Sunday afternoon, I took the Amtrak from Seattle down to Portland. I think from now on, if I want to go to Portland, that will be the way I will go. It's about as fast as driving, a lot less stressful, it's cheaper (looking at the cost of gasoline), and I have a power outlet. And no damn TSA to deal with.

Portland is a lot like Seattle, only with trains and more hippies.

The O'Reilly folks are helpful and friendly.

Monday, I had wanted to do the morning session on Xen. But it had been cancelled. Foo!

So instead I went to the "Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python" by David Goodger. It was very cool, and I improved my Python skillz just from watching his examples.

That afternoon, I to went to "A Taste of Haskell" by Simon Peyton-Jones. I picked it because I knew almost nothing about it, except that it's something very different from the CS research world that had made the …

The Sex Pistols once sang about "Anarchy in the U.K.," but that's not how we should view this news that the British government has rejected an extension to its 50-year copyright term. This is the same government that rejects software patents.

Looks like the land of Mary Poppins is ahead of us Yankees in how it views intellectual property.

Not everyone, of course, agrees:

...

Yesterday I sat through Intel's tutorial on Intel's Threading Building Blocks at OSCON.

The library looks pretty interesting, and I've been looking at the
interface and white papers to see how it was written.

Good white paper:
http://cache-www.intel.com/cd/00/00/30/11/301132_301132.pdf

The part I don't get?

Its C++.

They missed the point. Most of open source is in C. If you want
ubiquity, you write in C. You can wrap C into C++.

Or Perl, Python... but C++? Pain in the ass.

If I write something for just myself I'll use C++, but if I want
ubiquity? Its going to be C.

What would have been an even bigger leap in thought for this release?
Find a way to …

At OSCON 2007 listening to Josh Berkus talk about finding database performance issues in a web application. I see that Brian and Peter are here. I've been to many-a-MySQL tuning session, will be interesting to see how it differs looking at it from Postgres.

[prior to starting Josh is playing a Flash-based game (projected on the screen) called Mole where you try to whack a mole on the head]

Josh was involved in the recent benchmarks published comparing Oracle and PostgreSQL.

Josh looks at a stack with hardware, OS, database, middleware and application and talks about trying to figure out where in …

I don't have a myspace account, I can think of hundreds of people I still have to linkup with on LinkedIn, and my facebook account only gets checked every few days[1], so some might claim I'm not a real consumer of the social networking kool aid.

I'm a consumer of Hospitality Exchange networks though, so I thought I would try and write a bit of a history for the unintiated from my perspective.

The first 'large'[2] website was Hospitality Club ("HC"), started by Veit. For me Hospitality club is now dead in the water. The best volunteers walked out about a year ago to start BeWelcome, and Veit just can't attract the talent to keep his servers up, or afford to pay them.

The second 'large' website was probably Couchsurfing.com, which soaked up a lot of press when a crash managed to bring the website down, and almost meant the end of the website.

For some people couchsurfing was an answer to …

Well I've practically completed porting the existing Traffic Analyzer code over to Windows. One or two sacrifices had to be made, however, most notably I had to cope with the lack of support for certain struct sockaddr conversion functions such as inet_aton which are normally in the arpa/inet.h header. Still, it's compiled (under MinGW, screw you Visual Studio!) and seems to work so that's cool.

Additionally, the packet capture and processing features of the Traffic Analyzer were practically completed last week when I did a partial re-write. Packet processing is now done within the constructors of the three primary classes; Session, ServerResponse and ClientCommand. Sessions encapsulate ClientCommand objects which then encapsulate their corresponding ServerResponse objects. Generic information is extracted from server responses, such as the number of rows affected by a query, error codes, warnings and server status codes. Client …

By Artur Bergman

What an exciting day, as services for hundreds of thousands of users and millions of readers disappeared from the internet. In a stunning but unsurprising event, a repeated power cycling caused by a blown power station disrupted the 365 Main datacenter, causing them to lose all power to two colocation rooms.

I jokingly refer to 365 Main as the "Web 2.0" datacenter; of course, there is nothing Web 2.0 about the datacenter itself. But it does host a remarkable number of such properties, including Craigslist, Technorati, and Red Envelope. Someone could make a lot of VCs cry by taking it out, or so the running joke goes. And ironically enough, this morning 365 Main (together with Red Envelope) put out a press release announcing 2 years of 100% uptime; one may also note that they have now removed the press release from their …

Looking for documentation for read_rnd_buffer_size you would find descriptions such as "The read_rnd_buffer_size is used after a sort, when reading rows in sorted order. If you use many queries with ORDER BY, upping this can improve performance" which is cool but it does not really tell you how exactly read_rnd_buffer_size works as well as which layer it corresponds to - SQL or storage engine.

Honestly as it had name very similar to read_buffer_size which is currently only used by MyISAM tables I thought read_rnd_buffer_size is also MyISAM only. But talking to Monty today I learned it is not the case.

read_rnd_buffer can be used for All storage engines not only by MyISAM. It is used for some sorts to optimally read rows after the sort. Here is how it works:

As sort is performed it can be performed having only row pointers together with …

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News:
MySQL Focuses on Japan
http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/news/article_1368.html

MySQL Associate Certification Now Available
http://www.mysql.com/certification/

Learning resource:
Pythian Group’s Carnival of the Vanities for the DBA community, published weekly on Fridays.
…

Could not resist the title after reading what Matt wrote. Sexy and exciting, indeed. Most of the crew here have their heads buried with the upcoming releases of Amanda Enterprise and Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL. We are continuing to enhance the Management console for Network backup. And with the next release of ZRM for MySQL, backup of MySQL database will never be the same. Dmitri already wrote about how easy it will be to manage MySQL backups from Iphone. Additionally we are fixing stuff in the Management console for ease of use. You can see, touch and feel them at LinuxWorld. …