So… some colleagues have been experimenting with DTrace a bit, and I’ve been (for a while now) wanting to experiment with it.

The challenge now, instead of in the past, is that I’m setting up a Solaris based system - not getting one premade.

I chose OpenSolaris as I’d previously tried Solaris 10 and just sunk too much time trying to get updates and a development environment installed (another colleague could get the opposite to me going: he got devtools but no updates. at least mine was up to date and secure… but without a compiler).

So… OpenSolaris. It isn’t 100% open, there’s binary only drivers and such… but compared to previous Solaris, a whole lot better. Now, if only it was GPL licensed so we could have cross-pollination with Linux.

I grabbed the 2008.05 ISO as soon (in fact, slightly before) it was released and installed it in VirtualBox.

The installation was shiny …

I am very thrilled to hear that SUN is evaluating joining the SQL standard process. I feel that Peter would be the perfect candidate for this job too, given that he knows the standard inside out. My hope would be that this way the OSDB consortium (yes, I still believe) will get a liason to the SQL standards body. Also this way the much more down to earth real world approach of OSS databases to finding new syntax to add to SQL now has a chance to find its way into newer versions of the standard. It seems things are too late to ensure that SQL2008 will follow the popular LIMIT syntax, but in a way its already a huge leap forward that SQL2008 defines a way …

Cool chair

Originally uploaded by Elliot Murphy

–
Elliot Murphy

whenever i see somebody’s list of essential mac applications, i am always a little surprised at how little overlap it has for me. now that i’ve mostly switched over the new macbook pro, here’s the list of applications that i have installed:

• acorn ($50): this is a nifty little image editing application. in the last few days, i have been using it to mock up shelving layouts for the store.
• bzr (free): this is the distributed version control system of choice at mysql these days.
• busysync: it would be nice to keep my google calender and ical in sync. after giving spanning sync a try for a bit, i am giving this a try as an alternative.
• …

Marktplaats.nl, the largest E-commerce platform in The Netherlands, and part of eBay since 2004, is growing its business on Sun Microsystems' MySQL Enterprise™ Unlimited database subscription offering. To enable their fast growth, protect site uptime, and contain IT expenses, the company is using a flexible and scalable infrastructure based on open source technology such as MySQL™ -– backed by Sun's 24x7 global database support team.

Apparently High Performance MySQL, 2nd Edition is selling quite well — I’m not sure exactly how well — because we’re preparing for a second printing. This makes me very happy. I don’t think they anticipated going back to the press for quite some time.

The book fluctuates between sales rank 1000 and 2000 on Amazon during the day, and has reached as high as 600 or so. This is just phenomenal. The O’Reilly team was psyched when it broke 5000, and so was I — but now we’ve stayed under 2000 for a long time (except when Amazon sold out of it). Frankly I’d have thought that for a niche-market book like this, we’d have been in the 10,000 range or something like that.

Clearly we (the authors, editors, publisher, etc) have done something right! This is a great feeling.

Thanks for sending errata, by the way. I have just completed proofreading the whole …

Make sure you set sp_max_recursion_depth - see the instructions file.

changes:
functions/procedures now take parameters in DB,TABLE order.
demo database removed from sourceforge and added into SVN/release tarball.
GRANT USAGE on *.* to flexviews; is now the default permission level of the flexviews user
I removed the mview_ prefix from filenames.
flexviews.add_table() now checks for the existence of the table and the table's mvlog

get it at http://flexviews.sourceforge.net

Project: MySQL Forge RSS/Atom feeds

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

* Merging feeds with the BZR branch.
* Writing first PHPUnit tests.
* Extending existing PHPUnit testsuite to make it more suitable for use in the BZR branch.
* Reading the SeleniumRC documentation

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

* Installing SeleniumRC and exercise with its functionality.

KEY CONCERNS

* None

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

* Installing SeleniumRC
* Write new PHPUnit tests
* Final merge for RSS/Atom feeds in BZR trunk

The Sphinx project just released version 0.9.8, with many enhancements since the previous release. There’s never been a better time to try it out. It’s really cool technology.

What is Sphinx? Glad you asked. It’s fast, efficient, scalable, relevant full-text searching and a heck of a lot more. In fact, Sphinx complements MySQL for a lot of non-search queries that MySQL frankly isn’t very good at, including WHERE clauses on low-selectivity columns, ORDER BY with a LIMIT and OFFSET, and GROUP BY. A lot of you are probably running fairly simple queries with these constructs and getting really bad performance in MySQL. I see it a lot when I’m working with clients, and there’s often not much room for optimization. Sphinx can execute a subset of such queries very efficiently, due to its smart I/O algorithms and the way it uses memory. By “subset” I mean you don’t get the …

Had an interesting thought today, I wonder how much faster ( if at all ) updating via insert on duplicate key in bulk was compared to individual update statements.  The client  app I was looking at receives updates to a counter from various severs around the world and they are updating a row that contains time metrics.  For instance update traffic set visistcount = visistcount + 1000 where customer = 123 and hour = ‘12′ and date=’7/15/2008′.  These statements are driven by feeds from the various servers, so it lends itself to bulk operations very easily.   It seemed like batching these up will minimally save the parse and network travel time.

Basically instead of :

update bulk_update set val=10+val where val1 = 20;
update bulk_update set val=10+val where val1 = 21;
update bulk_update set val=10+val where val1 = 22;
update bulk_update set val=10+val where val1 = 23;

use …