A while ago I wrote about MySQL 5.1 information schema plug-ins.

At the time, I wrote a plug-in to report the contents of the query cache, but for all kinds of reasons, I never found the time to write a decent article about it, nor to release the code.

I am not sure if I'll ever find the time to write that article, but I just tidied up the code, and installed it in a new MySQL 5.1.26-rc server. It seems to work there, so I put the code up on the web.

Inside the source file, there's instructions to build and deploy it. If all goes well, you can do …

drizzle is an interesting new development in the mysql landscape. brian aker, who came along to sun microsystems in the acquisition but is actually now part of sun labs, not the database group, has taken the mysql server and started to strip it down to the bare metal. he isn’t working alone, of course, but has picked up some contributors during the stealthy period before they announced it at oscon on tuesday.

if you were paying attention the other day, you may have dug around my launchpad code page and noticed that i had a branch of drizzle where i was applying some fixes to make it build on mac os x. that should be merged into the main tree soon, so that branch will soon be retired. i’m not sure what i might try to do next.

drizzle isn’t something i am …

There's a fine line between love and hate, you see
Can't wait to late, but baby I'm on it


(From: "Liberation" by Outkast)

Suppose you need to build a MySQL server with the same options as a pre-built one, distributed through the MySQL download site.

Sounds strange?

Well, maybe, but that's what you need if you want to compile certain MySQL 5.1 plug-ins so that they'll will play nice with such a pre-built server.

Some plug-ins depend on nothing more but the plugin.h header file, but for example storage engine plug-ins require things way beyond that. If you want to compile those yourself, you are required to first build a …

In this blog I will talk about how we (the Sun/MySQL Performance Team) eliminated the need for a lock to get better scalability with MySQL 5.1.24+.

While comparing sysbench runs using two different versions of MySQL 5.1, I noticed a big difference in the system utilization. One version had much more idle time than the other. This difference was much more apparent with high thread counts on machines with lots of CPU. A look at the system calls showed a large number of lwp_park system calls. That is, threads were being put to sleep.

bash # $ dtrace -qn 'syscall:::entry{@c[probefunc]=count()}' -n tick-5s'{trunc(@c, 10);exit(0)}'

  p_online                                                       1535
  ioctl                                                          2255
  fcntl                                                          6134
  priocntlsys                                                    6462
  write …

Project: MySQL Forge RSS/Atom feeds

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

* Installing SeleniumRC and exercise with its functionality.
* Write new PHPUnit tests
* Final merge for RSS/Atom feeds in BZR trunk

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

* None

KEY CONCERNS

* Merging existing PHPUnit tests with SeleniumRC is harder then I expected it to be.

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

* Integrating PHPUnit tests into SeleniumRC
* Cleaning up the mess from the different branches

My editor Andy Oram recently sent me an ACM article on BASE, a technique for improving scalability by being willing to give up some other properties of traditional transactional systems.

It’s a really good read. In many ways it is the same religion everyone who’s successfully scaled a system Really Really Big has advocated. But this is different: it’s a very clear article, with a great writing style that really cuts out the fat and teaches the principles without being specific to any environment or sounding egotistical.

He mentions a lot of current thinking in the field, including the CAP principle, which Robert Hodges of Continuent first turned me onto a couple months ago. …

Well, nobody from Sun showed up in person, but we got a great rendition of “Where were you when you heard THE NEWS that Sun bought MySQL?” from Mark Rubin, the MySQL Sales Engineer for the New England area, and from Giuseppe Maxia, who revealed something very interesting and riveting.

From there, Giuseppe gave a short talk on what it’s like to work at MySQL, and then we moved on to the topic of the user group meeting, “What is MySQL Cluster Good For?”

The slides for the talk are downloadable in PDF Format 61kB and Flash (SWF) format, 31kB

The video can be played at http://technocation.org/node/572/play and …

Well, nobody from Sun showed up in person, but we got a great rendition of "Where were you when you heard THE NEWS that Sun bought MySQL?" from Mark Rubin, the MySQL Sales Engineer for the New England area, and from Giuseppe Maxia, who revealed something very interesting and riveting.

From there, Giuseppe gave a short talk on what it's like to work at MySQL, and then we moved on to the topic of the user group meeting, "What is MySQL Cluster Good For?"

The slides for the talk are downloadable in PDF Format 61kB and Flash (SWF) format, 31kB

read more

The last keynote of Tuesday evening at OSCon 2008 was entitled “Temporarily Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…..Made Easy!”

Damian Conway is a speaker that should not be missed. He spends his time hacking perl to do fascinating and obscure feats of technology such as time travel. This video is just over an hour of rolling laughter that will entertain you into realizing what a genius Damian Conway is.

Now, most of my exposure is within the MySQL Community, so if folks could pass the links to the video along to other communities, that would be great.

(This video is at 1.0 Mb/sec. Watch the video online at http://technocation.org/node/571/play or download it at …

The last keynote of Tuesday evening at OSCon 2008 was entitled "Temporarily Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces.....Made Easy!"

Damian Conway is a speaker that should not be missed. He spends his time hacking perl to do fascinating and obscure feats of technology such as time travel. This video is just over an hour of rolling laughter that will entertain you into realizing what a genius Damian Conway is.

Now, most of my exposure is within the MySQL Community, so if folks could pass the links to the video along to other communities, that would be great.

read more