Sorry that I need to abuse my blog for this. Usually my posts always say something about PHP, PostgreSQL and MySQL, even if sometimes most of the blog post is about Frisbee. But this time its entirely off topic, because I am trying to help my sister and her husband who was just layed-off from work without any prior notice. As a result he was pushed to do what he was thinking in the back of his head anyways, start his own business as an A/C repair service company. Of course now things are a bit rushed and so he is having trouble finding enough clients to keep him busy enough.

So I am calling out to all people in Florida. Ok he can probably not cover all of Florida. My sister and her husband are based in Sarasota. I asked and the work range is from North Port and Punta Gorda in the south to as far north as St. Pete. Anyways here is a partial "reprint" of a letter Bob send out to a potential customer:

I am a maintenance, service and …

Sorry that I need to abuse my blog for this. Usually my posts always say something about PHP, PostgreSQL and MySQL, even if sometimes most of the blog post is about Frisbee. But this time its entirely off topic, because I am trying to help my sister and her husband who was just layed-off from work without any prior notice. As a result he was pushed to do what he was thinking in the back of his head anyways, start his own business as an A/C repair service company. Of course now things are a bit rushed and so he is having trouble finding enough clients to keep him busy enough.

So I am calling out to all people in Florida. Ok he can probably not cover all of Florida. My sister and her husband are based in Sarasota. I asked and the work range is from North Port and Punta Gorda in the south to as far north as St. Pete. Anyways here is a partial "reprint" of a letter Bob send out to a potential customer:

I am a maintenance, service and …

So not too long ago, I ran some simple (and perhaps archaic) benchmarks pitting different engines against each other in terms of how they performance with BLOBs. While I ran into some interesting results, there was one fairly important storage engine that I neglected to test - Falcon. So this time around, I thought I would try some similar tests against MyISAM, InnoDB, and Falcon. I wanted to do PBXT as well, but was unable to get it to work with MySQL 6.0, and didn't think it fair to run PBXT on MySQL 5.1 since 6.0 appears to be slower (likely due to debugging options I would imagine).

Anyways, this time around I opted to use SQLBuster, a little PHP-based script I wrote to help test various queries and concurrency. It works quite well, but the problem is that I am using multiple processes, not threads, to perform the test, which I think tends to skew the …

I was browsing around the MySQL web site tonight and ran across some free webinars (recordings). Seeing as how I once did a podcast on Oracle partitioning, one webinar that jumped out at me was Partitioning in MySQL 5.1 and onwards.

I didn't even know MySQL did partitioning. Here is a description of the webinar:

In this webinar we will provide further insight into MySQL partitioning, including:

• Introduction to MySQL Partitioning
• Linear Key Partitioning
• Partition Function
• Partition Options
• Information …

Welcome to the 62nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. You know, I haven’t actually written one of these since LB#46, way back in May, so I hope I haven’t lost my touch. I guess we’ll see, eh? An item in last week’s Database Column by Mike Stonebraker, a guru [...]

Apparently while I was attending the BEAWorld and VMworld conferences in San Francisco this week, the pretty blue globe we call home kept on spinning, particularly where GPL v3 is concerned. On Wednesday an interview with Mr. Richard Stallman -- President of the Free Software Foundation -- was published in PC World Australia, from which I'd just like to reproduce a few choice quotes: Regarding the battle between Microsoft and Open (or as Richard puts it, "Free") Source community: Stallman: Nobody knows who will win this fight, because the outcome depends on you and the readers. Will you fight for... READ MORE

Yep, it's that time of the year again! The kids go back to school, Ohio sports teams make the playoffs and then lose miserably, and the MySQL Conference Call for Participation has started!. The conference website has been overhauled, and I'm very pleased with the design this year compared to last year's.

I encourage anyone who has experience working with MySQL and its ecosystem friends to submit a proposal. Here are the guidelines for submitters:

Be creative! Conference participants want to hear about real-world scenarios using MySQL, about ways they can be more productive, or write better code. Please submit original session and tutorial ideas that focus on hands-on instruction and real-world examples.

…

I've been working on the pgeodns nameserver again. It's fun picking up years old code. Currently we're using it for various perl.org services to geographically distribute requests and I'm working on some new features so we can use it for that and to more carefully load balance the servers in the NTP Pool. I've been working on writing tests for
everything and since then refactoring the code to get it cleaned up while adding a few features.

It's tempting to have a generic all-purpose super flexible modular nameserver platform, so I might take a cue from qpsmtpd and make all the Real Logic be plugin driven.

For most DNS serving I use …

Kris brought up a simple question:

Why do I have to set the slow-query-time by hand ? Why can't the server figure out the normal query time and tell me when something is unusual slow ?

In earlier articles I already talked about that the proxy can log the query-time in microseconds and we already implemented a Query Histogram with average and max query-time. Unusual slow ...

Almost all (actually, 99.7%) of the values lie within 3 standard deviations of the mean (or between the mean minus 3 times the standard deviation and the mean plus 3 times the standard deviation). Statisticians use the following notation to represent this: ? ± 3?.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68-95-99.7_rule

Hmm, so everything which is slower than ? ± 3?. is …

What is the mySQL Optimizer? Well it's the part of the mysql query engine that determines what index to use, based on given sql. It sucks in every version that I tested, which is

3.23
4.0
4.1
5.0
5.1


I find that in nearly every app that I've end up writing I need to create my own optimizer to determine what index to use.

Why?


Well, imagine this. Your table has 30 indexes and many of the prefixes of compound indexes are the same. The reason is because given a question you want to sort the data quickly in different views. The optimizer sucks at figuring out which index to use under these cases (and many others)

For example:

SELECT * FROM SomeTable WHERE owner_id = ? AND perms IN (0,1) AND karma IN (0,1) ORDER by date_create DESC, photo_id DESC limit 10


Now the table contains an index on …