Meetup.com has lots of MySQL users groups sponsored by MySQL itself. Look for a group near you at www.meetup.com or start one.

I have been trying for the past few months to get the North Texas MySQL Meetup Group rolling. One member who made our first meeting was able to use some knowledge he learned to help earn a Paypal Certified Developer Certification shortly before he got a new job. Sadly the new job kept him away from the last meeting.

If you are in or around Dallas / Fort Worth, we will be in the Starbucks inside the Barns & Noble at the Southlake Town Center (Hwy 114 & Carroll Ave) Monday February 4th at 7PM. Look for me in the tan MySQL baseball hat. If we swamp the Starbucks, we'll move someplace like Joe's Pizza where spirited talk about buffer caches or row locking is not shocking. Well welcome all levels of curiosity and experience.

In June 2007, I became a Certified MySQL 5.0 DBA. A couple of days ago, decided to see what was in the account at http://www.mysql.com/certification/candidate/. It's possible to create special account for people who want verify my certification. I think it's useful, for example, during interview with the employer.

Interesting statistics http://www.mysql.com/certification/candidates.php?exam=4. In Ukraine, only 3 people, including me, who are certified as MySQL 5.0 DBA. Apparently IT market is not in need of MySQL DBA and this is confirmed by Ukrainian job sites. I met only one vacancy, which assumed duties as the work solely as a DBA.

Recently, I have worked on client's project and I had to read MySQL's documentation very often. Caught myself on the fact that I perform the same operation: type query like 'site:dev.mysql.com WORD' in Google. Finally, I have found search plugin MySQL50DOC (http://www.searchplugins.net/pluginlist.aspx?q=mysql&mode=title) for Firefox which makes search pretty simple.

1. Zend and Microsoft have done a lot of work in the last year to make PHP run well on Windows. I never understood why Microsoft devoted resources to that, but now it is clear: it’s going to make technical integration between the two organizations go much more smoothly.
2. This will hopefully be the death knell of the awful "Windows Live" branding for consumer web stuff.
3. Maybe now somebody will release a .NET OpenID 2.0 library that actually works.
4. Big losers here from a tech supplier perspective: FreeBSD and MySQL.
5. Another potential big loser is Adobe; having a gigantic global audience will help with adoption of Microsoft’s various Adobe-killing initiatives like Silverlight, which would never otherwise have penetrated the consumer web without a large built-in audience like Yahoo’s.

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 …