yeah, it is all odbc, all the time here, it seems. that is just because i can’t write about the really exciting stuff. soon!

that is not to say that releasing mysql connector/odbc 5.1.3-rc is not a huge milestone! it took us a while to get there, but we finally have a unicode-aware odbc driver that is, in our opinions, production-ready. now we just need some community feedback to find out if we are right. there are a few minor issues we know about already, but the impact of those is generally small enough that the majority of folks should not have any problems.

I can’t remember the last time i used default mkfs or mount options… oh yeah, that’s right - by accident.

Anyway… I did a little experiment today.

The filesystem is my laptop /home - XFS, 100GB, 95% used (so 5-6GB free), rather aged. This is where a lot of my MySQL development is done. Mkfs options: 128MB log, version2 log. Mount options: logbufs=8, logbsize=256k. All of this geared towards increasing metadata performance.

Why metadata performance? well… source code trees are a lot of metadata :)

So, let’s try some things: cloning a repository and then removing the repository.

Two variables are being tested: mounting the file system with nobarrier (or barrier, the default). Write barriers tell the disk to ensure write order to the platter when write cache is in use. Also testing disabling (or enabling, the default) the disk write cache.

NOTE: the last option which …

Using regular expressions for query handling can become prohibitively complex after a while. If you need to manipulate parts of a query, either you are a regexp guru (I mean it, really, someone who speaks regular expressions more fluently than English) or you find some alternatives.

MySQL Proxy ships equipped with a tokenizer, a method that, given a query, returns its components as an array of tokens. Each token contains three elements:

• name, which is a human readable name of the token (e.g. TK_SQL_SELECT)
• id, which is the identifier of the token (e.g. 204)
• text, which is the content of the token (e.g. "select").

For example, the query SELECT 1 FROM dual will be returned as the following tokens:

1:
   text          select
   token_name    TK_SQL_SELECT'
   token_id      204
2: 
   text          1
 …

I have an ingrained (possibly even genetic) aversion to stock images. Actually, not all stock: just the vacuous kind. You know what I mean: like the politically-correct, gender-balanced, racially-balanced, age-diverse ones where people are all smiling and pointing at a computer screen you can’t see. Ugh!

(Photo credit: istockphoto.com)

There are many reasons not to use images like this. I guess it’s okay in some situations — for example when you just want a smiling, attractive woman with a customer-service headset to reinforce that you’ve come to the right place for support. However, even these really don’t have to be stock images. One of my former employers used their own employees for such photos, almost exclusively, and it made the site much more real. And there are plenty of examples of companies that use photos of their own employees and get “realness” as a result. If I’m not mistaken, …

yeah, it is all odbc, all the time here, it seems. that is just because i can’t write about the really exciting stuff. soon!

that is not to say that releasing mysql connector/odbc 5.1.3-rc is not a huge milestone! it took us a while to get there, but we finally have a unicode-aware odbc driver that is, in our opinions, production-ready. now we just need some community feedback to find out if we are right. there are a few minor issues we know about already, but the impact of those is generally small enough that the majority of folks should not have any problems.

I've been working on a very fun and challenging proof of concept / usability project that involves Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle), XUL, SWT, Swing and a very cool, slightly controversial theory: with a lot of work frontloaded, we should be able to port user interfaces to any UI technology, and expect consistent behavior AND look and feel without much, if any, additional code .

The project I'm in the middle of encompasses three different but equally compelling goals:

1. To move Pentaho forward in providing common layers across our core pillars (reporting , analysis, data mining, ETL and dashboards).
2. To provide a proof of concept for the Pentaho XUL Framework, an architecture built to help us support common UIs across all of our applications and tools .
3. To provide a common way of describing and managing the information needed to connect to a database.

So, we began by …

That story via MacWorld UK, very interesting. So first of all this allows people to edit photos (bitmaps) online. Secondly, Adobe doesn't try to reinvent the wheel but instead simply plugs into existing infrastructure like Facebook (and I would hope also Flickr). This is smart, as no one can rule it all, you really can't expect to be the one-stop shop that everybody uses. In addition, Adobe makes some useful graphics/publishing tools, they're not a social networking or photosharing company (perhaps they could be, but that's another issue altogether).

Although I follow this stuff in relation to my developing training courses on MySQL and related topics, I'm more interested in the pattern than in this particular event. But I do believe it's significant. Not that SaaS (software as a service) is the solution to …

I was just reading Matt Asay's post on Open source's "superficial impact" on the database market. I don't think it's a matter of "having to start somewhere".

The assessment/conclusion trail of the 451 Group (and other experts, analyst and even regular people in the industry) is typical of most, and it's adequately covered in "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen which I believe I've mentioned here before.

The assessment is correct (it's based on facts), but the conclusions are simply irrelevant since they presume that there is a single correct objective or market - in the case of databases, "enterprise" or "mission critical" deployments. But just look at the situation: the definition of both is vague and …

I've been working the last few weekends on setting up redundancy and failover for a MySQL server at work. In the process, I've run across various bits of useful information in different places, but nowhere have I seen it all brought together. So, I'm going to attempt to do that here.

The basic idea was to set up a dual-master replication setup with CARP failover. (I've heard of similar setups with Linux-HA heartbeat failover, but we're using FreeBSD, so CARP was a natural fit for us.)

A couple of notes in the examples below:

• Our servers have two network ports, so we have the replication on a separate interface from all of the "real" traffic. This isn't strictly necessary, but since we have the capacity available, we might as well use it.
• The IP addresses for replication in my examples will be 10.0.0.10 for the original server, and 10.0.0.11 for the new failover server.
• The IP addresses for …

Few months ago, I wrote about a faster way to do certain table modifications online. It works well when all you want is to remove auto_increment or change ENUM values. When it comes to changes that really require table to be rebuilt - adding/dropping columns or indexes, changing data type, converting data to different character set - MySQL master-master replication especially accompanied by MMM can be very handy to do the changes with virtually no downtime.

Couple of days ago I worked with one of our MySQL support customers as they were upgrading their application and mysql schema. We deployed and used MySQL Master-Master replication …