In exactly two months - April 14th - I'm doing a scalability tutorial at the MySQL conference.

It'll, of course, be based on the material I've been throwing around since 2001, but once again it's greatly expanded, extended and improved! It should be lots of fun.

I've yet to hear anyone tell me that they wasted their time with this particular session and I don't think people are just being polite because I'm often told that people find it tremendously useful. So go sign up already. And don't pay any attention to Brian Aker and …

Yesterday, Drupal 6.0 was officially released - check out this screencast to get a 29-minute tour on the new features in this release.

We'd like to congratulate the Drupal Developer Team and Community for reaching this milestone and are happy that the MySQL Server continues to serve well as the database backend for this awesome content management platform!

I had the pleasure of evaluating and reviewing a previous release of Drupal for the Open Source Content Management System Award from Packt Publishing and it has been one of my favourites.

Keep up the good work!
 

If you couldn’t make the MySQL MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2008, no worries - there’s recorded video!

• Upcoming MySQL Features (Stewart Smith) - focused on the future, as opposed to what’s available right now/soon
• MySQL Indexing Methods (Jonathon Coombes) AND MySQL Optimisation by Design (Arjen Lentz)- the slides are viewable from the video, and around 1 hour in, you’ll get to see a demo of Arjen’s tool, lossylogger at work. I blogged about these sessions…
• …

Since the announcement of Maria, I have been trying to use the same crashing test with Falcon, to establish conclusively if its crash recovery features are as reliable as I hope.

I tried the same test used for Maria, and after a crash, Falcon did not recover nicely. In fact, the server crashed on restart. I have not been able to repeat that behavior on Linux. Actually, I did, on a remote server that is not available to me at the moment, using an earlier revision, and I am waiting until I am back home to do some more testing with the latest tree.
However, I managed to repeat the problem with Mac OS X.
I run this script on a 6.0.5 server:

set storage_engine=falcon;
drop table if exists t1;
create table t1 (id int, b longblob) ;
insert into t1 values (1, repeat('a',1000000)); …

I created my Events to handle adding new partitions (and removing old ones) from my log table and they seem to be working.  However, today I noticed that the events ran a few hours later than they ran yesterday.  

          EVENT_TYPE: RECURRING
          EXECUTE_AT: NULL
      INTERVAL_VALUE: 1
      INTERVAL_FIELD: DAY
            SQL_MODE: 
              STARTS: 2008-02-13 05:36:21
                ENDS: NULL
              STATUS: ENABLED
       ON_COMPLETION: NOT PRESERVE
             CREATED: 2008-02-13 05:36:21
        LAST_ALTERED: 2008-02-13 05:36:21
       LAST_EXECUTED: 2008-02-14 07:32:22

My addpartition event is current date dependent: it creates a partition for tomorrow hopefully before tomorrow comes so we don't miss a partition and so my INSERTs don't get "No partition" errors.  So if it waits a few extra hours more each day, gradually it will push past midnight and screw things up. …

As some of you surely know already I'm moving back to USA, so does Vadim. From very beginning we had much more business from US than from rest of the world combined so this is a great step in company development having more comfortable time zones for our customers (without having to work nights) as well as more readily available onsite consulting. This also will give better time distribution among time zones which makes it easier for us to provide 24/7 support for MySQL and other technologies.

Initially we thought of going to Seattle area where I've previously lived for about 2.5 years. However talking to our mostly Silicon Valley based customers we kept hearing they really want to see us in the Bay area and we thought a little bit more sun would not be bad either (especially after London and Kiev) so we were seduced and will be located in East Bay town Pleasanton.

We're moving this weekend so our schedule is already erratic and …

For some reason I never was that excited about trying to accomplish these sorts of things in Perl:

1..rand(256)).inject("") {|string,n| string + ('a'..'z').to_a[rand(25)] }

This generates a string from 1 to 256 characters long, containing random letters from 'a' to 'z'.  

Normally, I wouldn't use something that's quite so unreadable, but I'm starting to like Ruby's way of taking what should be a very simple operation that I might have done in 3-5 lines in Perl and boiling it down to a single line.

I'd love to see if anyone can make this more succinct (but one line is still a requirement!)

Here's the code in it's context. It's just a test script writing into my partition table every minute so I can verify my Events from previous posts are working correctly.

read more

Do you know the difference between client programs and standalone programs?

The MySQL Certification exams have a series of questions about client programs spread among the six exams. The gist of the questions are that MySQL supplies some programs that need to connect to the mysqld server. These programs depend on having a running MySQL server with which to interact.

MySQL also supplies some programs that do not require a running server. The risk adverse would be wise to just shut down their database before using them. The myisamchk table-maintenance utility or myisampack MyIsam table compressor for examples. Read the documentation on myisamchk for the list of woes that can be befall the more adventurous.

Some of the questions on the exams are quite detailed on these various programs. But it is obvious that many candidates are not able to differentiate the two types of programs.

On one of …

As one can imagine I've been getting a lot of questions about the Sun acquisition.

"Will you still blog?"

"Will MySQL be rewritten in Java"

"Can I get a picture of you in the "Java, the best replacement for Cobol" t-shirt?"

I also hear things. Good stories about Sun, bad stories about Sun. A lot of past history on poor attempts at open source libraries which people still think are current.

A lot of very happy people over Open Office's existence.

Someone asked me if Sun was likely to be sold to Microsoft (huh?).

What no one has asked me so far is what should an open source advocate/programmer going into Sun should try to do.

In general I believe strongly in a combination of "let a thousand flowers bloom" and "be afraid to die until you win some victory for humanity".

More open source is good; software patents kill …

Day 2 for me started with watching Simon Phipps talk about Sun’s FOSS Philosophy and Strategy. It rained in the morning, so the talk started a little late, and there were hopes of better attendance. Nonetheless, the talk was interesting, and the announcement that there was money in it for FOSS developers, was just fabulous. I took away a few points, which I ended up Twittering:

• There’s this idea of a global mesh nowadays, and its leading to a changing society. FOSS is all about it. And “Its Going Mainer Mainstream”!
• Investment in skills is important for any country. There should always be a …