Ok, one more human interest post before diving into the technical stuff. Let's have a look at the Falcon team as it stands today.

Kevin Lewis, Falcon Team Lead

Kevin joined MySQL two years ago, following a ten-year run as an engineer on the MicroKernel Database Engine team at Pervasive Software, (Btrieve, Pervasive.SQL) in Austin, Texas. He ascended to team leadership when Calvin, our project manager, left MySQL in January.

I worked with Kevin for five years at Pervasive, where he started six months before me, just as he did at MySQL. Kevin's a good friend and has at various times served as something of a father confessor to me, patiently indulging some of the more, shall we say, unsettled phases of my life.

…

I joined MySQL and the Falcon project a year ago January, after five years writing and testing firmware for implantable heart devices (pacemakers, defibrillators.)

In the summer of 2006, Calvin, a former colleague from Pervasive Software, asked if I'd consider joining him at an open source company, MySQL. I declined at first because I'd spent the last five years learning a new domain, had just been promoted to Principal Engineer, and really enjoyed working in research.

I also really liked the idea of my code running inside someone's chest ("Step aside folks. I can debug that man."), plus I'd already done the database thing at Pervasive and didn't feel it would be all that challenging.

Huh.

But after another chat with Calvin, I was sold on MySQL. Not only was I sold, but I realized (and I'm lucky this way--sometimes realizations are just handed to me), that it was clearly time for a change. I did the New …

Download MySQL Cacti templates

As promised, I’ve created some improved software for monitoring MySQL via Cacti. I began using the de facto MySQL Cacti templates a while ago, but found some things I needed to improve about them. As time passed, I rewrote everything from scratch. The resulting templates are much improved.

You can grab the templates by browsing the source repository on the project’s homepage.

In no particular order, here are some things I improved:

• Standard polling interval and graph size by default.
• Full captions on every graph; you don’t have to guess at how big the values are. Each graph has current, max, and average values printed at the bottom for every value on …

I've finally succumbed to a few requests and just added some simple forums. There's only a few at the moment - General, Jobs (mainly because I want one...), Javascript and Suggestions. If they don't fit your poser, suggest a new forum and bung your post in General. I may move it (I probably won't though).

"The two metrics that are most important to me are first customer satisfaction and second growth." - Don McAskill

Today, I noticed Don is featured on Sun's customer success stories page:


Don McAskill is the CEO and Chief Geek of Smugmug, a photo and now hi-def video (using H.264) sharing site with a successful business model behind it.

I initially met Don last year at the MySQL Conference when my then boss told me that he is interested in meeting him. That was my introduction to Smugmug. I was impressed by SmugMug's presentation of photos and the care they took to make your photos and galleries look awesome.

This year, as a member of Smugmug, me and my wife got to interact with Don on a personal level.

We had several suggestions related to how our …

I've finally succumbed to a few requests and just added some simple forums. There's only a few at the moment - General, Jobs (mainly because I want one...), Javascript and Suggestions. If they don't fit your poser, suggest a new forum and bung your post in General. I may move it (I probably won't though).

I’m migrating my existing WordPress run blog site at blog.arabx.com.au to a my new site ronaldbradford.com (which is not yet publically available)

As part of this process I’ll be doing a number of upgrades/changes including:

1. Update blog software to 2.5.1 from 2.0.2 (I’d previously done a 2.0.2 upgrade to 2.3.2, but not deployed)
2. Migrate to new domain
3. Upgrade existing MySQL 5.1 version from 5.1.11 to 5.1.24
4. Migrate database to using MySQL 5.1.24, from 5.0.22 (my server runs 5.0 and 5.1 instances)
5. Split my blog into Professional & Personal

Upgrading
The upgrade is straightforward, backup database, download latest wordpress software. I run full revision to older versions via directories + symlinks so my installation is more …

There was a problem with MySQL 5.0.51a binaries for Windows and Mac OSX. They did not work out of the box. On Mac OS X, the installation succeeded, but the start panel did not work and needed a patch. On Windows Vista, the installation sometimes failed.
Both problems were fixed after Colin's heads up.
Thanks to Daniel Fischer, Kent Boortz, and Ignacio Galarza, who fixed the problem very quickly.
The new binaries (5.0.51b) are available from MySQL downloads page:

• Windows 32bit
• Windows 64bit
• …

Hakan Küçükyilmaz has just posted a new article  about the Falcon Engine.

There he explains that the Falcon Team at MySQL AB has added this week six new tests to the Falcon test suite and he reports (as usual) a time-trend chart of failed and passed Falcon tests.

I have calculated the ratio failed/passed tests and we can see that it is improving:

9%    |  (17:190)  |  207 tests in total  |  the last week
10%  |  (19:182)  |  201 tests in total  |  two weeks ago

Of course the ideal ratio is 0% i.e. 0 test failed.

In that post Hakan was wondering where and how Users use the Falcon Engine, what features they like/not like or want to see in it. Also he solicited Users for testing Falcon and reporting Bugs …

I recently came across this blog post with the catchy title of “DRBD and MySQL: Just Say No”. Now while I have absolutely no issue with people not liking DRBD or finding that it doesn’t fit their needs, I couldn’t help but notice that the post recycles some persistent myths about DRBD, which could use some correction.

I’ve tried to reply using a blog comment, but alas it seems I was moderated to /dev/null. Enter the “Write Post” button on my trusted WordPress dashboard.

So let’s look at the alleged “MySQL with DRBD Minuses” mentioned in said post I am referring to:

DRBD partition corruption means failover node would be unusable (disadvantage of shared storage) and failback could destroy …