This release of MySQL Toolkit updates MySQL Parallel Dump. Together you and I found a few bugs in it (table locking, argument quoting, exit status code). The restore utility is in progress.

I haven't done a serious learning project for a while so this week I decided to play around with Windows Server 2008 and PowerShell. I'll post some thoughts about Server 2008 soon (at first glance it looks terrific once you get past the fact that IIS is now a "role" instead of something you install). But I wanted to post a PowerShell example first because I wanted to do something with it that I couldn't find information about anywhere -- specifically, perform a database query and dump the contents to the console. (Later we'll get fancy and dump it to HTML or send it somewhere via email, etc.)

PowerShell can invoke any .NET object, so I knew it was possible to do database stuff with a PowerShell script, but I couldn't find any examples anywhere, so here's what I cooked up via trial and error.

The first step is to create a database connection:

[system.reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("MySql.Data")
$cn …

How does INNODB in mysql 5.0 tablespace per file grow?

I can just add data and hope to catch when the table space grows, but I really want to understand the internals of INNODB and build an accurate modal on how big the table space will grow when X rows are added.

• Some things that need to be known.
  
• Data stored in INNODB is stored as pages with a default size of 16KB.
  
• INNODB adds a page for every secondary INDEX
  
• INNODB has some overhead of about 18 bytes (maybe more) per row
  

First let's set up a test environment

delimiter //

CREATE PROCEDURE resettest()

 begin  
        DROP TABLE IF EXISTS testvarchar;
        CREATE TABLE `testvarchar` (
                        `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
                        `data_key` varchar(255) default …

Today’s xkcd is just wonderful. I think we need giant ones of these on the wall of offices around the world.

A

The Open Source Developers' Conference 2007 Brisbane program schedule is now online!
Registrations are coming along nicely, but it's a bit too early to project possible total numbers.

The organisers have decided that if you register after October 31st, you don't get a conference T-shirt. Nanana.
But seriously.... Elspeth needs time to get them printed, and producing lots extra of various sizes gets silly.
So no worries, unless you slack and don't register soon... earlybird ($275) ends October 14th, after that it'll be $295 until October 31st, and from November 1st you lose your shirt and pay $325.
Full (non-student) registrations include the Wednesday conference dinner, until sold out.

I am considering taking some time off work to concentrate deeply on MySQL Table Sync, which has been getting usage in very large companies whose names we all know. There are a lot of bugs and feature requests outstanding for it. It is overly complex, needs a lot of work, and I can’t do it in one-hour or even three-hour chunks. I need to focus on it. I’m considering asking for a bounty of $2500 USD for this.

This release of MySQL Toolkit updates MySQL Parallel Dump. Together you and I found a few bugs in it (table locking, argument quoting, exit status code). The restore utility is in progress.

In this Zimbra Administrator's PowerTip, we'll discuss how to move your instance of Zimbra to another machine. It applies to all version of Zimbra.
Administrator's PowerTip #4: October 09, 2007
Zimbra Forums - Zimbra wiki - Zimbra Blog

Introduction Either you, or someone you know has been there. Almost out of Disk space, RAM is topped out, and the CPU is constantly running above 80%. It's time to upgrade the hardware. But how easy and safe is it to move the Zimbra server instance? Well, it's easier than you might think.

In this Zimbra Administrator's PowerTip, we'll discuss how to migrate your Zimbra server to another Machine or OS. The one big caveat is that both instances of Zimbra MUST be running the same version. So if your old server is …

aka…..”when good queries go bad!”

So, today the developers were debugging why a script was running much longer than expected. They were doing text database inserts, and got to the point where they realized that double the amount of text meant the queries took double the amount of time.

You see, they were doing similar text inserts over and over, instead of using connection pooling and/or batching them. Apparently the other DBA explained that it was a limitation of MySQL, but either the developers didn’t convey what they were doing well, or the DBA didn’t think to mention batching.

I ran a simple test on a test server. I used the commandline to connect to a db server on the same machine (even though in qa and production the db machine is on a different machine) just to make a point:

…