So... last night couple of our application servers crashed. It was apparently due to some new codes that were released although I'm not yet sure. Here is the summarize version of what transpired:

1. Sysadmin got paged that the application servers were not responding.

2. Sysadmin called the DBA team to check the database connections... We said everything looks okay on our end.

3. Sysadmin called the developers next and they found out that the new codes caused the system to go haywire.

4. When the developers tried to revert back the old codes, apparently some of them did not checked-in the older version and it caused a couple missing database privileges to occur. Also, some needed tables were also missing.

5. From that time on, we were really in trouble and sufficient to say it was a very very long night.

The lesson: maybe it is nice to test an integrated backup …

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that the largest professional networking site, LinkedIn has selected Sun's MySQL Enterprise database subscription to support the company's rapid growth. With a network of more than 25 million professionals in more than 170 industries from around the globe and many more joining daily, LinkedIn turned to Sun when it recognized the need to increase the speed and performance of the open source database that powers its public Web site.

I recently posted about the results of the EDB Open Source Survey. It doesn't look like the raw data is going to be released. I was also reading about an O'reilly survey that costs $350 to see. Not that I am opposed to them making money, but I wanted to see the results and I think there are a lot people who feel the same. I have no idea if my survey is anything like O'reilly's.

Anyway, I have created a new survey. It has about 10 demographics questions asking who you are, where you are, what kind of role you have, etc. The rest are related to databases and open source. ALL data, and I mean all of the raw results, will be made available to anyone who wants to see it. I will also do some analysis and I will make that data available to any who want to see that.

All questions on the survey are optional. Feel free to skip …

Someone who should know told me that LinkedIn runs its main application on Oracle. So when I saw the press release about MySQL being their database, I read carefully, and they are not very specific about exactly what MySQL is used for. Depending on how you read it, you could argue that they left open the possibility that the main application database is not MySQL, and the MySQL deal is for something peripheral.

Hooray! The MySQL reference manual has a new search system. It now uses a Google Appliance and the results should be a lot better. The old system was not very helpful. It used to break config variables into multiple words and search on them individually and give a billion results I didn’t care about. I’ve just tried to search for some things like key_buffer_size and got results I think are very useful.

The following Lua scripts are the examples are from my MySQL Proxy @ OSCON 08 presentation.

analyze_query.lua

MySQL Proxy Analyze Query.

Requires MySQL Proxy Logging Module.

What is released is the Version for MySQL 5.0. A generic version for all MySQL versions is not yet released.

histogram.lua

This script is part of the standard MySQL Proxy examples.

Other Scripts

Additional Lua scripts from MySQL forge are available here.

MySQL Proxy got a bunch of changes in the svn-repo over the last weeks. Most of the important changes are in and we are working on making it a good 0.7.0 release.

The important changes are:

• script cache to improve the proxy performance
• central low-level decoding + lua wrappers
• plugins for proxy, admin and debug
• admin plugin is now lua based (more flexible)
• improved test coverage
• close a connection where we did throw a assertion before

Script Cache

In 0.7.0 we added a script-cache to only reload a script when it has changed and use a byte-cached version of it if it is unchanged.

This speeds up all script functionality quite nicely. No extra compile step as we did in 0.6.x when a connection was opened.

Plugins

We moved the proxy functionality into a plugin that can be loaded at startup as needed. We have at …

I have completed a rough draft of the first chapter of "Drupal Performance and Scalability". The first chapter of this online book is divided into four sections, the first of which focuses on the importance of fully defining your performance and scalability goals, helping you to identify what you need to accomplish and how to set concrete and attainable goals. The second section discusses monitoring and measuring your ongoing progress, helping you decide what you need to monitor, and how to monitor it. The …

Sunday morning, and I couldn't help but ponder Michael Tiemann's excellent note on Microsoft's revised (and improved) Open Specification Promise and "what Microsoft can do for open source."

Michael rightly notes that Microsoft's Promise, while certainly improved, still leaves much to be desired. No surprise there, which leads Michael to a thoughtful, probing analysis of what Microsoft could do to fully engage with open-source communities:

Let's think big. The open-source community already has more than a billion lines of source code at its disposal, and it's doubling every 12.5 months, so I think it's fair to say "we don't really need your code." And we also know that money alone is no substitute for the freedom to innovate that we so crave. So what big thing could we do with Microsoft's …

Looks like the guys over at Amazon had fun this week:

We’ve now determined that message corruption was the cause of the server-to-server communication problems. More specifically, we found that there were a handful of messages on Sunday morning that had a single bit corrupted such that the message was still intelligible, but the system state information was incorrect. We use MD5 checksums throughout the system, for example, to prevent, detect, and recover from corruption that can occur during receipt, storage, and retrieval of customers’ objects. However, we didn’t have the same protection in place to detect whether this particular internal state information had been corrupted. As a result, when the corruption occurred, we didn’t detect it and it spread throughout the system causing the symptoms described above. We hadn’t encountered …