Yes, I have turned into the stereotype called a scrum-master. I haven't really done the infamous 2 day course on it to be certified, but apparently I read enough about it and practiced some of the principles to know a few things (or at least to think I know).


In my company..

In my company, we do use scrum with our development team. In most cases it works very well and the management are very happy. In some cases, where emergency support is involved, not so much, but they still like the structure of it and the fact that people commit to finishing things.

In all cases, very little testing is being applied and almost no documentation is written. I do realize that in the case of documentation, agile is suppose to cut down on those, but some form of documentation or changing some charts will be fine by me. In the case of testing, I think since I made a fuss about it, more testing has been done. But, …

I got some really awesome feedback from Giuseppe (the Data Charmer) in my preivous post and it gave me a few ideas I thought I would share. One of the really nice things he did in his article about partitioning was to test partitions with the ARCHIVE engine. His results were mixed (and, actually, so were mine), but I did want to give it a spin. Here is what I ended up with:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS Logger;
CREATE TABLE `Logger` (
  `timestampOccurred` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  `dateOccurred` date NOT NULL,
  `session` char(32) DEFAULT NULL,
  `host` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `sslMode` enum('enabled','disabled') DEFAULT 'enabled', …

“There are 10 types of people in the world — those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”

The term “binary” in MySQL has many different meanings. How many can you come up with? I have 6, but I am willing to believe there are more!

0) “Binary distribution” is the name for the package that contains a binary. Another use is “binary installation” but that’s pretty much the same usage pattern as “binary distribution”, so I won’t count “binary installation” as a separate usage.
1) “Server binary” or “client binary” is the actual program (mysqld, mysql).
2) “Binary format” is a compressed format. For example, DECIMAL is stored in a “binary format” — each group of nine digits is compressed into 4 bytes.
3) “Binary log” is the change log. You can argue that this is an extension of #3, because the binary log is a compressed …

So, I mentioned earlier that I was looking at Infobright's Brighthouse technology as a storage backend for heaps and heaps of traffic and user data from Habbo. Turns out it works fine (now that it's in V3 and supports more of the SQL semantics), and we took it into use. Been pretty happy with that, and I expect to talk more about the challenge and our solution at the next MySQL Conference in April 2009.

However, our DWH team needs extra help. If you're interested in solving business analytics problems by processing lots of data and the idea of working in a company that leads the virtual worlds industry excites you, …

There were a lot of great stories and sessions at the Sun CEC 2008 conference. The MySQL sessions were some of the most popular sessions of the conference. My focus was on delivering sessions that would teach Sun engineers and partners why MySQL is exploding in the market place. Additional sessions developed specific MySQL DBA skills for Sun engineers. More details can be found at:http://

Recently I burned a copy of OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC1 and used it with Songbird (using pkg install SUNWsongbird)  and Fluendo MP3 Decoder (which is free for OpenSolaris),  Flash and soon I had a setup in my bedroom which I love to call OpenSolaris Home Theatre Edition that I used to listen to my songs collection and watch online shows that I controlled via Remote Desktop  which to me was a serious contender to those Media Centers out there. 

However I realized that while I wanted to …

Finally managed to upload the photos from Open SQL Camp to Flickr... btw below is the photo of a very bashful Baron receiving his surprise signed shirt from the gathering for all his hard work in helping it come together. I also want to note some thanks to everyone else who contributed in making it a success. Very impressive, very useful, very fun.

I've always been intrigued by the FIRST_ROWS hint, so I paid special attention when we reached it in the 11g SQL Tuning class. But I'm still puzzled.The course notes said that although you shouldn't be using hints generally, when you do, FIRST_ROWS is the most useful of the hints (in the form FIRST_ROWS(n) where you specify how many rows to optimize for). Also that it's not effective when the

Yang's departure opens the door for improved execution. Any takers? READ MORE

I've now been playing with MySQL Enterprise Monitor in its latest guise (which includes the Query Analyzer) for a number of days. To be honest, this is pretty amazing stuff.

Once installed, all you have to do is point your applications to port 4040 on the database server instead of the default of port 3306 and in a few minutes you'll start to see the queries being logged in the Query Analyzer tab. You can sort them by database, by execution time, by execution count, or any of the other table headings in the output. You can also filter by partial query as well as a variety of other filters.

"Ho hum" I hear you say? Yes you could probably just take a look at the processlist on your db server to see what it is doing now, but the statistics Query Analyzer provides can be extremely powerful. Two examples:

#1 - Badly performing query

I installed Quan (Query Analyzer) and within about 20 minutes it became clear I …