I'm getting in early, I had just started building my benchmarks for my talk on Amazon EC2 at the MySQL Conference and Expo next year when I discovered exactly why they say you need to run a test more than once; results can be completely unpredictable. Take for example the Sequential I/O performance on EC2, versus my home machine:



The first 3 tests were a 36G Seagate Raptor 10k RPM, a 160G Seagate SATA2 7200RPM, and a 320G Seagate IDE 7200RPM disk, running in the same machine I had at home. The last three were Amazon EC2 images. A few observations from these results:

• The char write test seems to max out my CPU (not on graph - see raw data), so that probably explains why it's consistent across all disks.
• My home machine is almost dead on consistent, whereas Amazon EC2 looks more like a roller-coaster
• The …

With new versions of XAMPP for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X we wish you all a merry christmas, snow on your server farm and a warming processor in everyones heart!

In all three Xmas gifts we updated MySQL to 5.0.51, PHP to 5.2.5 and phpMyAdmin to 2.11.3. But we didn't update Perl because the new 5.10.0 seems to be a development version, and in XAMPP we only support "stable" versions.

Santa Downloads and more details on the specific platform's XAMPP project page.

I was just reading Jan’s post about how to write a good build system

I’m in the need for a portable, fast build-system.

While I’m not about to write a build system in lua - or anything else, I thought I’d pitch in my thoughts as I’ve been having a similar problem recently. The problem is, autotools is the only system that doesn’t require some prereq to be installed on the system … other than a working build system. The only real downside to autotools (other than needing to learn m4) is that it is useless on Windows.

As Jan says, though, the other systems fall down on the make dist part. This is way important to me, as I also work in my tree alot and I really want to have an automated step to make sure I’m packaging up all the files I need, but not too many. This leads Jan to the …

Today's entry is provided by Jay Pipes.

Name

Jay Pipes

Blog

jpipes.com

Biography

Jay Pipes is the North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL. Coauthor of Pro MySQL (Apress, 2005), Jay regularly assists software developers in identifying how to make the most effective use of MySQL. He has given sessions on performance tuning at the MySQL Users Conference, RedHat Summit, NY PHP Conference, OSCON, SCALE, and Ohio LinuxFest, amongst others. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife, Julie, and his four animals. In his abundant free time, when not being pestered by his two needy cats and two noisy dogs, he daydreams in PHP code and ponders the ramifications of …

2007 was an off year for me when it comes to blogging. Not a surprise, since my first blog after returning from my trip to Argentina was entitled “Am I done blogging?”

Seeing that I’m a self proclaimed “Data Dynamo and BI Geek” and even google agrees (search term “BI Geek” yields me at the top) it seems only fitting for me to see how bad 2007 was… You know, by the numbers.

First, pop the top on the wordpress database schema. (5 minutes)
Second, write a simple SQL Query based cube (blogmart.mondrian.xml) on top of my blog data (posts, categories) (15 minutes)
Third, do some analysis in JPivot to see how …

2007 is almost over and what a year this has been for Wave2!

My programming preferences have gone full circle, from beginning the year playing snakes and ladders (Python), I spent the summer drinking coffee (Java) and finally settled down surrounded by Camel’s, Lama’s and Parrots (Perl). Bizarre but never dull!

Steady progress has been made all round and as always the Open Source community has proven a valuable resource. Not a day went by where I did not discover something new or think of a new idea that could be built using Open Source Software. I only wish I had more time in the day!.

My Christmas present came early this year in the form of a MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA Certification Study Guide. I have been putting off the final MySQL certification while waiting for the book to arrive, and now it is in my hands the only thing preventing me from taking the …

In writing earlier on IBM's acquisition of Solid Information Technology, I failed to remember a key piece of trivia. Solid used to employ Marten (1995-97). Marten's experience at Solid is hilarious in retrospect:

When [Monty Widenius] started MySQL, I worked for this other small database company, Solid Information Technology. I told Monty that his project was just going to fail, and that it was a stupid thing to do, and that he didn't have a chance because we had a chance.

GM: What was your view of the Free Software world when you were at Solid--were you even aware of it?

...

First it was Oracle buying Innobase (though Oracle has so far played fair). Now it's IBM buying Solid Information Technology. Given much of the proprietary world's public attitude toward open source ("Open source a threat? What's open source?), it's surprising that IBM would even bother to hedge its bets against MySQL.

After all, who's afraid of little MySQL? I mean, who besides everyone with a database business that depends on lock-in, overpriced licenses, and 20th Century software? Matthew Aslett doesn't think this was targeted at MySQL, and he's likely right. But it impacts MySQL all the same, as the New York Times …

This is not a HOWTO, but more a RFC. I'm in the need for a portable, fast build-system. For lighttpd, for MySQL Proxy, ...

I need what autotools + gmake do, just in a portable (yes, including windows) and fast way. Up to now I tried SCons and cmake as alternatives and both fell short in important categories (like make dist).

If you are reading this blog since a while you know what comes next: Let's write a full replacement in LUA.

Requirements

I like what the autotools (automake, autoconf and libtool) do. From the users point of view it is:

$ ./configure ...
$ make 
$ make install

With automake you also get:

$ make uninstall
$ make dist
$ make distcheck

Especially the distcheck target is very neat if you are a packager …

So current benchmark run:

generate_hsieh_consistent

Testing generate_data                                    6.983 [ ok ]
Testing get_read                                         5.545 [ ok ]
Testing delete_generate                                  5.143 [ ok ]
Testing generate_data                                    7.173 [ ok ]
Testing mget_read                                        1.369 [ ok ]
Testing mget_read_result                                         1.379 [ ok ]
Testing mget_read_function                                       1.308 [ ok ]
Testing mdelete_generate                                         1.001 [ ok ]
Testing cleanup                                  0.047 [ ok ]

I've added this function:

memcached_return memcached_fetch_execute(memcached_st *ptr,
                                              unsigned int (*callback[])(memcached_st *ptr, memcached_result_st *result, void …