CA and IBM, two of the so-called Big Four in systems management software, announced this week a federated configuration management database (CMDB) system for interoperability of their software. Something like this comoing from two of Big Four (BMC, CA, HP and IBM) wouldn’t normally hold much meaning for open source players such as GroundWork, Hyperic and Zenoss, but it actually does for a couple of reasons.

First, part of the technology that CA and IBM are using to link up their systems management software, which allows it to share information between the two CMDBs, is actually open source software itself from the Eclipse Cosmos Project. CA and IBM said the Eclipse Cosmos software accelerated implementation of the CMDB Federation (CMDBf) specification and the two vendors plan to contribute code …

I know this is not one of my normal type of posts, but I really wanted to get this out to raise some awareness on the topic of cancer which most of us do not think about because it does not affect us directly.  It is sad how many people are affected by cancer and how many people die every year because of losing fight with cancer.

It is wonderful when famous people who can help make a difference do things to help a cause.  One of those people is Lance Armstrong, winner of Tour de France a record-breaking seven consecutive years.  He is also a cancer survivor.   Today I found out that Lance Armstrong announced that he is coming back to professional cycling in order to raise cancer awareness. Below is the full press release from …

Dana Blankenhorn suggests that add-ons make good business sense for Acquia and other open-source vendors, and he's dead-on. Zimbra climbed to $20 million in just two years on the back of a successful add-on strategy to its open-source Microsoft Exchange killer. SugarCRM is doing well with such a strategy, too.

It's not, however, simply a way to make money. It's also a way to better define and feed community.

Seem counterintuitive? Perhaps it is for those companies like Red Hat, Acquia, and others that are built to harvest preexisting open-source communities (Linux and Drupal, respectively). But for companies like Zimbra, MySQL, etc., an add-on strategy enables a vendor to focus wholly on delivering a quality open-source project while simultaneously creating a robust, scalable business.

…

OK, I'm not really bilingual at all. But, fortunately for our French dolphins out there, some French MySQL users have translated some articles on MySQL into French! Developpez.com, a French-language developer website, now has translated my Rolling Sums and Aggregates in MySQL article from a number of months ago. Thanks to Joris Crozier and Arnaud Feltz for doing the translation! If I could remember anything from my years of French class in high school, I suppose I could read the article, but alas, the mind has a habit of forgetting those things which we don't use on a daily basis.

Apart from my article, there are lots of other MySQL resources …

Although we had previously planned to make MySQL 5.1.26 RC into the GA or production release, we've decided to instead incorporate two more release candidates into the schedule. The goal is to make sure that MySQL 5.1 is absolutely rock solid, even if it takes a few more months to release it as GA. Given the additional two releases candidates, I expect MySQL 5.1 will GA in late November of this year.

First of all, there will be several dozen additional bug fixes included in a 5.1.28 release expected to be available mid-September. Many of these bug fixes were completed and queued up ready to go after the GA release as part of our monthly rapid update cycle. Since the GA obviously didn't happen, we're incorporating these into the RC immediately. The bug fixes generally fall into three areas:
-potential crash bugs
…

This week I will be the moderator for a MySQL Webinar How to secure MySQL data and achieve PCI compliance being held Thursday, September 11, 2008, 10:00 am PST, 1:00 pm EST, 18:00 GMT.

Recently I wrote about Do you store credit cards in your MySQL Database?. If you do, then PCI Compliance is not something you can ignore.

This webinar will not only be discussing PCI Compliance, but also MySQL data security. Our panel includes Didier Godart from MasterCard Worldwide, one of three members who drafted the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard 1.0.

For more information on the various PCI Compliance and Encryption options for MySQL , check out the …

I was wondering for quite a while if MySQLs C-API (libmysqlclient) can really do async queries and where it is lacking support.

Scanning through the source (sql/client.c) you see:

int mysql_real_query(MYSQL *mysql, const char *query, ulong length)
{

  if (mysql_send_query(mysql,query,length))
    return 1;

  return((int) (*mysql->methods->read_query_result)(mysql));
}

Digging a bit deeper you discover that mysql_send_query() and mysql_read_query_result() are public, but undocumented. Well, but that doesn't stop us.

When I talk about async queries I mean:

• being able to issue several queries in parallel without using threads

That is usually what you need in event-driven applications and allows you to create parallel application without having to use too many system resources (memory, threads, ...).

As long as you …

Salle (MySQL EMEA Support Leader) just told me over IRC: “One has to be crazy to do the job Kaj is doing :)”. While it may not be mandatory, it does help. It also helps me in my free time, where I just climbed Mt Blanc with my fourteen year old son.

Die-hard marathoners or mountaineers I recommend to scroll towards the bottom. There, I have an account of the exact times and heights of ascent, how to survive Refuge Gouter etc. But let’s start from the beginning, in the spirit of the http://xkcd.com/77/ web comic “bored with the Internet”.

It all starts with a leisurely walk up the Gran Paradiso, 4061 m.

The usual sight is the heels of my son.

A MySQL cap protects me against excessive Sun.

It also helps when it’s snowy.

Valley panorama.

Specifically this view, of my son’s heels, was next to mandatory as I was …

I recently released some RAID testing I did using the sysbench testing framework.  In light of the recent attention paid to multi-core CPU scalability, I have been working on some related tests trying to identify sources of contention using that same set of tests.

After effectively turning off every single innodb safety setting (like flush_log_at_trx_commit, checksums, doublewrite, etc.), and not seeing any real performance increase, I started to wonder what was going on.  
Surely my test client server wasn't the problem, it had plenty of idle CPU according to top, right?  Wrong.
I've been able to drive more QPS to my mysql test servers by starting up parallel sysbench tests from multiple test servers, but using (more or less) the same number of total test threads.  

read more