To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

According to statistics presented by Roberto Galoppini, 2.4% of visitors to SourceForge are from Poland, a statistic which serves its purpose of being both interesting and pointless at the same time.

Also statistically meaningless in terms of open source adoption, but nonetheless interesting is the …

There's an interesting post from a few weeks back by Guy Kawasaki in an article entitled "How to pickup a VC." While it's a short piece illustrating how boneheaded "attention grabbers" will work against you with VCs, I think it's actually quite a good reminder about effective communications for any IT vendor. I can't count how many times I've sat through a vendor pitch or product presentation and after 20 minutes I'm wondering "Why don't they just tell me what it is that they do?" Instead, I get a lot of discussion about open source freedom, community, business models, licensing... READ MORE

OK, now I know that the GA version of 5.1 is rapidly approaching. PBXT compiles with the latest release of MySQL without any changes!

This has never been the case before. Just search the PBXT code for MYSQL_VERSION_ID, and you will find things like:

#if MYSQL_VERSION_ID < 50114
    XT_RETURN_VOID;
#else
    XT_RETURN(0);
#endif

and, even worse:

#if MYSQL_VERSION_ID < 60000
#if MYSQL_VERSION_ID >= 50124
#define USE_CONST_SAVE
#endif
#else
#if MYSQL_VERSION_ID >= 60005
#define USE_CONST_SAVE
#endif
#endif

The lack of changes that affect pluggable storage engines can only mean that the bug fixes required are diminishing in scope.

And I believe this is a far better gauge of whether GA is close than any other …

Hi,

Today’s MySQL Weekly Seminar is third one, which theme was “MySQL Storage Engines”.  It seems that almost 80% of attendees are using InnoDB for their system.  However, there are actually more storage engines available for MySQL.  This time, Kajiyama; MySQL Technical Evangelist presented variable storage engines along with tips and examples for how to use them.

First, the seminar started with the introduction of popular MySQL storage engines such as MyISAM, InnoDB and Falcon.  He described architectures and features for each storage engine and what storage engine is appropriate for each application.

Then, it went deeper into storage engines details.  Each engine has specific features.  And third-party storage engines’ unique functions and next-generation transactional storage …

I should have written about it a while ago but I never had a change.
I'm speaking at Velocity conference taking place in the Bay Area 23-24 of June.

At the same conference we will have a book signing event for our book High Performance MySQL 2nd Edition which is finally in printing and should start shipping next week.

Entry posted by peter | No comment

Add to: …

MySQL 5.1.24-rc ships with a EXAMPLE storage engine which is basically a dummy storage engine and serves as a useful source to start writing your own custom storage engine.

However, it is not available for use, by default. You can verify this as follows:

mysql> show engines;

+------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------------+--------------+----+------------+ | Engine     | Support | Comment                                                   | Transactions | XA | Savepoints | +------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------------+--------------+----+------------+ | …

MySQL 5.1.24-rc ships with a EXAMPLE storage engine which is basically a dummy storage engine and serves as a useful source to start writing your own custom storage engine.

However, it is not available for use, by default. You can verify this as follows:

mysql> show engines;

+------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------------+--------------+----+------------+ | Engine     | Support | Comment                                                   | Transactions | XA | Savepoints | +------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------------+--------------+----+------------+ | …

I sometimes encounter the issue where a replication slave is behind the master, while happily connected and in state of "waiting for binlog event". Clearly it somehow didn't get the memo that new stuff was available. I know others have seen this too, but for lack of reproducibility it's not yet a bug report.
Mark Barger of ANYwebcam has been kind enough to tweak a script so Nagios can alert on this problem, see the Nagios Scripts page in the Resources/Tools section of the OQ website. See the page itself for further details on monitoring and dealing with the problem.

Tracking MySQL replication status in general is important anyway, as basically a master doesn't "care" whether a slave is connected or not (the system is slave driven) and a slave can quite validly not be connected or replicating at any point in time (stopped to take a backup …

Hearing from Brian that UDFs might be slower than native functions in MySQL, I did a small benchmark.

mysql> select benchmark(1e9,abs(1));
+-----------------------+
| benchmark(1e9,abs(1)) |
+-----------------------+
|                     0 | 
+-----------------------+
1 row in set (27.15 sec)

mysql> select benchmark(1e9,udf_abs(1));
+---------------------------+
| benchmark(1e9,udf_abs(1)) |
+---------------------------+
|                         0 | 
+---------------------------+
1 row in set (43.04 sec)

The numbers were taken on my MacBook (Core 2 Duo @ 2GHz, OS X 10.4.11) running the official binary version of MySQL 5.1.25-rc for 32-bit arch. So the overhead of UDFs compared to native functions seems to be about 30 clocks per each call.

So the question is whether it would matter on an actual application. I created a 100k row heap table and performed …