Well, after I talked about the Blue Screen of Death during the Olympics, arstechnica mentioned it.
































The more important point though, is the discussion in the comments.
Here are the theories as to why the BSOD happened:
1) Hard disk failure
2) Pirated copy of Windows with not all the right updates
3) …

Should you use memcached? Should you just shard mysql more?
Memcached's popularity is expanding its use into some odd places. It's becoming an authoritative datastore for some large sites, and almost more importantly it's sneaking into the lowly web startup. This is causing some discussion.

Most of whom seem to be missing the point. In this post I attempt to explain my point of view for how memcached should really influence your bouncing baby startups, and even give some pointers to the big guys who might have trouble seeing the forest through the trees.

Using memcached does not scale your website! …

Should you use memcached? Should you just shard mysql more?
Memcached's popularity is expanding its use into some odd places. It's becoming an authoritative datastore for some large sites, and almost more importantly it's sneaking into the lowly web startup. This is causing some discussion.

Most of whom seem to be missing the point. In this post I attempt to explain my point of view for how memcached should really influence your bouncing baby startups, and even give some pointers to the big guys who might have trouble seeing the forest through the trees.

Using memcached does not scale your website! …

So, I wrote about the begining of our wild database issues. Since then, I have been fighting a cold, coaching little league football and trying to help out in getting our backup solutions working in top shape.  That does not leave much time for blogging.

Never again will we have ONLY a cold backup of anything.  We were moving nightly full database dumps and hourly backups of critical tables over to that box all day long.  Well, when the filesystem fails on both the primary database server and your cold backup server, you question everything.  A day after my marathon drive to fix the backup server and get it up and running, the backup mysql server died again with RAID errors.  I guess that was the problem all along.  In the end, we had to have a whole new RAID subsystem in our backup database server.  So, my …

I had a long flight from Sydney to Edinburgh this weekend, and wanted to answer a common training question - how fast/slow is the stored proc language in MySQL. To do this, I started by stealing an example exercise we have in one of our exercises:


DELIMITER //
CREATE FUNCTION fibonacci(n INT)
RETURNS DOUBLE
NO SQL
BEGIN
DECLARE f1, result DOUBLE DEFAULT 0.0;
DECLARE f2 DOUBLE DEFAULT 1.0;
DECLARE cnt INT DEFAULT 1;
WHILE cnt <= n DO
SET result = f1 + f2;
SET f1 = f2;
SET f2 = result;
SET cnt = cnt + 1;
END WHILE;
RETURN result;
END //


If I run this a few times, here are the results:

mysql> select benchmark(100, fibonacci(40000));
+----------------------------------+
| benchmark(100, …

I had a long flight from Sydney to Edinburgh this weekend, and wanted to answer a common training question - how fast/slow is the stored proc language in MySQL. To do this, I started by stealing an example exercise we have in one of our exercises:


DELIMITER //
CREATE FUNCTION fibonacci(n INT)
RETURNS DOUBLE
NO SQL
BEGIN
DECLARE f1, result DOUBLE DEFAULT 0.0;
DECLARE f2 DOUBLE DEFAULT 1.0;
DECLARE cnt INT DEFAULT 1;
WHILE cnt <= n DO
SET result = f1 + f2;
SET f1 = f2;
SET f2 = result;
SET cnt = cnt + 1;
END WHILE;
RETURN result;
END //


If I run this a few times, here are the results:

mysql> select benchmark(100, fibonacci(40000));
+----------------------------------+
| benchmark(100, …

I’d like to inform members of the MySQL™ Community about an amazing Program @ Sun™ Developer Network: the Campus Ambassador Program.

Quote:
Sun has more than 500 campus ambassadors worldwide who help spread knowledge and awareness of leading-edge technologies such as Java™, NetBeans™ IDE, OpenSolaris™, and many more.

Now that MySQL™ is part of SUN™ I guess that you can be ambassador of MySQL™ too, among the other SUN™’s products.

Quote:
Campus ambassadors are Sun™ Microsystems interns who build a Sun™ community on their school or university campus. They learn all about the latest Sun™ open-source technologies and share that knowledge with fellow students. This includes activities such as starting a Sun™ user group on campus, demonstrating Sun™ technology to fellow students, …

The GSoC is about to end up and it is time to sum up what has been done within the last weeks.

News

*Error handling added. Plugin uses the following mechanism to gather and report errors. When we can't load/open SIGAR library or get any information from it we pass the error to user informing about that. On the other hand when only some information is not available we rather print warning about that to MySQL .err file.
Also we check for return value for each schema_store_record function.

*Plugin has been merged into the MySQL 6 server code. Now you can download and compile the MySQL server with SIGAR plugin already being there.

Downloads

Standalone SIGAR plugin is available at lp:~m.ch/mysql-server/sigar-plugin.
SIGAR plugin merged into the MySQL server is available at lp:~m.ch/mysql-server/mysql-6.0-sigar-plugin.

Updated installation …

I'm off to do some MySQL training in Asia for the rest of the month. One week in Singapore, one week (and the weekend) in Bangalore.

Correction, Asia and the Emerging Markets. Apparently thanks to phenomenal growth, China and India have left Asia in the last few years (in our corporate parlance).

Always good to check flight status before you head to the airport, even (especially?) at 7am when you just checked 6 hours before. I now have 5 extra hours in beautiful John F Kennedy Airport, terminal 7. I haven't seen the new JetBlue terminal, but this one almost makes JFK feel like a major international airport.

Cathay Pacific seems a fine airline, though perhaps …

I'm off to do some MySQL training in Asia for the rest of the month. One week in Singapore, one week (and the weekend) in Bangalore.

Correction, Asia and the Emerging Markets. Apparently thanks to phenomenal growth, China and India have left Asia in the last few years (in our corporate parlance).

Always good to check flight status before you head to the airport, even (especially?) at 7am when you just checked 6 hours before. I now have 5 extra hours in beautiful John F Kennedy Airport, terminal 7. I haven't seen the new JetBlue terminal, but this one almost makes JFK feel like a major international airport.

Cathay Pacific seems a fine airline, though perhaps …