First of all, I'd like to start my first blog entry with a special thanks to Edwin De Souza from MySQL. I would not be blogging if it wasn't for his kind advice. Thanks!

Now to the subject in question. It seems like the word "enterprise" is now just a marketing term that really means nothing and its added freely to all sorts of software. Since we emphasize jbilling as an enterprise billing system, I'd like to clarify my understanding of what enterprise means, at least to me.

Common associations with the term are "large", "for businesses" or even "serious". Indeed, an enterprise application could be (and commonly is) all of the above. But it doesn't have to be. The software that runs the avionics of a plane can be very serious and very complex. Yet, it is not an enterprise application.

So, you can write very important, very complex and very advance software and still not be writing enterprise software. Enterprise …

Today, Hi-Media (HIM.PA), a French publicly traded company, has announced that it is acquiring Fotolog (my employer) for approximately $90 million in a 23% cash and 77% stock transaction.

Hi-Media was founded in 1996 and currently the Hi-Media Network is the French leader in interactive marketing and the third largest in Europe.

Last year, in April, we had 3 million members and 100 million photos. Today, the number is more than 10.5 million. We are also very close to reaching 300 million photos.

" …

I started work on a Java class that mimics the functionality of the mysqldump command today.
My goal is to create a standalone application to begin with, but design the class such that it can be plugged into any other Java application requiring MySQL backup capability.

After completing the initial prototype of the dump_table method (minus blob support), I began to wonder what the performance would be like compared to the bundled mysqldump application (written in C).

As this was a prototype with no optimisations, the results were not that bad. The following figures were obtained from running both the C-based mysqldump and the MySQLDump.java app against a fairly large innodb …

ActiveRecord-JDBC 0.5 is now available. As mentioned earlier, one of the main features in this release is simplified database configuration for JRuby-on-Rails applications. From the release notes:

It is no longer necessary to specify :driver and :url configuration parameters for the mysql,  postgresql, oracle, derby, hsqldb, and h2 adapters.

This means that if you deploy a Rails application as a WAR file on GlassFish as described …

Last weekend saw the second installment of the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) in Sankt Augustin. The conference revolved around a rich schedule of talks, highlighting current topics in Free Software and Open Source. Moreover, Open Source projects took the opportunity to organize their own meetings or even their own lineup of events. Just like last year, the PHP usergroups of Dortmund and …

mysqlnd saves memory. It consumes half as much memory as libmysql. This is what we have been convinced of. This is what we taught you. Then I tried to test it and made Andrey get nervous for a few hours… Meanwhile he is fine again and we can announce: mysqlnd saves memory, not only in theory, we tested it - we can proof it, can we?

The read-only variable trick

In theory it is so simple. libmysql is not part of PHP. If libmysql fetches any data from the MySQL Server, it puts the data into its own buffers. Then the data gets copied from the libmysql buffers into the ext/mysql resp. ext/mysqli data structures. Those data structures are “zvals“. “zval” is the name of the data structure that PHP uses internally - on the C level - to implement user variables. So, you have the data twice in memory: 1x inside the libmysql buffers and 1x inside …

mysqlnd saves memory. It consumes half as much memory as libmysql. This is what we have been convinced of. This is what we taught you. Then I tried to test it and made Andrey get nervous for a few hours… Meanwhile he is fine again and we can announce: mysqlnd saves memory, not only in theory, we tested it - we can proof it, can we?

The read-only variable trick

In theory it is so simple. libmysql is not part of PHP. If libmysql fetches any data from the MySQL Server, it puts the data into its own buffers. Then the data gets copied from the libmysql buffers into the ext/mysql resp. ext/mysqli data structures. Those data structures are “zvals“. “zval” is the name of the data structure that PHP uses internally - on the C level - to implement user variables. So, you have the data twice in memory: 1x inside the libmysql buffers and 1x inside …

There has been quite a bit of talk about emergence of Open Source in China, but the numbers are still very small, as they are for the overall software industry, highlighted by the numbers with Linux (smaller yet for other OSS).

‘’Linux has been riding on a wave in China, topping the growth of all operating systems in the first quarter of 2007, says an industry analyst.

According to CCID Consulting, which specializes in China research, Linux sales posted a 30.9 percent year-on-year growth to reach 31 million yuan (US$4 million). Windows and Unix growth rates were 11.6 percent and 9.6 percent, respectively.’’

‘’Q1 market share Linux (2.5 percent), Windows (41.8 percent), Unix (53.9 percent)’’

More in a ZDNet Asia article

Some key issues to consider in my view are:

1) …

Not so long time ago I had task to update string column in table with 10mil+ rows, and, as the manipulation was non-trivial, I decided this task is good to try Stored Function. Function written - go ahead. Since 5 min I got totally frozen box with no free memory and giant swap.

The case was worth to look deeply - let's try simple table (experiments with MySQL 5.0.45)

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. CREATE TABLE `testf` (
2.   `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
3.   `name` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
4.   PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
5. ) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=20971521 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
6.  
7. mysql> SELECT count(*) FROM testf;
8. +----------+
9. | count(*) |
10. +----------+
11. | 20971520 |
12. +----------+
13. 1 row IN SET (0.00 sec)

and simple …

In http://jan.kneschke.de/2007/8/1/mysql-proxy-learns-r-w-splitting we did a first implementation on idea of sending non-transactional reads to the slaves and writes and transactions to the master.

While that was mostly a proof of concept it already worked pretty well. In this second round on R/W splitting several issues are taken care of:

• SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS ... + SELECT FOUND_ROWS()
• INSERT ... + SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID()
• default_db not in sync between client and backend

These changes should make Read/Write splitting more robust and make it a drop-in for more users.

Up to now we used the tutorial-keepalive.lua to implement the Read/Write-splitting. As the name says, it is a …