If you are reading this, chances are you already know the advantages of open source. Open source is free, benefits from a community of contributors, it's well tested, the list of benefits is long... right?

Well, I agree. It's hard to believe that someone would choose anything but apache to run a web server. But software runs in a lot of different places, different industries and cultures. In the world of billing, we are about 15 years behind the industry standard, as far as open source adoption goes. The other day I had in my hands an issue of a billing magazine (Billing & OSS World, I think is its name). They had an article on open source and it was half funny, half depressing. Open source was synonym of Linux, that's all. Like there is nothing else in the open source world but Linux.

In about two months, jbilling will be launching a new major release that will include a package of components that address es the needs of …

If you are reading this, chances are you already know the advantages of open source. Open source is free, benefits from a community of contributors, it's well tested, the list of benefits is long... right?

Well, I agree. It's hard to believe that someone would choose anything but apache to run a web server. But software runs in a lot of different places, different industries and cultures. In the world of billing, we are about 15 years behind the industry standard, as far as open source adoption goes. The other day I had in my hands an issue of a billing magazine (Billing & OSS World, I think is its name). They had an article on open source and it was half funny, half depressing. Open source was synonym of Linux, that's all. Like there is nothing else in the open source world but Linux.

In about two months, jbilling will be launching a new major release that will include a package of components that address es the needs of …

HighLoad.RU is the conference focused on Building High Performance Systems and has speakers from most of top Russian Internet companies.

It is taking place in Moscow, Russia 24-25 of September and you should know a bit of Russian to attend

The conference has some international flavor though there are few people coming from other countries and giving talks in English. I too will fly from London but I'll specially prepare Russian presentation versions.

I'll have two sessions: MySQL Transactional Storage Engines and MySQL Scaling Techniques for Web Applications.

Here is the full conference program.

Andrey has implemented a little mysqlnd only addition to mysqli_debug(): ‘m’ - dump memory information. It works like the other options described in PHP: Debugging ext/mysqli and mysqlnd with the only difference that it is only available with mysqlnd.

Without option ‘m’

This is a short example of mysqlnd freeing the meta data of a result set.

[...]
| | | >mysqlnd_res_meta::free
| | | | info : persistent=0
| | | | info : Freeing fields metadata
| | | | info : Freeing zend_hash_keys
| | | | info : Freeing metadata structure
| | | >mysqlnd_res_meta::free
[...]

Additional mysqlnd memory allocation debug information with option ‘m’

Same trace excerpt but with memory debugging turned on. The control string used for this trace was ‘t:O,/tmp/mysqlnd.trace:m’.

[...]
| | | >mysqlnd_res_meta::free
| | | | info : …

Andrey has implemented a little mysqlnd only addition to mysqli_debug(): ‘m’ - dump memory information. It works like the other options described in PHP: Debugging ext/mysqli and mysqlnd with the only difference that it is only available with mysqlnd.

Without option ‘m’

This is a short example of mysqlnd freeing the meta data of a result set.

[...]
| | | >mysqlnd_res_meta::free
| | | | info : persistent=0
| | | | info : Freeing fields metadata
| | | | info : Freeing zend_hash_keys
| | | | info : Freeing metadata structure
| | | >mysqlnd_res_meta::free
[...]

Additional mysqlnd memory allocation debug information with option ‘m’

Same trace excerpt but with memory debugging turned on. The control string used for this trace was ‘t:O,/tmp/mysqlnd.trace:m’.

[...]
| | | >mysqlnd_res_meta::free
| | | | info : …

I thought my PHP/MySQL friends would get a kick out of another story of a company not being ready for technical demand.  I live in Alabama (southeastern USA).  For those that do not realize, we like our college football a lot (American football that is).  University of Alabama football has a particularly large buzz this year due to the hiring of our new coach, Nick Saban.  The first game of the year was this past Saturday.  It was not on network or cable television since it was against a no name team.  It was however available on Pay-Per-View for $29 or something (I don’t even know, I just ordered it blind).  Since getting tickets for me and my family was not really an option, I decided to just order the game and watch from the comfort of my home.  Directv tells you (a lot) that the easiest way to order sports events is their web …

One of the key features MySQL often uses to advertise for their database is the modular architecture that allows them to have different storage engines below the same SQL layer. In practice the application and/or database designer can choose from a variety of low level data storage implementations that each offer different characteristics and may be chosen on a per table basis. (Even though I personally believe most designs will use one type of table for all tables of a particular schema).

The idea behind this is that for example people who do not need transactions should not have to worry about them at all ? maybe there is performance impact involved which they cannot afford to take. Moreover some specialized types of index or column might not be available on all engines. Basically the concept is very interesting and can be really useful for developers.

However there is a weakness that in my opinion needs some severe work to be …

I am reading up on MySQL Proxy and find it to be very interesting. It looks like the proxy is a network layer between clients and servers. A client may think it is connecting to a single server but in reality, the client's query could be running against multiple distributed servers.

Another nice feature is the ability to monitor and secure data at the query and result level. A client can send a query and the proxy can log that query. When the results come back, the proxy could strip out data (or mangle it) before it goes back to the client.

That would be a nice feature for protecting data during development and testing. The developers and testers can run their queries against production and the proxy could mangle sensitive data on the way back out.

It's only compatible with various Unix/Linux flavors at this time so no Windows. That's probably not that big of an issue. I don't know anyone running MySQL in Windows in …

I am a conference junkie. I love attending them, organizing them, speaking at them, planning to attend them, seeing my friends at conferences, making friends with the nice (but often stressed) people who run conferences and so on. I even like eating the (often bad) food - kvetching about it builds a sense of camaraderie with the other participants.

Given how much time and money I spend on conferences already, it might be hard for you to be able to get more money directly out of me. However, here is one small tip on a way that you might be able to do this.

When you send me email about upcoming events, send me links to useful feed as well. Many of you are technologists who run technology conferences for other technologists. For Zarquon’s sake, use the common pieces of technology that many of us use.

What would such feeds look like? Well, to answer my own rhetorical question …
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