previously not offered outside of commercial products.

The beta-3 build has a number of important improvements:

• MySQL 5.1 row replication is largely working. We are still seeing problems with datetime and timestamp replication but most other datatypes work.
  
• The …

A lot of people keep asking me about the status of HSCALE so I thought it is best to just write about it.
Since I am waiting for the next GPL release of MySQL Proxy I concentrate on other things, both project-related and not project-related.

Continuous integration and test strategy enhancements

First of all there is a CI server up for almost 3 months now. Check out teamcity.hscale.org (Login as guest user). I also introduced a lint-process to discover bugs in my LUA code which arise mostly by mistyping variable names. By the way: You should definitely have a lint-like process in place if you are doing LUA programming or other languages of that type. It helps a lot.

What’s in svn trunk? Multiple backends

The current status is this: Spreading across multiple backends is fully …

You can read my conversation with Lenz Grimmer or look at other interviews conducted by the MySQL community team. 

You can read my conversation with Lenz Grimmer or look at other interviews conducted by the MySQL community team.