Perfect is the enemy of good enough. This is fertile soil for why people choose to use the simpler, functional, cheaper open source cousins of proprietary feature function behemoths. Don’t get me wrong - too few features / crappy performance you lose customers because you’re not helping people solve problems if you lack too many features.

Recently, I observed a thread at the blog of Goban Saor entitled “Open Source Metrics.”

It basically has turned into a discussion which keeps creeping up about which tool is faster: Talend or Kettle. Which leads me to ask the question: Who Friggin’ Cares?

I’m a Kettle Expert so I think Kettle is Wicked Fast.
If I were a Talend Expert I’d think Talend is Wicked Fast.

Performance for customers who are focused on results, and aren’t …

Admittedly, I'm not a big fan of Webex (in case you don't know what that is (lucky you!), it's a conferencing system), which might explain why Webex seems to hate me sometimes, but today Webex made me laugh. Or maybe cry, I'm not sure after having wasted more than an hour trying to set up Webex' Meeting Center on another computer. (I'm not sure if it's Meeting Center or rather Meeting Manager. Webex doesn't seem to be sure either.)

I'm exclusively running Linux on my computers (currently SuSE 10.3 and 11.0), and so I'm used to web sites not working properly, requiring some weird browser plugin that's hard or impossible to find, or requiring me to tune my browser settings. I'm mostly on Firefox (versions 2 and 3), but sometimes I use other browsers. Today, I had to use another browser.

The trouble started when I tried to set up Webex' Meeting Center, which is the requirement …

The gig I spent in New York, I spent writing a handful of MySQL UDFs. User Defined Functions are written in C, and link into the server binary, and are about as equally performant as the built in native functions.

The UDFs I wrote there take some parameters, marshall them in a way specific to that particular application, and then pass the packed data to the connectionless sendmsg() system call, sending it as a UDP/IP packet. The most interesting part of the actual development process for me was learning the new IPv6 friendly getaddrinfo() APIs.

But the problem solved seems generic enough, I've started a set of UDFs to solve this problem in a generic manner. Pass it a hostname, port number, and piece-of-data, and it will send that piece of data to that host's UDP port.

The only part of the design I'm sticking on, is I don't want to have to call getaddrinfo() every single time around the call loop if I …

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is close, so close that we’re seeding the mirrors (I hope you noted Giuseppe’s blog entry)! So it’s time for Position 4 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

4. Volker Oboda (TeamDrive Systems GmbH, Hamburg, Germany): Using the Pluggable API for TeamDrive. See Volker’s DevZone article, and the Wikipedia article on TeamDrive.

Thanks and congratulations, Volker! Your MySQL Community Contributor T-shirt is underway.

Links:

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The Perfect Server - Fedora 10

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora 10 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable) with PHP5/Ruby/Python, Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.

Here is my list of top ten things to do to deliver a great presentation.Make sure you properly prepare your presentation.Create a great first impression in the first ten seconds.Show enthusiasm and energy for your topic.Speak to the audience. Use the works "I", "you", "we" to engage the audience.Make eye contact with individuals throughout the presentation. Make each person feel as if you are

Being an excellent presenter is one of the most important skills you need to have to be successful in your career. Excellent presenters:Make more money.Have larger social and business networks.Have more opportunities brought to them.Have more opportunities to positively impact other people.At the same time, when lists of top fears are shown, public speaking is always number one on the list of

Continuing on with the discussion on Waffle Grid, I have put together a few interesting benchmarks and wanted to expand on some of the possible deployment scenarios using Waffle.

My home laboratory is rather small, so my datasets are limited in size for the moment. To compensate I have shrunk the data sizes and database setting to simulate as best as I can the performance on a larger system. For this first test I decided to go with a 20 Warehouse DBT2 test, which equates to about 3GB of data in the database. In order to get a better feel for the performance benefit of fitting all most of your data in local memory + remote I setup my local machine with 768M allocated to the innodb buffer pool, and setup a remote machine with 768M allocated to memcached. This should scale up at a somewhat similar rate. What I mean by this is the increase seen with a 3GB dataset with 768/768 local/remote split I should also see with a 6GB dataset with a …

In a nutshell, there is some code for doing delayed replication from inside the server, as an optional parameter to the CHANGE MASTER TO syntax. Maatkit has a script for doing this functionally externally, but an internal solution might be preferred.

If you have an urgent interest in this feature, in either MySQL 5.0 or MySQL 5.1, please contact me to discuss.

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ourdelta/+bug/288898 for more details and current code status (link to relevant OurDelta branch that has the work-in-progress patches).

The MySQL Enterprise Monitor continuously monitors MySQL servers and alerts to potential problems before they impact the system. It helps eliminating security vulnerabilities, improves replication, optimizes performance, and more. Its newest feature, Quan (Query Analyzer), helps identify queries that could be tuned to improve performance. Quan enables database administrators to do the work that would otherwise require hours in just minutes, or even seconds, and it provides ongoing statistical information about the performance of your queries.

MySQL Enterprise Monitor is a commercial offering by Sun Microsystems, and so was the documentation. To help anyone (even if they're not customers) get a better and complete understanding of what exactly MySQL Enterprise Monitor is about and what it can do, we've decided to make its full documentation publicly available. This has been done now, and the docs are part of the MySQL Manual now; see: …