Matt Asay asks why Asia doesn’t contribute more to open source. It’s an interesting question, and the responses are equally interesting. There are a few in the comments to Matt’s piece, for example, pointing out Asia’s contribution to projects such as Ruby on Rails, not to mention Andrew Tridgell’s crucial involvement in the Samba project.

Those are the exception rather than the rule, however. There are also a few clues regarding the comparative lack of open source contribution from Asia in the ZDnet article that prompted the question in the first place.

“Harish Pillay, open source evangelist with Red Hat Asia-Pacific, acknowledges …

As mentioned earlier I am testing out SSD disk performance on a 4 core machine with 6GB of memory. I spent last week comparing the drive to a standard 10K RPM SATA Raptor drive (EXT3 file system right now). As noted here and elsewhere the performance of these drives really shines with a specific workload, but they are not for everyone out there. The random write performance of these drives leaves a great deal to be desired while their read performance is outstanding:

Above you can see that when we perform 10K random reads with 0 writes we peak at about 5200 IOPS vs the 161 IOPS on a standard SATA drive. When we flip the IO to all writes we end up getting around 100 IOPS out of the SSD drive. Not many sites are 100% reads, so some sort of mixed IO load is expected. Here you can see how the number of IO’s per second varies under different workloads:

One of the cooler inventions in recent versions of MySQL is having the slow log and general log available as plain-text files as well as CSV-engine type tables directly within the mysql database.

So now you want to analyze the slow query log using SQL, but (a) you don’t want to lock up the table while you do your work, and (b) you suspect that your work may involve adding indexes, dropping columns and such during the analysis.

So you decide to make a copy of the table.

Except that you can’t.

mysql> CREATE TABLE slow SELECT * FROM mysql.slow_log;
ERROR 1553 (HY000): You can't use locks with log tables.

As all the data is stored as a plain CSV …

There is a new wiki comparing MySQL to PostgreSQL. Because it's a wiki, hopefully it can be kept updated so that it's current AND accurate.

The wiki is MySQL vs PostgreSQL.

Personally, I'd like to see this grow into a universal comparison site that the community could keep updated.

LewisC

Finding largest tables on MySQL instance is no brainier in MySQL 5.0+ thanks to Information Schema but I still wanted to post little query I use for the purpose so I can easily find it later, plus it is quite handy in a way it presents information:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> SELECT concat(table_schema,'.',table_name),concat(round(table_rows/1000000,2),'M') rows,concat(round(data_length/(1024*1024*1024),2),'G') DATA,concat(round(index_length/(1024*1024*1024),2),'G') idx,concat(round((data_length+index_length)/(1024*1024*1024),2),'G') total_size,round(index_length/data_length,2) idxfrac FROM information_schema.TABLES ORDER BY data_length+index_length DESC LIMIT 10;
2. +-------------------------------------+--------+--------+--------+------------+---------+
3. | concat(table_schema,'.',table_name) | rows   | DATA   | idx    | total_size | idxfrac |
4. …

In the first article on IP to location I described the overall concept. In this edition we'll look at the implementation and how to scale the tracing to a reasonable speed.

With the examples from the last article you can also implement everything to build your own database. Before you jump into it take a minute to look at the implications.

Taking the example from the previous article 217.80.0.0/12 for the German Telekom we have to trace 1mio addresses and scanning them all will take a while:

# time traceroute -w 1 -m 8 -q 1 217.80.0.1
traceroute to 217.80.0.1 (217.80.0.1), 8 hops max, 40 byte packets
 2  217.0.72.230  36.974 ms   
 3  ke-eb1.ke.de.net.dtag.de (62.154.98.82)  54.454 ms
 4  217.0.74.213  54.610 ms
 5  * * *
 6  * * *
 7  * * *
 8  * * *

real    0m3.244s

If we can make the make …

Somebody missed a good job by not being being a Certified MySQL Database Administrator (CMDBA). So for the lack of some study time and the cost of two exams, a prime job in New York for a MySQL DBA evaporated. Several times each month I hear from someone internally at MySQL that some customer is looking for MySQL Certified talent.

For a Texan, I have spent a fair amount of time in New York and know there is a good deal of LAMP talent in that area. It is frustrating to know an area with so much talent did not have someone holding a CMDBA that could be found by the company mentioned in the linked blog.

I used to be the CTO of an online recruiting corporation and I know that keywords such as 'MySQL', 'CMDBA', or 'MySQL Certified' are what recruiters are plugging into their searches. Recruiters …

Good location and very good presentations from our partners Magirus and Red Hat, in Milan last week.

Giuseppe Paterno', Senior Solution Architect at Red Hat (here is Giuseppe's web site, in Italian) has delivered a great presentation on the new features of RH 5.1. I think that the new virtualization features, now included in 5.1, will attract the interest of many Red Hat and MySQL users. There has been a long debate whether DB servers should stay away from virtualization or they should get the big advantage of the availability and the flexibility that a virtualised environment can provide. I think that para-virtualization may be a good compromise between a thick virtualized layer and a non-virtualized environment: it's more predictable, less intrusive and it can provide all the flexibility required for a DB server. More information on virtualization and on the new features of RHEL …

Solaris Express, Developer Edition 1/08 or SXDE 1/08 as its affectionately called within Sun is being released on monday. There are certain new features that I think needs to be highlighted specially for the PostgreSQL community.

Well for starters the versions of PostgreSQL included in SXDE are PostgreSQL 8.1.10 and PostgreSQL 8.2.5. (Unfortunately not all security fixes made it to the release though). However the big news is the PostgreSQL servers which are pretty hidden now has an administration GUI. Yes pgAdmin III is now included in SXDE.

Also there are lot of new features which now are quite well integrated with PostgreSQL.

For example take …

Ops Mantras (as made popular by Dormando).
I've been doing this shit for a while now. I'm presently acting as a MySQL DBA for SixApart, but these views are mine and not of my employer. This is an omega post of all of the generalized one off mantras I find valuable when approaching operations management. Even if these end up being idealistic, my humble view is to shoot for these and you'll be better off with what you end up with.

It's uh, long, sorry. This _was_ inspired by another post which I'll not be direct linking. Aside from the list-style, I've not stolen anything else. The Mantras are broken up into major sections:
- The Technical Element
- The Human Element
- The Practice

The Technical Element
Design for change
- The old google mantra is right. Design for change. Change is having to deploy new software, upgrade …