I've been wanting to test diskchecker.pl on EC2 for while. It's a shame -
since now that I think about it, there is no way I can prove
whether or not it works, and I feel like an idiot for not
realizing prior.
I thought I would try my best to offer an explanation to save
someone the trouble:
Normally when you write a file, it just writes to a buffer. Think
of it like a funnel - there could be a little or a lot of other
writes trying to make it to the disk, but to improve performance
your operating system will allow you to continue without having
to wait. Under normal circumstances all those writes will
eventually make it, so when that happens shouldn't concern
you.
The problem is that when you have a database application, having
something in a buffer that's pending isn't good enough. You want
to know that when you send a write, …
I’m speaking at the upcoming VITTA conference.
Title:MySQL database administration for non DBAs
Abstract: MySQL is incredibly ubiquitous. MySQL database administrators are not everywhere; MySQL is. Often MySQL is run to power a small web site or two, an application or two, or run on a machine purely for someone else’s use (and the install made MySQL just work so you don’t have to care). This session goes over the things you need to know about your MySQL installations to keep them healthy without burdening you with work, including MySQL Basics, installation, security, backup, restore, performance and upgrades.
When: 12:15 PM, Wednesday 21 November 2007
Should be fun!
I created MySQL Table Checksum because I was certain replication replicas were slowly drifting out of sync with their masters, and there was no way to prove it. Once I could prove it, I was able to show that replication gets out of sync for lots of people, lots of times. (If you really want to hear war stories, you should probably talk to one of the MySQL support staff or consulting team members; I’m sure they see this a lot more than I do).
On Nov 1, I started an undefined duration gig with MySQL Inc, as part of
their Professional Services Department, with an emphasis on
Storage Engines.
Mainly, this means I will write, tweak, and certify custom
storage engines for specific MySQL users. My main job will not
involve writing stuff that goes into the regular codebase, but
who knows?
Just recently I seem to have noticed an increased number of mysterious crashes and terminations of applications. This is generally on brand new systems that I’m setting up, or on existing systems where I’m setting up a new or duplicate account.
Initially everything is fine, but then all of a sudden as I start syncing over my files, shell profile and so on applications will stop working. I’ve experienced it in MySQL, and more recently when starting up Gnome on Solaris 10 9/07.
Sometimes the problem is obvious, other times it takes me a while
to realize what is happening and causing the problem. But in all
cases it’s the same problem - my TMPDIR environment
variable points to a directory that doesn't exist. That's because
for historical reasons (mostly related to HP-UX, bad permissions
and global tmp directories) I've always set TMPDIR to a directory
within my home directory. It's just a one of those things I've
had in …
Back in April I was thinking "Excellent! I will have the memcache
engine beta for the MySQL User's Conference!"
Nix that idea. What happened? We ran the first benchmark on the
engine and while it did very well against other engines (aka
kicked a number of their asses) it was completely unstable. The
library which I had been fighting with all along that allowed me
to communicate with the memcached servers leaked memory and was
just too unstable.
At the time I was told that a new library was going to be made
public so I shelved the project waiting for the new
library.
And waited...
Finally got annoy with waiting and wrote my own (aka
libmemcached, http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html).
Which while I thought it would take me all of ten hours to write,
took much longer (thanks to Remedy Tea on 15th for providing …
Term Hallelujah! They finally added tabs. I've been using
iTerm for years now for this reason, and while it has gotten
better, it still crashes a lot. I have no idea why it took Apple
this long to fix this.
From Row They are now including this on all Macs. About
time...
Safari The new find feature makes find useable on web
pages. Simple interface change but it overall quite nice. The
"copy part of a page is dashboard" will either turn out to be one
of my new favorite features, or I will forget about it
completely. I've made a copy of some of the reporting widgets out
of Google Analytics (which was cake to do). This has the
potential to make Dashboard useful for me.
Time Machine I am finding myself a little bit scared of
this one. It keeps all of its backups in some sort of
uncompressed database. I am not sure how the Restore is supposed
to work, and not being able to just copy …
I needed to start mysql without privileges after a database restore today, and while confirming the correct option which was –skip-grant-tables I came across an option which made me laugh.
$ mysqld --verbose --help
...
--sporadic-binlog-dump-fail
Option used by mysql-test for debugging and testing of
replication.
...
And here is the Official Manual Entry