Dtrace is one of the coolest things in Solaris 10, adding great observability to applications. A Dtrace provider for PHP that adds probes to function entry and exit points has long been available. I finally got around to integrating this with the php in Cool Stack. 

Bryan Cantrill has some excellent examples of how to use dtrace to trace through your php code, down to the system libraries and kernel (if you want to go that far !) .

Instructions for installing the php dtrace extension

1. Download the shared library for the extension :

    dtrace.so.x86.bz2

…

Baron Schwartz was nice enough to make recordings of about a dozen talks at the recent MySQL conference. The original uploaded files were in ogg format and wouldn’t work on an ipod and weren’t very portable.

With his help, I uploaded the original MP3 files and made a podcast which contains all the links to the sessions and should work fine with iTunes and an ipod.

Here’s the link to the podcast. Just add it to iTunes or your favorite podcasting software and off you go.

This is the first part, in what hopes to be, a series where I go through the entire process of building a storage engine for MySQL.

The first thing to do is to download the skeleton engine. You can find the latest copy at:

http://hg.tangent.org/skeleton-mysql-engine?ca=tip;type=gz

You will need to untar and uncompress the file. The Skeleton engine is a basic bare bones engines which is a starting point for creating a storage engine project (the memcache, PBXT, AWS, HTTP, Google File system and many other engines all evolved from it).

What you will find once you download the engine and cd into its directory, is that it doesn't have a configure file just yet. To generate one, run the following:


[brian@zim skeleton-mysql-engine]$ sh config/bootstrap
+ aclocal …

I have successfully built the MySQL source with the BUILD/compile-pentium-gcov script provided. I ran mysql-test/mysql-test-run.pl --force, and the gcov files are being populated. But now that I've made it this far of course I have a problem. Lcov says that I do not have the gcov kernel module installed, and I can't figure out how to install it, even with the directions in the readme. Overall though, I'm getting a feel for gcov and I can still look at individual files, but having lcov working would be nice as well.

Last week I attended and spoke at the MySQL conference. Some of the talks, particularly the ones that targeted system administrators rather than developers were over my head, but that's useful information in itself -- it serves as a reminder that sometime soon I'll need to either learn the finer points of big-time MySQL system administrator or hire somebody who does.

It was particularly fun giving a talk on .NET to MySQL guys just two weeks after I finished giving a talk on MySQL to a room full of .NET guys. It was also fun seeing my client Alfresco and hanging out with them in their booth, where they were doing demos and fielding lots of inquiries.

I'm just now getting around to firing up the blog-o-matic in earnest after four weeks of more or less non-stop conference-going, but I wanted to mention that I've released the tool that we use to create the data access layer. It's …

Today we've announced the availability of Connector/Net 5.1.0 Alpha.  This is a very exciting release for us as it's the first time we've made available our ASP.Net 2.0 web providers and our compact framework support.  This release also folds in our Tools for Visual Studio into a single installer. 

To that end, we are dropping Tools for Visual Studio as as separate download.  Going forward, you can select Visual Studio integration as an option directly from the Connector/Net installer.  All the same functionality is there, but packaging the products in this way will simplify bug fixes to the products and give our users a better out of box experience.

We encourage anyone using our products to try out this latest release and let us know what you think.  You can read our official release announcement here.

Woohoo, I finally got a bit of spare time to blog — my first blog post ever! I chose to talk about a technique I used at a client’s site to report the topmost space-wasting objects in an Oracle database. I was looking for a way to detect these objects without having to run some expensive [...]

Microsoft recently announced that they are removing the Entity Framework and tools from Visual Studio "Orcas" and will, instead, ship them as an update in the first half of 2008.  It's pretty easy to see this as YAMM (Yet Another Microsoft Miss) but I instead look at this as a very positive sign of things changing.

Microsoft is accelerating many of the development timelines and embracing the "release early, release often" methodology.  It seems that almost every Microsoft product these days comes out as a CTP about a million times even before it his beta stage.  This just means greater awareness and better adoption.  MS is even releasing alot more code as open source as they recently announced a Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) that supports languages such as Python and Ruby.  They are releasing it under …

We now have Developer support for Cool Stack (or Solaris + AMP).  This dedicated online support service for developers provides technical
assistance for code support, diagnostic advice, and programming
questions that may include:

• Sanity Checks
• Code level support
• Best practice guidance
• Workarounds when available
• And other forms of technical assistance

Sun Developer Expert Assistance Service is available to all developers,
with a cost of $49 (USD) per request or unlimited requests for an
annual subscription cost of $249 (USD).

Check out the details at http://developers.sun.com/services/expertassistance/

  …

For years Slashdot trolls would just complain that MySQL was nothing more then an interface to the filesystem.

So what does someone go off and do?

Create exactly that.

http://code.google.com/p/mysql-filesystem-engine/

The engine was written by Google's Chip Turner and can process any file that the database has access too (though exactly how the parsing works I am unsure about, I've only read the code related to the actual engine). The example given is this:

mysql> CREATE TABLE LoadAverage (
load1 DECIMAL(3, 2),
load5 DECIMAL(3, 2),
load15 DECIMAL(3, 2),
active_processes VARCHAR(12),
lastpid INTEGER) ENGINE=FILESYSTEM connection="file:///proc/loadavg";
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from LoadAverage;
…