Update: If you are interested in automating this task with a simple Perl script, I created one here.

Say, you had a MySQL database that stores texts in languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic, and so on, and recently there was a server move or upgrade, and all of sudden text in the above mentioned languages didn’t display properly. What do we do to fix it then?

That was what happened to me recently. My hosting company migrated this site to a new LAMP server, and managed to screw up the character set so my Chinese entries looked like gibberish. I spent some time researching, and was able to convert my WordPress database character set to utf8 successfully. Below is the notes for my own consumption. If it helps you, dear reader, all the better!

Please follow the procedures below step by …

It’s been a crazy month here at Kickfire which is why I have fallen a bit behind on my postings – a new product, new customers, a new CEO, a new relationship with Sun/MySQL, a new website … and a new baby girl! Here’s a quick summary of all that has been going on:

New Product
We quietly came out of beta a month ago. After nearly two and half years in development, this is a great achievement for the company. The team took on a hugely ambitious project: to re-design how SQL is processed today to be able to deliver an order of magnitude improvement in price/performance relative to any other data warehousing solution on the market. This project involved bringing together over 50 of the industry’s smartest database and hardware engineers to build a new type of database machine that includes the world’s first SQL chip, an ultra-modern database kernel, and advanced system features. Kickfire’s four data …

I have calmed down after my frustration of a few days ago.  My conscience says I was being unfair to Sun’s employees, who are just trying to make a business succeed in difficult times, and who support OpenSQL Camp, Maatkit, MySQL, and many other things that are dear to me.  To those I treated harshly, [...]

Repeating the meme from Kees:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

My result:

“Now, while doing this, draw the number six (6) in the air with your right hand.” - Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, Andy Hunt.

I was really lucky on this one - I have so many boring books, this one happened to be on the top of the pile next to me.

Recently, some tests were conducted at Sun that show that MySQL with ZFS can scale on our servers with Cool Threads technology.  These tests show that MySQL can scale on these systems with  little tuning expertise.  The tests used database sharding and application partitioning to obtain the optimal configuration.  Some details of the tests can be found here. 

Sun systems with CoolThreads technology deliver breakthrough performance, scalability and reliability with dramatic space, power, and cost efficiency on Sun's proven open source chip multithreading (CMT) architecture. In addition, you get open source Solaris 10 OS and virtualization technology at no extra cost.  Take the Sun savings challenge …

Thought I would throw this out here so I remember it, and it maybe useful for someone else.  During a session here at Sun’s CEC conference one of the presenter was talking about setting CPU affinity for hardware interrupts.  This made me think of our hack ( workaround ) for innodb scalability on a 16 core machine ( set the mysqld affinity to cpu’s 0-7 or 8-15 ).   In order to get the top performance out of a 16 core machine we probably want to ensure everything else goes to the cpu’s not set to be servicing mysql.   So a quick google search came up with this article on setting the affinity for IRQ’s in the linux kernel.   So with a 16 core box, I could set the affinity for Mysqld to cpu’s 8-15, while setting the affinity of the interrupts to something in the 0-7 range.

Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems, has clarified the company's business model for open-source software, including its MySQL database, suggesting that Sun's revenue hinges on delivering, "for a fee, the means to create value between deploy and scale, for those who need it."

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I took a 1-hour long session (was supposed to be 2 hours, but my planned agenda was exhausted) for students of engineering colleges across Karnataka studying in colleges under VTU. The session was delivered via EDUSAT under the Sun Microsystems- VTU EDUSAT e-learning programme.

It was fun. However, the fact that there was no interaction with the students felt a little dumb. (I was speaking on the camera which was beamed live)

These are my slides:

• http://blogs.sun.com/amitsaha/resource/MySQL/MySQL-Intro-features-benefits.pdf

I also put together a short Quiz for them:

• …