One of the sessions at DrupalCon I attended was Larry Garfield's talk about "Drupal Databases: The Next Generation", which gave me a good insight into the current state of the Drupal database layer and how they plan to overhaul it for Drupal 7. The key points that I took away:

• A new API based on PDO
• Object-oriented, requiring PHP5
• Support for using prepared statements
• A unified access API
• A query builder
• More support for other database systems (currently Drupal supports MySQL and PostgreSQL only). In particular, they are …

There are many times when I needed to find out my outgoing (or external) IP for the servers which are behind load balancers or firewalls.  I used to just login to another external server from the server in question and find out by looking at “who” what my external ip is.  Even though it works and I am so used to it, today I decided to figure out a more graceful way of finding my outgoing ip.  As most of us already know, whatismyip.com is the quickest way to find out your outgoing ip from the browser.  So I decided to use the same way on the servers.  So I issued a wget:

wget http://www.whatismyip.org

Well that does the trick.  But being lazy as I am, I did not want to have to cat the output file to find out the ip (plus there is no point of creating extra files and doing extra work to remove them).  …

The MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition is in full swing - we've already received a number of cool and interesting submissions, which we will turn into articles that will be published on the MySQL Developer Zone over the course of the coming weeks. Today we received a note from Jakub Vrána from the Prague, Czech republic. He's the author of phpMinAdmin, a MySQL management tool written in PHP. Here's what he wrote:

In the beginning of September 2008, I have implemented MySQL 5.1 Events to the database management tool phpMinAdmin. I've used the Windows version of MySQL 5.1.26 for the development.

As phpMinAdmin …

I am tired of writing about Virtual Box, but they have given me an early birthday present.

Virtual Box 2.0 dropped today.  Now I have my 64 bit guests AND apparently the lockup under OS X was a VBox defect of some sort or other, because it does not occur under 2.0.

Now if only the Windows “AMD64″ installer (ie: for the 64 bit host) would execute I might actually be able to use this thing for something serious.  Either it dislikes Intel CPUs or dislikes 32 bit Vista; VMWare doesn’t care, and neither do I, so VBox loses again.

Why I'm switching to Google Chrome; hint: it's for the same reason that I originally went to Firefox READ MORE

O'Reilly Media has opened the Call for Participation for the 2009 MySQL Conference & Expo, scheduled for April 20-23, in Santa Clara, California.

Conference program chair Colin Charles and the program committee invite proposals for conference sessions, panel discussions, and tutorials. More than 2,000 attendees are expected to participate in over 120 sessions at next year's event.

Proposals can be submitted here. The deadline runs through October 22, 2008.

Co-presented by O'Reilly Media and Sun Microsystems, the MySQL Conference & Expo is the largest gathering of MySQL developers, users, and DBAs worldwide. The event reflects MySQL's wide-ranging appeal and capabilities. The open atmosphere of the MySQL Conference & Expo helps IT professionals and community members create the best database applications, tools, and software through expert …

There are some good stuff on the horizon! It’s called is is an btrfs (“butter-fs”). It was originally announced/”released” over a year ago by our friends at Oracle and has, in my opinion, not quite received the attention it deserves. I’m keeping a close eye on the very intensive devlopment of this as the feature list is very interesting from several aspects. It’s got some of the big names behind it and will undoubtedly be widely deployed and accepted into the vanilla kernel once stable.

btrfs, like ZFS, implements copy-on-write model, so yes – it will be able to do snapshots! Writeable ones at that. In fact, it’s got the ability to do snapshots of snapshots! Quasi-MVC filesystem! COW unfortunately makes a filesystem more prone to fragmentation, but luckily btrfs comes with …

There are some good stuff on the horizon! It’s called is is an btrfs (“butter-fs”). It was originally announced/”released” over a year ago by our friends at Oracle and has, in my opinion, not quite received the attention it deserves. I’m keeping a close eye on the very intensive devlopment of this as the feature list is very interesting from several aspects. It’s got some of the big names behind it and will undoubtedly be widely deployed and accepted into the vanilla kernel once stable.

btrfs, like ZFS, implements copy-on-write model, so yes – it will be able to do snapshots! Writeable ones at that. In fact, it’s got the ability to do snapshots of snapshots! Quasi-MVC filesystem! COW unfortunately makes a filesystem more prone to fragmentation, but luckily btrfs comes with …

Following up on my Previous Post I decided to do little test to see how accurate stats we can get for for Index Stats created by ANALYZE TABLE for MyISAM and Innodb.

But before we go into that I wanted to highlight about using ANALYZE TABLE in production as some people seems to be thinking I advice to use it.... a lot. In fact I should say I see more systems which have ANALYZE abused - run too frequently without much need than systems which do not run ANALYZE frequently enough.

First it is worth to note MySQL only saves very basic cardinality information for index prefixes for index stats and these rarely change. There is no histograms or any other skew metrics etc. MySQL optimizer also uses number of rows in the table for many decisions but this is computed live (maintained for …

Oddly enough the announcement of the constituent replicator coincides with some MySQL replication problems we’ve been feeling over the last couple of weeks.

… so here are some more thoughts and feature suggestions:

- get this in Drizzle. From what I understand they ripped out replication since the code wasn’t as elegant as the Drizzle core. I’ve heard this echoed by a number of developers so this seems like a good decision.

- Add the ability to promote a slave to a master and re-parent existing slaves to the new master - easily. I think one can do this now with log_slave_updates but it needs to be easier to setup.

- Per-statement synchronous replication support.

This could be done by a comment or …