Giuseppe claims he didn’t want to get involved, but this tell-seven-things-about-you game is as fun as it is useless. The rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

So, here come seven completely useless facts about myself:

1. My first programming language was APL, which I learned from my father (1924-2001, worked for IBM Finland 1951-83). The picture is of an APL ball for an IBM electric typing …

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Screen profiles

kirkland reported that he had uploaded a new version of the screen-profiles package to universe which changes the default escape sequence back to ctrl-a. nijaba also implemented a new functionality to allow to customize the escape sequence when choosing the screen profile. Now that the main inclusion report has been accepted kirkland is planning to seed the screen-profile by making it a dependency of the screen package.

kirkland plans to start a discussion about enabling screen by default on server installs. He will outline the implementation details in a post to the ubuntu-server mailing list to …

Follow up from Part 1.

Attended "What Developers should care about MySQL ?" by Colin and "Groovy and Grails" by Chuk-munn Lee.

I enjoyed both the talks for different reasons. Colin's talk explained the pluggable storage engine architecture that is unique to MySQL (pronounced my-ess-kew-ell, not my-sequel). It was interesting to know that the different storage engines can be picked a la carte based upon the requirements. The performance comparison for INSERTs was 5x between MyISAM, InnoDB and Archive storage engines. But then InnoDB provide transactions and other goodies. Multiple performance tuning tips such …

Follow up from Part 1.

Attended "What Developers should care about MySQL ?" by Colin and "Groovy and Grails" by Chuk-munn Lee.

I enjoyed both the talks for different reasons. Colin's talk explained the pluggable storage engine architecture that is unique to MySQL (pronounced my-ess-kew-ell, not my-sequel). It was interesting to know that the different storage engines can be picked a la carte based upon the requirements. The performance comparison for INSERTs was 5x between MyISAM, InnoDB and Archive storage engines. But then InnoDB provide transactions and other goodies. Multiple performance tuning tips such …

At OpenSQL Camp in November we presented a challenge to insert one billion rows, maintaining indexes, into a MySQL table. The best results we have seen are:

In the last few months Sun has expanded significantly our online outreach efforts and we currently have (at least :-)) three Webinar series that cover the GlassFish products. Going through them:

After suggestions by Sinisa on ways to improve my mysqldump progress patch I finally got around to working on these improvements.

This new patch has an extra parameter --show-progress-size which by default is set to 10,000.  So when --verbose is used, every 10,000 lines you will get a status output of the number of rows for a particular table dumped.  So what you should see is something along these lines:

shell> mysqldump -A --verbose >out.sql
-- Connecting to localhost...
-- Retrieving table structure for table testing...
-- Sending SELECT query...
-- Retrieving rows...
-- 10000 of ~94347 rows dumped for table `testing`
-- 20000 of ~94347 rows dumped for table `testing`
-- 30000 of ~94347 rows dumped for table `testing`
-- 40000 of ~94347 rows dumped for table `testing`
...

shell> mysqldump -A --show-progress-size=1500 --verbose >out.sql
-- Connecting to localhost...
-- Retrieving table structure for table testing...
-- …

The Sun Tech Days Singapore started earlier this morning - over 1100 developers, an outstanding audience!!!

The kick off had a good local flare when the Gods of Longevity, Fortune, and Prosperity (Fu Lu Shou) showed up to start the event ;-) The build up to their appearance was really exciting as evident from the video below:

This particular event will also be recorded in Singapore Book of Records for the largest numbers of Sun developers playing a rattle together :) Here are some pictures from the event:

A Toshiba laptop and an iPod was …

Just before Christmas, I was working with a client that needed to insert more than a billion rows into a NDB table. The cluster was big,
14 nodes, and after a few hundred millions rows, we got the following error:

2008-12-09 18:28:52 [ndbd] INFO     -- dbacc/DbaccMain.cpp
2008-12-09 18:28:52 [ndbd] INFO     -- DBACC (Line: 5274) 0x0000000e
2008-12-09 18:28:52 [ndbd] INFO     -- Error handler shutting down system
2008-12-09 18:28:53 [ndbd] INFO     -- Error handler shutdown completed - exiting
2008-12-09 18:28:56 [ndbd] ALERT    -- Node 10: Forced node shutdown completed. Caused by error 2304: 'Array index out of range(Internal error, programming error or missing error message,

which looks like a bug in the NDB kernel.  In fact, it is not really a bug.  This error is the …

A year ago this past week (on January 16, 2008), Sun Microsystems announced a historic deal to acquire MySQL AB for a billion dollars. Since then, MySQL-ers (aka Sun Dolphins) have settled in with Sun folks. While Sun has had an influence on MySQL, MySQL has also had an influence on several projects within "Sun Classic". Over this week, we hope to explore some of the projects around Sun which use MySQL and how the acquisition has helped bring us all closer together.

Today we talk to Detlef Ulherr and Thorsten Fruehauf, engineers working on Solaris Cluster and its Open Source sibling, Open HA Cluster.