After several months I have again spent a little work in the MySQL Index Analyzer I first published back in August of 2006.

I added a feature that will find duplicate columns inside an index, caused by the internal appending of the InnoDb primary key columns to each secondary index.

To get the code and read more about the new feature, including an example, go to the MySQL Index Analyzer Blog.

I have a small website that I've built for my wife who is a realtor.  It's a simple site that tracks properties, showings, etc and it was built using ASP.Net and Sql Server.  Recently I decided to move it to Connector/Net and MySQL 5.1 so I needed a way to migrate the data.  Enter the MySQL Migration Toolkit.

This is a terrific tool that can migrate data from various databases into MySQL.  My SQL Server instance was setup to support mixed mode authentication and I had enabled the SQL Server Browser service and the TCP/IP protocol so I didn't anticipate any problems.  I was almost right.

The one thing that tripped me up was that I was using a named instance with SQL Server.  My instance was named SQLExpress so the hostname of the instance was .\SQLExpress.  The problem is that the JDBC driver that the toolkit uses doesn't accept that as a hostname.  To get it to work you have to enter a …

Listening to Josh Berkus presentation on OSCON today I decided to take a closer look at SpecJAppServer benchmarks results which were published by PostgreSQL recently and which as Josh Puts it "This publication shows that a properly tuned PostgreSQL is not only as fast or faster than MySQL, but almost as fast as Oracle (since the hardware platforms are different, it's hard to compare directly)."

If you look at Benchmark Results List you would see MySQL Scores 720.56 and PostgreSQL scores 778.14 JOPS on 12 cores. This seems to show PostgreSQL is some 10% faster, from the glance view.

If you take a closer look you however would notice hardware is different - MySQL benchmark use Sun Fire X4100 available in Nov 2005 …

While MySQL AB CEO Mickos is in no hurry to adopt the GPLv3 (see blog post), SugarCRM just announced (press release) at OSBC 2007 that it would adopting the GPLv3 as a replacement to its Sugar Public License, a variant of the Mozilla Public License with an attribution clause. This change applies the company’s release of Sugar Community Edition 5.0 and future releases. Does this mean that SugarCRM is abandoning the attribution clause within the new license? Nope. The GPLv3 allows for the inclusion of an attribution clause in the appendices.

Why would SugarCRM pursue this move? It may see this move as an opportuity to align itself more closely with Open Souce Initiative (OSI). SugarCRM has been taking a …

Sunday afternoon, I took the Amtrak from Seattle down to Portland. I think from now on, if I want to go to Portland, that will be the way I will go. It's about as fast as driving, a lot less stressful, it's cheaper (looking at the cost of gasoline), and I have a power outlet. And no damn TSA to deal with.

Portland is a lot like Seattle, only with trains and more hippies.

The O'Reilly folks are helpful and friendly.

Monday, I had wanted to do the morning session on Xen. But it had been cancelled. Foo!

So instead I went to the "Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python" by David Goodger. It was very cool, and I improved my Python skillz just from watching his examples.

That afternoon, I to went to "A Taste of Haskell" by Simon Peyton-Jones. I picked it because I knew almost nothing about it, except that it's something very different from the CS research world that had made the …

The Sex Pistols once sang about "Anarchy in the U.K.," but that's not how we should view this news that the British government has rejected an extension to its 50-year copyright term. This is the same government that rejects software patents.

Looks like the land of Mary Poppins is ahead of us Yankees in how it views intellectual property.

Not everyone, of course, agrees:

...

Yesterday I sat through Intel's tutorial on Intel's Threading Building Blocks at OSCON.

The library looks pretty interesting, and I've been looking at the
interface and white papers to see how it was written.

Good white paper:
http://cache-www.intel.com/cd/00/00/30/11/301132_301132.pdf

The part I don't get?

Its C++.

They missed the point. Most of open source is in C. If you want
ubiquity, you write in C. You can wrap C into C++.

Or Perl, Python... but C++? Pain in the ass.

If I write something for just myself I'll use C++, but if I want
ubiquity? Its going to be C.

What would have been an even bigger leap in thought for this release?
Find a way to …

At OSCON 2007 listening to Josh Berkus talk about finding database performance issues in a web application. I see that Brian and Peter are here. I've been to many-a-MySQL tuning session, will be interesting to see how it differs looking at it from Postgres.

[prior to starting Josh is playing a Flash-based game (projected on the screen) called Mole where you try to whack a mole on the head]

Josh was involved in the recent benchmarks published comparing Oracle and PostgreSQL.

Josh looks at a stack with hardware, OS, database, middleware and application and talks about trying to figure out where in …

I don't have a myspace account, I can think of hundreds of people I still have to linkup with on LinkedIn, and my facebook account only gets checked every few days[1], so some might claim I'm not a real consumer of the social networking kool aid.

I'm a consumer of Hospitality Exchange networks though, so I thought I would try and write a bit of a history for the unintiated from my perspective.

The first 'large'[2] website was Hospitality Club ("HC"), started by Veit. For me Hospitality club is now dead in the water. The best volunteers walked out about a year ago to start BeWelcome, and Veit just can't attract the talent to keep his servers up, or afford to pay them.

The second 'large' website was probably Couchsurfing.com, which soaked up a lot of press when a crash managed to bring the website down, and almost meant the end of the website.

For some people couchsurfing was an answer to …

Well I've practically completed porting the existing Traffic Analyzer code over to Windows. One or two sacrifices had to be made, however, most notably I had to cope with the lack of support for certain struct sockaddr conversion functions such as inet_aton which are normally in the arpa/inet.h header. Still, it's compiled (under MinGW, screw you Visual Studio!) and seems to work so that's cool.

Additionally, the packet capture and processing features of the Traffic Analyzer were practically completed last week when I did a partial re-write. Packet processing is now done within the constructors of the three primary classes; Session, ServerResponse and ClientCommand. Sessions encapsulate ClientCommand objects which then encapsulate their corresponding ServerResponse objects. Generic information is extracted from server responses, such as the number of rows affected by a query, error codes, warnings and server status codes. Client …