Welcome to the 81st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. We begin this issue with some more (and probably not the last) commentary on the acquisition of MySQL AB by Sun. On rand($thoughts);, Savio Rodrigues questions the idea that MySQL are not big enough for some customers: “I’m confused that Sun, [...]

I'll be attending the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo again this year, and I'm looking forward to hearing some great sessions, meeting new and old friends, and giving sessions myself. As a proposal reviewer, I looked at and voted on 250+ proposals for sessions and tutorials for this conference. There are going to be some great sessions and tutorials.

Had a customer issue come through right before I left for the day. Hadn’t seen this happen before and google was not too helpful.

Problem: We had the tmp-dir set as /var/tmp which was on it’s own partition of 5GB. This is a relatively small database of about 15GB. Customer has some replication slaves setup and was running a LOAD DATA INFILE on the master. File was about 12GB, so the slave creates a SQL-DATA-1024-512.data file in the tmp directory to buffer that INFILE command coming from the master. Well, eventually that filled up the /var/tmp partition.

Solution: stop the server, change the tmp-dir=/bigger-partition, move the file to the new tmp location, restart cluster, all good.

Prevention: Make sure your tmp-dir setting is on a large enough partition to hold your temporary files, and make sure if you’re going to load a data file on the master that’s bigger …

Curt Monash has an interesting post. As with everything on the web, I agree and disagree with various bits - which is one of the great things about blogging … but this comment concerns me enough to respond, since it’s not so much an opinion but incorrect technical information…

As for your distinction between too many connections and memory pools ? lack of memory is the reason for limits on connections.

Lack of memory is actually _NOT_ the reason for limits on connections in a well tuned MySQL installation. MySQL is a multi-threaded application and as such in its current implementation allocates a thread to a connection. In the standard web hosting platform, which is Linux, there is a point at which Linux itself can’t actually deal with the threads effectively, thus getting you into an overloaded run queue situation. The answer …

Here are a few upcoming open source conferences worth paying attention to: - SugarCRM Developers Conference, Feb 6-8, San Jose, CA - PHP Quebec, March 12-14, Montreal, Canada - EclipseCon, March 17-20, Santa Clara, CA - OSBC, March 25-26, San Francisco, CA - ApacheCon Europe, April 7-11, Amsterdam, NL - MySQL Conference & Expo, April 14-17, Santa Clara, CA We'll have MySQLers at most if not all of these events. If you're thinking of hitting your boss up for a conference registration and travel, look for the early registration deadlines. You can easily save a few hundred bucks by registering... READ MORE

A number of people have emailed me wondering why I haven't blogged about the Sun/MySQL deal. Well, I'm still working out my thoughts on that, so I'll leave it to another day. Besides, haven't there been enough blog posts about it already?!

As a PHP community member and a person who has been participating on MySQL's behalf in the much-maligned PDOv2 working group, there is a more important and pressing topic of conversation that I'd like to comment on. Namely, the recent events surrounding the publication of the FAQ about PDOv2. There are many different topics being bandied around the PHP community schoolyard — some on-topic, some wildly off-topic and tangential. These are the issues I think represent what the majority of conversations have been about:

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First: Here's to give an idea of how much traffic our site handles:


I just read the post by Monty Taylor about MySQL and threads which was in response to Curt Monash's post on why not to use MySQL.

As Director of Database Infrastructure for a top 14 Internet destination (according to Alexa), I just wanted to pitch-in with a quick comment.

Monty says, "Try running an top-10 web property with 100+ Oracle databases with a team of 1 DBA and see how long it remains running. I?d be happy to take the challenge of running the same thing on MySQL."

I couldn't agree more. I am a …

Regardless of how "prepared" and "ready" one feel for a disaster, it will, in one form or another, inevitably happen. The best thing you could do is continuously revise and test your disaster recovery plan, strengthening it each time against any kind of disaster you can think of. Things generally go wrong when you least expect them to go wrong.

I was getting chills reading about Charter Communications, a St. Louis based ISP, accidentally deleted 14,000 active email accounts along with any attachments that they carried. All the deleted data of active customers is irretrievable. As someone who is responsible for data of one of the top 15 heaviest trafficked site in the world, according to Alexa, I know, I'd HATE to be in shoes of the person responsible for this.

As I was reading the news story, I was constantly thinking about the …

I'm not sure why we continue to persist in talking about downloads, but I'm with Stephe on this one: downloads are not the best measure of success in open source. In fact, they're often not even a remote predictor of success (i.e., sales). Having them, as Stephen O' Grady notes, is much better than not having them, but it would be erroneous in the extreme to assume a company with 100,000 downloads per month necessarily has a bigger market opportunity than a company with 20,000 downloads per month.

The 451 Group's Matt Aslett points out that marketing automation software like Loopfuse can help to supercharge an open-source …

The following is essentially a repost of what I send to the PDO list. However I felt that since I have discussed this topic extensively on my blog before, I should also put this on my blog. Also it might be a slightly calmer reply than what others have posted. Finally after weeks of waiting we now have a proposal on the table of how the likes of IBM, Oracle and Microsoft feel that they could become code contributors to PDO. I agree we should see this as an opportunity. Getting new people on board is always a good thing (tm). I have read through …