I haven’t been blogging about the things I used to – how-tos and technical hacks – because I’ve been working quite hard on MySQL Toolkit and, believe it or not, innotop. I’ve made it possible to write innotop plugins, which have been very useful to our team at work, and I’m working on documentation. Plugins won’t make it into the upcoming release; it’ll just be bug fixes and documentation. These projects have taken up most of my free time.

This release fixes some bugs and improves the chunking functionality. MySQL Table Checksum had a few minor bugs and one major bug with the chunking functionality. I also rewrote the chunking, though the behavior is backwards compatible. I am very happy with the way it works now, and will probably not make any more incompatible changes to it. The changes enabled me to add support for chunking on float, double and decimal columns.

So, we did it! New Best Tech Videos site version has been released today. Of course, it could have some issues, and we are really looking forward for your feedback on our support forums.

Let’s review main improvements we’ve made here:

• First of all, I want to mention our first step to socialization of the BTV - all our users could signup now and get their own lists of favorited, commented and voted videos and much more - they could have their own personal RSS feeds.
• Next cool thing we’ve prepared for you is user-generated content! You can find some great videos on the Net and share them with fellow BTV readers. At this moment our posting system works in pre-moderated mode to keep really high level of videos we post here, but later we want to delegate …

Savio has had some interesting posts lately crunching numbers related to open source investments and, most currently, the FSF's financial ability to litigate GPLv3. In both cases, though, I think he's getting a bit too attached to the calculator and detached from reality. (Not that I ever stray from reality.... :-)

(That said, in both cases I appreciate the exercise that he walks us through. It's useful.)

With regard to the FSF's ability to litigate over GPLv3, this misses the point. The FSF has never needed to rely on litigation to enforce the GPL. That's what public pressure is all about, and the open source community can deliver that in abundance. I've yet to see it fail.

To the extent that the FSF …

Checking out the state of tables of your MySQL setup in production is important for fine tuning server parameters. MySQL's SHOW TABLE STATUS command comes very handy in determining table states from a running environment. Here, I explain the output of the command.

mysql> SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 'mytable' \G
****************** 1. row ******************
           Name: mytable
         Engine: InnoDB
        Version: 9
     Row_format: Dynamic
           Rows: 2465222
 Avg_row_length: 370
    Data_length: 913326080
Max_data_length: NULL
   Index_length: 146817024
      Data_free: 0
 Auto_increment: 18357110
    Create_time: 2007-05-11 22:27:56
    Update_time: NULL
     Check_time: NULL
      Collation: latin1_swedish_ci
       Checksum: NULL
 Create_options:
        Comment: InnoDB free: 869376 kB
1 row in set (0.34 sec)

Leaving behind the obvious …

I finally got around to installing a SlimDevices SqueezeBox at home. It was a gift from my wife some months back, but the idea of wrestling with our in-wall cabinetry to hookup the audio cables and get my MP3 collection onto the living room stereo put me off for a long time.  But I was in a cleaning mood this weekend and wanted to get rid of a bunch of boxes, books, and other clutter, so I figured this was as good a time as any.  The installation was fairly simple, as long as you know how to convert a WEP key into hex.

All tolled it took about 15 minutes, including messing with the …

If you happen to be in Northern Germany at the end of August, I recommend a visit to Sankt Augustin, a charming city near Bonn.
Apart from the friendly atmosphere and excellent beverages, Sankt Augustin hosts the second edition of FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source Software Conference, organized by a group of very dynamic and efficient enthusiasts.



I will present a topic for database administrators, Monitoring and logging a database server.

And of course I will meet a bunch of friends there. Someone I know very well, like Lenz Grimmer, who will speak about Opening the doors of the Cathedral, and Zak Greant, whose session about …

Let me announce ClickAider - another projects we were working on in stealth mode for last several Months.

ClickAider is Hosted Web Statistics system but it tracks Clicks rather than page views as most web counters do. And by clicks I mean not just clicks on the urls and images but clicks on many sophisticated advertisement systems - Google Adsense, Yahoo Publishers Network, AdBrite, AuctionAds and few others, plus ClickAider also can track form submissions.

The Click Tracking is done non-intrusive way, without Advertisers JavaScript modification so typically it is compatible with advertisers terms of service.

Why did we decide to do it …

Georg, Andrey and Ulf have been hard at work designing, implementing and testing a replacement for libmysql only for us PHP users. The idea is that mysqlnd can leverage all the internal PHP infrastructure for communication and memory management. It can also be much more PHP aware, removing old cruft we do not need while adding extra goodies just for us!

This means the PHP memory limit will finally be honored, PHP user streams will be able to hook into the communication with MySQL. A client side query cache promises speed improvements and the fact that data does not need to be moved from libmysql to PHP should also stream line things. They are also looking to improve support for persistent connections.

While originally developed for PHP6, mysqlnd now also runs on PHP5 and talks to ext/mysqli and ext/mysql with PDO support planned. More over the …

In my previous post I mentioned you might need to increase net_write_timeout to avoid connection being aborted and now I think I should have better explained that.

MySQL uses a lot of different timeout variables at different stages. For example when connection is just being established connect_timeout is used. When server waits for another query to be sent to it wait_timeout
(or interactive_timeout for applications which specified they are interactive during connection). This value is rather large as it is rather typical for some applications to have long delays between queries.

If query is being read or result set is being sent back, much shorter net_read_timeout and net_write_timeout are used.

…