SuperDBA and SOA guru Robert Schneider over at PushToTest is putting on a 3-day test automation bootcamp in Silicon Valley Feb 26-28.  It's a hands-on session with laptop required.

The role of testing and testing tools has evolved in recent years from simple record / playback tools (e.g. GUI monkey tools) to more sophisticated approaches that leverage a web services model with dynamic data. New technologies like soapUI, Selenium, and PushToTest, have been designed for Web app, Web services and Ajax testing. Pulling these tools and platforms together into something that the average database developer or tester can use can requires quite a bit of effort …

MySQL 5.0.45 is integrated with Open Solaris build 79. It is available in Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE) 01/08. MySQL 5.0.45 is integrated with Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF).

This blog entry describes the steps that were taken to integrate MySQL with SMF.

First a quick recap of what is SMF:

SMF is the core component of the predictive self-healing technology available in Solaris 10, which provides automatic recovery from software and hardware failures as well as adminstrative errors.
Some of the advantages of using SMF are as under:

• Failed services are automatically restarted in dependency order, whether they failed as the result of administrator error, software bug, or were affected by an uncorrectable hardware error.

• More information is available about misconfigured or misbehaving …

MySQL 5.0.45 is integrated with Open Solaris build 79. It is available in Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE) 01/08. MySQL 5.0.45 is integrated with Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF).

This blog entry describes the steps that were taken to integrate MySQL with SMF.

First a quick recap of what is SMF:

SMF is the core component of the predictive self-healing technology available in Solaris 10, which provides automatic recovery from software and hardware failures as well as adminstrative errors.
Some of the advantages of using SMF are as under:

• Failed services are automatically restarted in dependency order, whether they failed as the result of administrator error, software bug, or were affected by an uncorrectable hardware error.

• More information is available about misconfigured or misbehaving …

As part of planning our integration into Sun, we surveyed all MySQLers on their opinions regarding Sun, their concerns and ideas. Amongst concerns, “retaining the MySQL Culture” ranked second.

MySQL Staff Meeting in Budapest 2003; time off in the Gellért Baths

But what exactly is “The MySQL Culture”? That’s never been written down, and defining culture is usually a matter for anthropologists, not Open Source companies.

So we decided to ask. Instead of engaging field anthropologists, we just added a question to the survey. And did we get answers! This is what the foremost experts, i.e. our employees, think constitutes MySQL Culture:

• A diversified and distributed workforce
• Lack of empire building
• A place for geeks
• Lack of …

Like in the years before, I (and some other colleagues from MySQL) will be attending FOSDEM 2008 in Brussels, Belgium on February 23rd and 24th.

The schedule is packed as usual and lists several MySQL-related topics and sessions:

• Main tracks: Unicoding With PHP 6 by Andrei Zmievski and the talk about CakePHP by Garrett J Woodworth are certainly relevant for web developers using PHP.
• Lightning …

The first point I’d like to make is that you’re using a Microsoft Windows API, so you have already lost. You are just not quite aware of how much you have lost.

A quick look around and you say “Ahh… GetFileSize, that’s what I want to do!” Except, of course, you’re wrong. You don’t want to use GetFileSize at all. It has the following signature:

DWORD WINAPI GetFileSize(  __in       HANDLE hFile,

__out_opt  LPDWORD lpFileSizeHigh

);

Yes, it supports larger than 4GB files! How? A pointer to the high-order doubleword is passed in! So how do you know if this errored? Return -1? WRONG! Because the high word could have been set and your file length could legitimately be 0×1ffffffff. So to find out if you actually had an error, you must call GetLastError! Instead of one call, you now have two.

The Microsoft documentation even acknowledges that this is stupid: “Because …

Dave Rosenberg once wrote that the winner in a given open-source category (ERP, CRM, etc.) takes all. There's no room for second place. The first mover to get critical mass tends to horde the community and media resources.

I didn't believe Dave at the time, but after looking through the data from Alfresco's Open Source Barometer survey, I'm becoming more and more convinced.

The Barometer now comprises a data set of 35,000 enterprises, a significant percentage of which hail from the Global 2000. In the case of open-source databases, these enterprises are overwhelmingly voting for MySQL, …

Last week, I described how to use the MySQL plug-in API to write a minimal 'Hello world!' information schema plug-in. The main purpose of that plug-in is to illustrate the bare essentials of the MySQL information schema plug-in interface.

In this article, I'd like to take that to the next level and demonstrate how to write an information schema plug-in that can access some of the internals of the MySQL server. For this particular purpose, we will focus on a plug-in that reports all the SAVEPOINTs available in the current session. This …

Download Maatkit

This release contains minor bug fixes and new features. Besides the little bug fixes, there's a fun new feature in mk-heartbeat: it can auto-discover slaves recursively, and show the replication delay on all of them, to wit:

baron@keywest ~ $ mk-heartbeat --check --host master -D rkdb --recurse 10
master 0
slave1 1
slave2 1
slave3 4

(Not actual results. Your mileage may vary. Closed course, professional driver. Do not attempt).

Nothing else in this release is very exciting. I just wanted to get the bug fixes out there.

After five days of powder skiing and mountain climbing on ski, I’m back in business. This is how I looked out-of-business:

My son and I did not meet with Ötzi the Iceman, but we got a few blisters, a lot of Alpine sun, plenty of powder skiing and the experience of climbing more than 1000 height metres to K2 (in Tirol, not its namesake in Karakorum). And we conquered Austria’s second highest peak, the Wildspitze at 3772 metres above sea level.

The group consisted of our Austrian mountain guide, four ladies and four gentlemen, all of which were German …