Microsoft has finally decided to bite the bullet and made a hostile $44.6 billion bid to acquire dying Yahoo!

I personally think that Microsoft will eventually just kill Yahoo! Although who knows. I can't wait for Microsoft advertising to advertise to hire BSD and MySQL gurus to keep Yahoo! running. That'll be funny. For some reason, I can't see them switching Yahoo! to SQL Server.

What started out as a key buffer efficiency study turned to a fruitless search for ways to overcome a somewhat high ( ~20%) amount of unusable key buffer space. This behavior seems to be platform and version independent as I observed this with versions 5.0.45, 5.0.52, and 5.1.22 on Solaris 10, Windows XP and Linux.

I'm not the first person to discover this, but I haven't had much luck finding an explanation. Just like this poor soul whose post fell into the swirling vortex of the un-interesting:
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?20,127934

Finding usage, and physical read/write information about individual key buffers is slightly obscure. The only way I know of is to run "mysqladmin debug" and view the information in the MySQL server error log.

The output looks like this:

Key caches:
default
…

What started out as a key buffer efficiency study turned to a fruitless search for ways to overcome a somewhat high ( ~20%) amount of unusable key buffer space. This behavior seems to be platform and version independent as I observed this with versions 5.0.45, 5.0.52, and 5.1.22 on Solaris 10, Windows XP and Linux.

I'm not the first person to discover this, but I haven't had much luck finding an explanation. Just like this poor soul whose post fell into the swirling vortex of the un-interesting:
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?20,127934

Finding usage, and physical read/write information about individual key buffers is slightly obscure. The only way I know of is to run "mysqladmin debug" and view the information in the MySQL server error log.

The output looks like this:

Key caches:
default
…

The cost of creating a thread varies by operating system. On Linux, with x86 hardware it's pretty damn cheap now. I think all major Linux distributions have switched to NPTL by now, with many not offering LinuxThreads.

In light of bugs like this one, I thought I would test how much slower a SELECT 1 is after disabling my thread_cache_size=32:



Not much, but it seems to be measurable. The test was:


#!/bin/sh
#parent.sh

for i in `seq 1 10`; do
echo "Spawning child $i";
time ./child-process.sh &
done;



#!/bin/sh
# child-process.sh

for i in `seq 1000`; do
mysql -e 'SELECT 1' > /dev/null
done;


I dislike old boy's club. Not the part where you sit around in gab, but the part where people have to wait at the door to get in.

Something about them rubs me a bit raw.

Open Source has this problem in spades. The bar to commit to the major projects is not problematic in that it is high, it is a problem because it is not written down. It is often fuzzy, or worse personality dependent (so much for the meritocracy that is espoused).

Here is a story for you...

A few weeks ago I went to the Velocity Summit O'Reilly held in San Francisco (not to be confused with the Velocity Conference which I still owe an abstract to Jesse for), and I talked about my current topics, as always MySQL, and as of recent libmemcached.

Somewhere during on of the sessions we got off on a tangent about distributed source control (another favorite topic of mine), and how it made vendor versions simpler …

We’ve got a lot of queries recently on the MySQL docs team address about the documentation (particularly man pages) for MySQL on Debian/Ubuntu.

The source of the original problem was reported as a Debian bug. The assumption from the reading of the license in this instance is that you are not allowed to distribute MySQL documentation unless you’ve asked first, and that the documentation is not released under the GPL license.

The original license was misunderstood in this respect.

In fact, the license as originally quoted in that bug does allow you to provide the documentation if you are providing the MySQL software.

In addition, regardless of how you interpret the license, all of our documentation, including installable man pages, has been available on …

Hyperic has announced a new major version of their HQ monitoring system that adds plenty of new capabilities. HQ enables companies with a web infrastructure to monitor all the various components of the stack, whether open source, closed or a mix. For example, HQ can monitor Windows, IIS, MySQL, and JBoss. Or whatever combination you have in your environment. The latest release also enables users to incorporate existing Nagios scripts and now uses MySQL as the back end database. The combination of HQ and MySQL has been used to track 1.5 million metrics per minute with plenty of headroom for... READ MORE

Hyperic has announced a new major version of their HQ monitoring system that adds plenty of new capabilities. HQ enables companies with a web infrastructure to monitor all the various components of the stack, whether open source, closed or a mix. For example, HQ can monitor Windows, IIS, MySQL, and JBoss. Or whatever combination you have in your environment. The latest release also enables users to incorporate existing Nagios scripts and now uses MySQL as the back end database. The combination of HQ and MySQL has been used to track 1.5 million metrics per minute with plenty of headroom for... READ MORE

What links JBoss, XenSource, Zimbra and MySQL (aside from the fact that they were all acquired for large amounts of money)? Peter Fenton and/or Benchmark Capital.

UPDATE This post corrects a couple of mistakes in the original version. UPDATE

Fenton made his investments in JBoss, Zimbra and XenSource while at Accel. Benchmark also invested in Zimbra, via Kevin Harvey who led the investment in MySQL. JBoss, sold to Red Hat for $350m; XenSource, sold to …

“What will happen to us now?” That’s the usual question for most employees in any acquired company, and MySQL AB is no exception. And given that less than 10% of MySQL AB is at the integration kickoff here at Sun’s headquarters in Menlo Park, more than 90% are probably also asking “what is that small group of people deciding?”.

Judging from the feedback I’ve got, those questions are of relevance not just for MySQLers, so let me re-state a couple of “old truths” and come with a few observations from MPK. (Do note the lingo — MPK is Sun speak for Menlo Park; I’m trying to learn…).

First thing, it’s “Business as Usual”. We’re just making plans for actions that can follow upon closure. Closure is planned (as announced earlier) in late Q3 or early Q4, where the Sun quarter numbering should be translated to mean late Q1 or early Q2 for the rest of the world.

…