It was a beautiful day to start with, but rain and thunderstorms did mess with the barbeque planning Germans are famous for. So, lots of people attended Web Montag yesterday!

Darren Cooper opened Web Montag this time. He repeated a few times "1st of September", which is the next meeting in Frankfurt. For next events he really want to see more non-technical presentations. I think that's indeed a good thing. Darren also got some good jokes, seriously!

Andreas Demmer was first speaker, talking about Presentation Zen. It made us, the other speakers look bad afterwards.. just kidding! I knew bits and pieces about this approach for doing presentations, but it's what it is: an approach, not a …

Over the years, the database world has been buzzing with the strategic threat posed to the established players by upstart open-source database systems. Oracle and IBM would no longer be able to gouge defenseless small and medium-sized businesses of non-trivial portions of their IT budgets for a mere database licence. Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, for their part, have tried their best to respond to this threat, but it is clear that they cannot simply squash open-source products, but rather evolve with the changing landscape.

the countered threat from Oracle

Oracle made some strategic purchases in the past few years to establish a foothold in the embedded and front-end database market by acquiring Sleepycat (maintainers of BerkeleyDB) and InnoBase (makers of InnoDB storage engine for MySQL). These two also happened to provide the only two transactional backends for MySQL, whlie InnoDB is the only one to be used widely in practice. …

I'll be using this blog to keep the community and anyone interested in updates on my Google Summer of Code Project.The initial ideas for the project are available here MySQL Obfuscator. 
I'll developing it for PHP >= 5.1. The simplified working of it will be that it takes query's and a DB connection, gathers information about schema and rewrites the query and DDL for related tables.

I've got some ideas about the Schema renaming scheme that i will post here in the next day or two, I would like to get some feed back on the scheme, so feel free to poke holes in my ideas early. I would also like to hear any other input.

Greeting from India!
India Shock Tour which started on May 27 has been successfully ended. The MySQL team of David Axmark, Brian Aker, Iko Rein, and myself visited Pune, Hyderabad, and Chennai along with Manish Malhotra and Naveen Asrani from Sun Microsystems India. The tour attracted 750 MySQL developers in total.

In the week of Feb 18, just before MySQL was merged with Sun, we were in India holding India Road Show stopping 4 cities. This time, more than double number of people joined and I found MySQL was definitely getting more attention and popularity in India. There was a hailstorm of questions during MySQL performance turning session which was one of the topics added by the requests from many attendees of the Feb tour.

One of the …

I was working with the customer today investigating MySQL over DRBD performance issues. His basic question was why there is so much overhead with DRBD in my case, while it is said there should be no more than 30% overhead when DRBD is used.

The truth is - because how DRBD works it does not adds static overhead which could be told as 10% or 80% and you really need to understand how DRBD works as well as how IO system is utilized to understand how much overhead you should expect.

First lets talk what kind of IO you performance you care about while running MySQL over DRBD. Your reads are going to be serviced from local hard drive and it is only writes which suffer overhead of DRBD.
If you're using MySQL with Innodb (and running MyISAM with DRBD makes little sense anyway) you will have to care about background random IO coming from buffer flush activity - which is typically not latency critical and rarely the problem and log …

This week I had to face one but very weird problem. Each and every time I tried to compile and build MySQL server on Ubuntu 7.10 from source files the process ended up with errors. Most commonly it was Segmentation fault error but sometimes the OS just stopped responding (something like BSOD on Windows).

I followed the instructions on MySQL Installation Using a Source Distribution. The tools I use are newer than suggested there so I doubt they cause such an error. Also i tried to ./configure with different keys as suggested but with no luck. Now below you will see that the error occurs while compiling different sources. My concern is that the issue is with OS or my hardware. I was running memtest86 for a couple of hours and it says the RAM is ok. So after dozen of times doing cleaning and building I'm really close to give up …

Over the last few years there has been a lot of fanfare around open source companies and their liquidation events. Most of the news has been around Sun’s billion dollar acquisition of MySQL or the Citrix acquisition of Xen and even Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra. In contrast there was little attention paid to the SourceFire. Actually if you ask most open source users about SourceFire they would probably answer “SourceWho?” If you ask open source users if they have heard of ClamAV or Snort they probably would be able to tell you that they are the leading open source software for virus protection and intrusion detection respectively. Recently, SourceFire has been in the news a …

SimpleXML is neat.  Some people don't think it is so simple.  Boy, use the old stuff.  The DOM-XML stuff.

Anyhow, one annoying thing about SimpleXML has to do with caching.  When using web services, we often cache the contents we get back.  We were having a problem where we would get an error about a SimpleXML node not existing.  We were caching the data in memcached which serializes the variable.  So, when it unserialized the variable, there were references in there to some SimpleXML nodes that we did not take care of.  Basically, a tag like:

<foo>bar</foo>

is a string.  But a tag like:

<foo></foo>

is an empty SimpleXML …

Ever wish you could have a browser based shell for Google? One that was clutter and advertising free? Say hello to Goosh, one of the coolest service to hit the web.



It even recognizes 'clear' :) For now, I am addicted to it.

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• I integrated some changes from the past semester into the Skoll Client source code. These changes will allow the client to collect more detailed information of the testing process. One of such change is creating a separate log file for each step of the testing process.
• I created a mock-up for the new HTML testing report pages. The goal of the new report pages is to combine the interfaces of push-build and Skoll. Push-build provides very detailed information of testing process, while Skoll is good at visualizing huge number of test results. The new interface looks promising, but lots of improvements will be added later on.
• I began to modify the module that's responsible for generating the HTML testing report pages. This week I separated test result generation from HTML generation, so in the future other reporting interfaces can be implemented for the test results. Eventually, the …