The 2007 MySQL Conference is over, and I finally made it back
home. I have some notes on some of the sessions, which really
aren't that great, so if you want to see what you missed, you
should read Planet MySQL. But I will give some of the
highlights.
There's a lot of new development around storage engines.
MySQL-5.1 has a pluggable storage engine architecture which
allows you to load and unload storage engines while the server is
running. Brian Aker explained that this is for cases where you
have a stable server setup and only want to upgrade the storage
engine. All the storage engines in 5.1 are pluggable, and there
are already some third-party proprietary storage engines
available.
One of the relatively new third-party storage engines is SolidDB.
Solid has been around for quite awhile. In fact, I was using
Solid for a project in the late 1990's …
Over at Solfo I play sysadmin in between being a programmer and DBA. Between real hardware, xen boxes and network equipment we have a few dozen devices. One of the really neat tools we use for monitoring is Munin. It's (yet another) tool to graph system stats and anything else you can write a plugin for.
One of the default plugins is memory use. In this graph you can see the memory usage for one of our application servers. Last week we changed some configuration so the application won't grow to eat a ton of memory every few hours.
Other similar tools are Cacti and Ganglia. I've played with both but they didn't hook me like Munin did. I never really liked …
[Read more]Over at Solfo I play sysadmin in between being a programmer and DBA. Between real hardware, xen boxes and network equipment we have a few dozen devices. One of the really neat tools we use for monitoring is Munin. It's (yet another) tool to graph system stats and anything else you can write a plugin for.
One of the default plugins is memory use. In this graph you can see the memory usage for one of our application servers. Last week we changed some configuration so the application won't grow to eat a ton of memory every few hours.
Other similar tools are Cacti and Ganglia. I've played with both but they didn't hook me like Munin did. I never really liked …
[Read more]Ever since we switched out build process from Java 1.4 to Java 5 (1.5.0_09) we have seen FindBugs crash with an OutOfMemoryError when started from ant. The whole thing is running under RedHat Enterprise Linux 4. The output is always the same:
[findbugs] Running FindBugs... [findbugs] Exception in thread "CompilerThread0" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: requested 134217736 bytes for Chunk::new. Out of swap space?
Our first attempts to increase the heap size with the -Xmx VM parameter did not help. We suspected the newer FindBugs release we had installed roughly at the same time, but this turned out to be wrong, because newer and older versions showed the same behaviour.
Armed with the fresh knowledge about the SAP Memory Analyzer just learned at jax.07 I …
[Read more]Ever since we switched out build process from Java 1.4 to Java 5 (1.5.0_09) we have seen FindBugs crash with an OutOfMemoryError when started from ant. The whole thing is running under RedHat Enterprise Linux 4. The output is always the same:
[findbugs] Running FindBugs... [findbugs] Exception in thread "CompilerThread0" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: requested 134217736 bytes for Chunk::new. Out of swap space?
Our first attempts to increase the heap size with the -Xmx VM parameter did not help. We suspected the newer FindBugs release we had installed roughly at the same time, but this turned out to be wrong, because newer and older versions showed the same behaviour.
Armed with the fresh knowledge about the SAP Memory Analyzer just learned at jax.07 I …
[Read more]Nokia has been making great strides in developing a family of small, pocket sized multimedia devices. There's the Nokia N800 wi-fi enabled Internet Tablet as well as the recent N95 multimedia phone (though not yet available in the US.) I wouldn't quite call them computers yet --at least until they add a proper keyboard, but they are interesting multi-function devices.
Nokia recently launched the quite humorous www.greatpockets.com web site, which features a mythical Saville Row tailor Henry Needle & Sons who designs men's and women's clothing with, ah, great big pockets in which they can load all their bulky …
[Read more]
MySQL Users Conference was a great success.
Oh, screw that.
I don't actually think it was. I just keep hearing this sentence
in announcements and press-releases year after year and my
structure-seeking brain classified the sentence as a set phrase.
But the conference was okay. Good tracks, decent food, a lot of
new engineers from our new and numerous storage engine building
partners. I don't know if it was good value for the money, since
I didn't have pay a dime - I was a speaker, and the conference
organizers paid the admission fee for me, while the company
covered the expenses. But it certainly was a good use of time.
I've had a very good day today.
I don't stop and think and say that to myself very often.
Despite all the driving, sitting, bad spicy food and me
voluntarily suffering while pretending I can be a vegetarian, I
feel that it was a day worth to live.
In the morning we had to drive over 90 miles to Linuxfest
Northwest 2007 and despite long distance and apparent
unimportance of the conference it was just the right kind of
American experience I like to have.
People were coming there with their kids to listen to talks about
Zope and Python and find out more about basics of the General
Public License. Presenters whose profile seemed to be too high
for this conference, like BrianA and BradFitz seemed to be at
home and at ease. Seeing these two kinds together is part of the
American society I've always been pleased with.
Nothing …
Domas Mituzas (who works for MySQL AB and works with Wikipedia) has published a workbook (pdf) about about the design and architecture of Wikipedia.
Expect to see lots of common infrastructure tools used in common across sites like Livejournal, Digg, etc.
Basically, everyone is using about the same core technology:
Started as Perl CGI script running on single server in 2001, site has grown into distributed platform, containing multiple technologies, all of them open. The principle of openness forced all operation to use free & open-source software only. Having commercial alterna- tives out of question, Wikipedia had the challenging task to build efficient platform of freely available components.