one of the questionable habits i picked up in the run-up to the election is reading andrew sullivan’s blog at the atlantic. his thoughts about the recent interview with lame-duck president bush and how president bush seemed unable to take any responsibility for his own role for the failings of his presidency reminded me of monty’s thoughts on 5.1 being declared “generally available.”

In all my days at working at MySQL the
LOCK_open mutex have always been a
key mutex to understand, now that I'm
working on scalability improvements of
the server it's as important to change
this mutex into something less contentious.

So last week I finally decided to start
thinking about how we can resolve this
mutex which is at the heart of the MySQL
Server. In principle the idea is that
LOCK_open has been used to protect a
hash table with all the open tables in
the MySQL Server. However it has been
used for many other purposes as well.
So it's not trivial to move around it.

However the main scalability problem
with LOCK_open is the hash lock it
provides. So what to do about it?

My current thinking is that a four-thronged
approach will do the trick.

1) Divide and concquer, perform the …

A feature which hasn't been so public about the implementation
of partitioning is the support for atomicity of many ALTER TABLE
statements using partitioned tables.

This atomicity exists for
ALTER TABLE ADD PARTITION ....
ALTER TABLE REORGANIZE PARTITION ...
ALTER TABLE DROP PARTITION ...
ALTER TABLE COALESCE PARTITION

Given that partitioning often works with very large tables it
was desirable to have a higher level of security for ALTER TABLE
of partitioned tables. To support this a DDL log was implemented.
This DDL log will in future versions be used also for many other
meta data statements. The DDL log will record all files added,
renamed and dropped during an ALTER TABLE command as above.

The design is done in such a way that the ALTER TABLE will either
fail and then all temporary files will be removed (even in …

Its hard to believe but sometimes we create sexy software at MySQL: think of MySQL Proxy, MySQL Workbench or MySQL 5.1! Thank you for the MySQL 5.1 chocolate pie, Santo. When I saw the pie I fell in love with it. You made me start singing It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World and baking another pie…

WARNING: This web site shows pictures of pie baked using a bake your dream girl cake pan. Do not enter, if you do …

As one of the co-founders of the Waffle Grid project, I beam with pride every time I get a stellar benchmark or every time I find a new use for the Waffle.  But as a professional I still have to be critical of all solutions I would recommend or deploy.  One of the big goals of Waffle Grid is to replace disk IO which should be slow with remote memory which should be much faster.  But what happens when the disk is no longer slow?  This leads me to ask myself, is Waffle Grid only good for servers with slower disk?  Or is this a solution that can also help systems with fast disk?  So which should you deploy SSD -vs- Waffle?  Are they competitors?  Or are they complementary technologies?

I am going to say this, in these tests latency is king.  The faster the drives can deliver data, the higher the benchmarks should be.  Basically if my interconnect can deliver faster then the drive can serve up …

Its hard to believe but sometimes we create sexy software at MySQL: think of MySQL Proxy, MySQL Workbench or MySQL 5.1! Thank you for the MySQL 5.1 chocolate pie, Santo. When I saw the pie I fell in love with it. You made me start singing It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World and baking another pie…

WARNING: This web site shows pictures of pie baked using a bake your dream girl cake pan. Do not enter, if you do …

On what was said by Monty.

I think that in any dispute there are never two separate positions; there’s no a “black position”, there’s no a “white position”. I think about a “gray gradient” where there exists several different positions and opinions. Maybe the truth in this case is “gray” colored!
As a good Italian I stay in the middle thinking that there are some truths in the criticism of Monty, but at the same time I think there’s also exaggeration.
But mine is not a relevant opinion! I don’t have a deep knowledge of MySQL AB organization and I don’t know all the facts and the people involved. My contribution to the discussion is very simple and humble, just to say that I’m using 5.1 version since August 2008 in a more than 2 million queries per day production environment and I never experienced a server crash (ok, sometimes it crashed … but that was my own fault!).
For the goals of my …

We decided to join forces with Open Query in sponsoring the Open Source Developer’s Conference 2008 in Sydney that has just started. Here is Arjen’s blog post about it - you can find the details of his presentations there.

What’s Pythian has to do with open source? If you read this blog you already know that quite a few MySQL community leaders and active contributors are working at Pythian and I’m very proud to have such colleagues. You might also know that Pythian’s John Scoles maintains DBD::Oracle Perl package and that …

My CAOS colleague Matt Aslett wrote recently about how we expect to see an uptick in open source merger and acquisition activity given the current economic conditions and bargains for the larger, mostly proprietary players. Matt also discusses the difficulty of further VC funding, though we have seen some significant investment announcements, such as Open-Xchange, Infobright and others. Still, Matt is probably right that funding will be harder to come by for any company, open source or not.

I also continue to see a number of startup and younger open source vendors — would-be fundees — that are opting to hold off on venture funding and stick to building up business, customers and …

People are always asking for this feature from NetBeans. We're working on it, but in the meantime, if you're using MySQL, here is some very simple code to export to CSV. Nice!

http://ariejan.net/2008/11/27/export-csv-directly-from-mysql/