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 …
…

We have yet another opening at MySQL Performance Blog.

We're looking for Intern position (with limited compensation) to work on project of MySQL Performance research and analysis, developing and running benchmarks under our guidance, writing WhitePapers and articles.

We feel this would be perfect part time position for the Computer Science student interested in High Performance systems design, performance optimizations and MySQL. The work done with us has potential of also being used for course work or diploma project.

The work to be done is with intent to be openly published both in terms of benchmarks code and benchmark results.

Working us you would learn a lot about MySQL Architecture, Unix/Linux Operating Systems and Hardware Performance Optimization, Performance Analysis, benchmarking and load testing plus get your name known in MySQL Community.

What we're looking for: You must be …

Just as a head’s up, I’ll be at Software Freedom Day 2007, not in Melbourne, but in Beijing! Its on Saturday, September 15, 2007, and it only starts at 1PM (I presume this means I get to party on Friday night, to re-live some Beijing memories?).

I’m told a beginner-styled talk is best, so what kind of MySQL-related talk would you be after? Business model related? Do give me ideas (sooner, the better). Keep in mind, I’ll have to pass the message on within a good 15 minutes, with 5 minutes for questions…

Check out the program, and I do hope to see you soon, if you’re in Beijing (or if we cross paths - I’m on Dopplr now, so you can play a “Where in the world is …

What if which ever way you turn, you think are seeing a postcard? What if you could take the afternoon off to go skiing? What if you would one day come to assume that every city has a beautiful lake at the center and mountains surrounding? What if every movie would always be shown in the original version without having to go to that single cinema in town that did? Speaking of languages, what if you could get by with whatever language you speak, or just practice one of many languages without having to go an a trip? What if going for a snack after one of the monthly user group meetings, feels more like a speakers dinner at a conference? Yes, then you must be working in Zurich, the up and coming PHP capital of the world! :)

Seriously, all I can say its awesome down here and there are a ton of awesome companies looking for top notch PHP developers. Sizes and types greatly vary. From the small development team, to large international …

I'm looking at the final patch for adding Asynchronous IO to the
Archive engine in MySQL. The current patch relies on an AIO library I
wrote myself a while ago to play around with the problem. It works,
but it adds more ongoing threads to MySQL, and I have mixed feelings
about doing that in user space (though its all the rage among engine
writers).

Last night I got it in my head to try out the posix AIO callers. In
part because I've never used them, and in part because I like the
thought of reusing code that someone else wrote (aka support my own
AIO means well... supporting it...).

I decided to do a test using 1024 byte buffers on a 1 gig file:

First Intel:

read()
real 0m0.789s
user 0m0.041s
sys 0m0.744s

aio()
real 0m2.487s
user 0m3.067s
sys 0m1.798s

…

This release of MySQL Toolkit fixes some minor bugs and adds new functionality to four of the tools. Some of the changes I made were in response to feedback I got at the recent MySQL Camp. I'm still working on some of the feature requests, such as daemon-izing certain tools.

For those who requested features for MySQL Query Profiler, the tab-separated format should give you the desired output: no zero rows, and variables are not renamed.