Yesterday I had a look at the Open Source Census (OSC), a project aiming at counting the installations of open source packages.

It is a collaborative effort. The OSC offers the infrastructure, and it's open to cooperation. It works with a disc scanner, and relies on the principle that the contributions are voluntary and anonymous.
If you want to contribute, you need to register, and you are encouraged to do so anonymously. The OSC is not interested in who you are, but the registration gives you a chance of tracking your results with the rest of the community.
The registration is also necessary to avoid duplicates, and to track your installations over time, should you decide to do that on a regular basis.
If you want to give it a try, the procedure goes like this:

1. Register (with any fancy …

There were a number of problems in the installer script and in support for COMPLETE refresh materialized views. These problems have been rectified and an updated version is available on sourceforge. Also, you can pull the latest source from the svn repository:
https://flexviews.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/flexviews/src

Here is a little example for complete refresh:

CALL flexviews.create('mv2', 'test', 'COMPLETE', 1);
SET @MVID = LAST_INSERT_ID();
CALL flexviews.set_definition(@MVID, 'SELECT 1');
CALL flexviews.enable(@MVID);
CALL flexviews.refresh(@MVID, 'COMPLETE');

Since few weeks I was working on patching the MySQL 5.1 with libevent support to have thread pooling in server end as it is needed by few properties where they do not need a persistent connection and needed to scale server with thousands of connections as each call just does a simple query execution by connecting and disconnecting and pooling seemed to be a right choice.

When I brought this idea to Monty; he pointed me to 6.0 where it is in preliminary stage. Now I took the same design and implemented in 5.1 to be compatible with how its working in 6.0; and things so far seems to be running fine, except few misc glitches that am trying to solve now.

It uses the same thread_handling=one-thread-per-connection (default) and new thread_handling=pool_of_threads and thread_pool_size controls how many will be initialized and kept at the …

I keep on with my productivity little tricks. This time I’m sharing some of my firefox shortcuts. I’m not in the mood for explaining how to actually install these, so check out the excellent article Firefox and the art of keyword bookmarking, if you need help.

# Dictionary search
dict http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s

# Yahoo finance stock
fi http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%s

# Wikipedia page
wp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s
slang http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%s

# Search in MySQL website/manual
my http://mysql.com/%s

# BitTorrent search
bt …

At the MySQL Conference and Expo, right after my participation in scaling up or scaling out keynote panel, I talked to Sun's Multimedia team about Sun and MySQL in our environment.

Recently, I found the interview on Sun's Multimedia page. The video of my discussion is embedded below:

Did you notice that I moved this blog from pair Networks to pairLite hosting?

Probably not, unless you check the DNS of xaprb.com regularly!

Don’t you hate it when people say “I’m moving my blog, I hope there won’t be more than a few days of downtime, blah blah…” Why is this ever necessary, I wonder? I wonder the same thing about a lot of hosting providers — recently I had a client in my consulting practice whose (very large, well-known) hosting provider tried to help them with some very simple MySQL work and ended up causing them an obscene amount of downtime, like many many days, and there was no end in sight. As I spoke on the phone with him and asked him about his business, he said “we have X thousand users in our beta.” long pause. “Well, we did …

A while ago I blogged about using Mercurial as a backup repository for my databases. I was asked about this again
last night over dinner.

This is an example of what I see via the web:




I can see both changes to schema, and do deltas between days (aka slice out a days worth of data or grab a snapshot of anyone one particular days data). The nice thing with hgweb is that I can make this happen via my browser :)

Part of what really makes this work is the --tab option to mysqldump (I also use Innodb so my backups are all done online). I can compress it, but frankly disk is cheap and storing deltas is cheap :)

I am proud to announce the availability of Flexviews for MySQL 1.0.0-alpha under LGPLv3!
http://flexviews.sourceforge.net

The documentation needs quite a bit of work. When you run into problems (and I'm sure you will) you can ask for help on the sourceforge support tracker. Please download the example database for some examples of incremental refreshable views.

I haven't tested COMPLETE refresh views in quite a while, but I think they break when you try to enable them. I'll fix this today or tomorrow and upload a new version. INCREMENTAL refresh is what is interesting anyway :)

Please report bugs (of which I'm sure there are quite a few), as well as feature requests, etc, on the sourceforge bug tracker.

http://barcamp.org/BarCampBrisbane gives the details... I'm going in the afternoon, and might do a talk on RepRap. There'll be enough software talks, so why not something different!
(not that I *always* talk about MySQL - I have done other talks at various confs)

I just returned from a meeting with the great Sun people in Prague. The main topic of our discussions was the database support in NetBeans and their MySQL support in general. To have the best possible database integration in all of Sun’s products is one thing that is high on my personal agenda.

As the current resources working on the NetBeans database integration are limited we looked into utilizing what we have done in MySQL Workbench to get a more powerful database interface into the hands of NetBeans users. But there are a few things that make this approach quite difficult. First, the two tools are using different development languages. Just to name a few. NetBeans is written in Java while MySQL Workbench is written in C/C+. MySQL Workbench does not include any query functionality yet and we are still working on the multi-platform support.

Still, we had good discussions and are currently working out a plan to overcome all these …